Well, there was the movie about him that came out a year or two ago. I'm sure that contibuted to the spike, but honestly 95% of the people I've seen reading Infinite Jest in public are somewhere in the first 20 pages, and that's been the case since the mid 2000s. I don't think reading literary fiction to look cool is anything new.

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”