Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I've read both of these, and don't recommend them.

House of Leaves has a very uninteresting plot, and raises more questions than it answers. It's physically painful to read, because most pages, you have to rotate the entire book every which way since the words go in spirals.

Infinite Jest is good, but way too long. A good 70% of the book could have been cut out or condensed. The writing is also intentionally bad, which makes it harder to read. There are definitely good lines, but it's kind of like DFW used a random sentence generator and some of the lines just happened to be amazing, but 90% of it is garbage.



Re House of Leaves, I don't recall it being most pages. There was a flurry of those at the end, but I found it was an effective machination that heightened the drama rather than distracted.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: