Yet another brief post about a book I'm reading

So I've been reading Danielewski's House of Leaves recently, which is a pretty neat book. It's all meta-textual and pretensious and shit, despite the fact that at its core its a mostly agoraphobic horror story, and another layer or two out its mostly a claustrophobic horror story with a melodramatic, way over-the-top narrator. I dunno though - through the first 166 pages or so I was really into it, and even finding it to be genuinely scary, but like so many horror-things, its, another 120 pages or so later, starting to get kinda boring. No details, though, as our blog-wide moratorium on details about books that no else has read continues.

Mostly, I mention it, 'cause I think there are some paralells, at the book level, with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, in that both books are first novels and both books are super-ambitious. House of Leaves is typographically ambitious, and Infinite Jest just is really fucking long. And they both have footnotes.

I don't know that I can really even recommend either book. Mostly I just feel kind of lame for reading yet another one of those books thats a book that people know by name or whatever, as one of those books that most people don't read or whatever. I'm looking forward to reading Lay of the Land, thusly, as that books seems much more acceptable.