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I haven’t read the novel he’s most famous for, Infinite Jest (Little, Brown & Co.), but I’ve read many of his essays, and enjoy them tremendously. What I enjoy most is highlighted in this video clip–the humor of reality. He reads from essays on the Illinois State Fair and a cruise, and they are funny because they are the observations we might all make, but the connections drawn go beyond mere description. He’s funny because he’s thinking.

Jonathan Franzen’s essays are often delightful for the same reason. He’s able to laugh at himself and the rest of us without ever placing himself above the absurdities. Franzen’s The Corrections (St. Martin’s Press) made me laugh out loud, but it was also a tad precious. I wished, as I read it, that he’d been curbed a little. It would have been a better book if whoever was editing it hadn’t surrendered the red pen to his or her respect of Franzen’s prodigious talent.

But his essays, collected in How to Be Alone: Essays (Picador), don’t seem to cross that line. They’re more circumspect, more controlled. Perhaps just more self-conscious, self-critical. He doesn’t show off as much, and that gives them a gravitas that grounds the comedy.

David Foster Wallace’s essays are chock full of entertaining footnotes, parenthetical asides and other goodies that might be off-putting in other genres, but seem particularly well suited to essays. His are collected in Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown & Co.).