One of the things that characterizes a certain kind of personality—for lack of a better term, allow me to suggest the ever-popular “geek”—is a completionist streak. You see it at comic-con in the guy flipping through long boxes of back issues, trying to fill in those pesky gaps in his Claremont run on the X-Men. You hear it in a record store (those that still exist, anyway) in the guy bragging about his collection of every song by his favorite band—B-sides, covers, Japanese-only imports, etc. The geek loves his craft so much that he’s not satisfied until he’s conquered it entirely; good luck getting a geek on life-support to agree to voluntary euthanasia if his collection is missing the famous mirror-image issue of Watchmen.

So it’s not surprising that epic stories like The Lord of the Rings or The Dark Tower appeal to geeks; in some ways, that sort of journey is a metaphor for our self-imposed quest to fulfill some goal that is incredibly important to us. That goal might not matter squat for non-geeks, whose own bucket lists may include skydiving or visiting the Grand Canyon.  There’s nothing wrong with those goals, but the average joe’s bucket list tends to be less imbued with personality, more a matter of going through the motions, than those of us more inclined to let our freak flag fly.

I suppose there’s probably any number of reasons why the geek is so invested in those things that make him happy, but I think the psychology is probably less interesting than the commonality. It’s why I firmly believe that Star Wars geeks should lay off on making fun of Twi-hards: so what if their vampires sparkle, you all know what it’s like to be ostracized for doodling your own fan fictions in your notebook during math class.

Now, to bring it around to what got me to start writing this ode to geekery in the first place, my own bucket list item: before I die I want to read every book ever published by author David Foster Wallace. The particular composition of that goal is likely to be completed with the posthumous publication of a novel unfinished at the time of Wallace’s suicide in 2008, The Pale King, on April 15.

So what is it about Wallace—DFW—that triggers my geeky completist impulse? It all began when I first laid eyes on Wallace’s massive, 1000-plus page novel Infinite Jest. Even the title seemed to sneer at me from the shelf in the bookstore: you can’t read me, I’m too big and your attention span’s too small. And so far, that smart-ass book’s been right: I now own both a physical and a Kindle copy, and I just can’t seem to make it very far. Not that it’s not good; far from it. There’s just so much goodness, I go into sensory overload and usually end up reading something simpler.

So maybe the average book lover’s own bucket list item may be to merely conquer that beast, but that’s not me. No. If Infinite Jest was the ultra-hard Emerald Weapon in Final Fantasy VII that kicked your ass and sent you packing the first time you tried to tame it, well then I’d just go find some easier bosses and side quests that would help me boost my skills before—Knights of the Round and Omnislash in hand—I’d make another go at it. In other words, I’d read his shorter stuff first.

And that’s how I got hooked. Beginning with The Broom of the System, DFW’s first novel—adapted from his undergrad (!) thesis at Amherst, and published when he was a mere 24 years old—and continuing with his book of essays and reportage Consider the Lobster and his commencement speech at Kenyon College entitled “This is Water,” my geekery was fueled by what I found within the pages of DFW’s work. Huge ideas and vivid characterization rendered in brilliantly-constructed sentences—and footnotes; who would think that footnotes could be so awesome?!—in an approach described by Michiko Kakutani as “aim[ing] to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life.”

To me, DFW writes the kind of books that makes reading as a hobby so appealing. Seemingly with every page turned of one of his books I learn something new, and in a way that frequently makes me laugh out loud at the sheer audacity of it all. It’s not surprising that DFW taught in a college in addition to writing fiction: reading his fiction is like sitting in the classroom of the kind of teacher that inspired me to go into education: undoubtedly brilliant, and capable of conveying their knowledge of the material in such a way that everyone from the apple-polisher in the front row to the burnout hunched in the corner—by osmosis of language, apparently—left feeling more complete a human being.

I should think it’s now readily apparent why exhausting DFW’s oeuvre is on my bucket list, given my self-anointed geek status: I keep wanting more. Like the completist who wants to own every Spider-Man story out there, I want to consume every idea David Foster Wallace ever put to paper. Even a small sample of those ideas includes such various topics as porn industry conventions, Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, and just why is it that we’ve developed euphemisms—beef, venison, veal—for those higher-order mammals that humans consume as food. I didn’t know I wanted to know about any of these things before I came across them in one of his books, but the fact that DFW had chosen to write about them meant that it was something worth learning about.

If that’s not fanboyism at its finest, I don’t know what is.

Front page image from infinitejest.wallacewiki.com, C2E2 photo by Matt Peters, from padsandpanels.com, interior photo of DFW from afflictor.com,