Both Flesh and Not – David Foster Wallace – 8⭐

Picking out books from your collection for a summer holiday can be tricky. Big juicy tomes are out of the question, you need to be able to hold it in one hand while holding a cocktail in the other. Short ones are a no-go – unless you pack three or four – as you risk having nothing to read after only a few days of lazing by the pool. When it comes to fiction you have to know in advance what’s behind those covers. A straight forward adventure à la Stephen King? Yes. A convoluted and dense Pynchon? No dice.
But here comes non-fiction as a safe dive, you can drop it and pick it up easily, the prose is more natural and easy to follow, and especially with an essay collection you have something to talk about during one of the five daily meals and snacks that an all-inclusive sojourn will bring.

“Both Flesh and Not” from DFW was one of my two picks last week (along with a biography of Ernest Shackleton). It has all the right stats:

Readability: 9/10, casual but with a sprinkle of challenge and distinctive vocabulary;
Pages: 336, dense enough as far as writing goes, light enough to read one-handed
Format: Essays, short and long
Subject: Varied! Each one covers something completely different
Relevance: Surprisingly, most essays still hold in 2025

Most memorable essays:

Federer Both Flesh and Not – Regarding Roger Federer, this one’s a very nice tribute to DFW’s favourite sport. I truly enjoyed the writing even though the world of tennis is foreign to me.
Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young – On book publishing and the attitude of western consumers in a culture influenced more and more by TV. Incredibly prescient, with ideas that are explored further in the brilliant “E Unibus Pluram”.
Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open – This one’s a bit in between the previous two, with comments about culture as well as tennis. The observations about the increased consumerist and commercialized approaches to everything are definitely an inspiration for the backdrop of “Infinite Jest”.
Back in New Fire – A beautiful piece about sex in the 90’s with a rather optimistic on the AIDS scare.
Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama – An absolutely valid essay on “genre books”, in particular “math fiction”. Even more well founded arguments in today’s fragmented media landscape, the idea being that creating something in a very niche genre has to be extremely well done, otherwise it’s just the same cheap fiction with a coat of paint for the casual readers and a slap in the face for the niche connoisseurs.
The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress – A review so beautifully written it made Markson’s book jump to the top of my “To Read” list.

This was a good read, got the book full of sand and of pool water but that’s how a book should be – used thoroughly. This wasn’t better than “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”, but ASFTINDA is a collection that should hold a special place on everyone’s non-fiction shelf. 8 stars and a sincere “we miss him dearly” to DFW.