Finite summer: a short story end-of-summer sprint
Some people started the summer with ambitious plans to read David Foster Wallace's opus, "Infinite Jest" in a kind of online book group. Aptly dubbed Infinite Summer, the project has now inspired a new summer reading program at the short story website Five Chapters.
Calling its version InfiniteFiveChapters, the website will post 15 short stories in 15 days, beginning Monday, Aug. 24 and ending Monday, Sept. 7.
Authors whose stories will be included in Five Chapters' summer send-off include Dwight Allen, Lauren Gronstein and musician Joe Pernice. The grand finale will be from Tod Goldberg, a frequent contributor to the L.A. Times Book Review.
Perhaps it would have been better called FiniteFiveChapters -- because instead of seeming like a marathon-length reading challenge, this is more like a sprint, with the end clearly in sight. Sept. 7 is, sadly, Labor Day: The end of summer really is upon us.
But it's not here yet for those participating in Infinite Summer: They'll keep reading until September 22. They do have more than 1,100 pages to get through.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: Vacationers at a Black Sea resort in Russia. Credit: Sergei Ilnitsky / EPA
