Since its debut, 20 years ago on Monday, David Foster Wallace's 1,000 page novel Infinite Jest has been heralded as an American masterpiece — and is very likely to be the most famous book most of us have never actually finished.

Indeed, the famously dense 1996 novel has become something of a literary litmus test. In this world there are casual readers and there are book lovers, but readers who have completed Infinite Jest are in a category of their own.

Not all those who claim to have finished it also claim to love it, though. Many readers have deemed the book unreadable — thanks to Wallace's sprawling sentences, heavy use of footnotes and meandering subplots.

The book boasts nearly 1,000 reviews on Amazon to date, and some 140 of those are from readers who really, really didn't like it. Here's a representative sample of their ire.

Image: Back Bay Books