I've spent some time in the Liberal Arts world, and yes, the English Lit Douche is an observably accurate stereotype perfectly deserving of mockery, but the handful of dudes I've known who actually read and finished INFINITE JEST...

...are perfectly nice boys who neither bragged about reading it nor used the fact as some kind of cred badge, and who genuinely appreciated DFW's emotional intelligence and humanism. It's weird how that novel was recontextualized as lazy shorthand for "peacocking hipster."

Like, maybe we've reached the point where tossing off "Ugh, and he had a copy of IJ on his nightstand, lol what a douche," as some kind of cutting insight is a brighter red flag for insufferability than some schmuck just trying to crack a thick book.