Infinite Jest is also great, if you haven't read it. It gets a lot of bad press mostly due to being fetishized by a particular type of insufferable person. The book has its flaws, but is a great piece of writing and (depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc) may offer a different lens. Also, the writing is excellent.
The dialogues made it feel like experiencing isolation and disconnection from other people; the characters talk to each other, but don't listen or care for anyone but themselves or the ones/things they deify.
The thing is, I think that was kind of the point of the book (at least as far as I read). But I couldn't handle it. That, on top of the many paragraphs of needlessly esoteric language he peppers in, made me feel like I was reading a book written for someone else.
Should I go back and finish the book? What makes it compelling to others?
Tried again about 5 years later and loved it. I suppose you just have to be in the right mindset when you approach it.
If it helps anyone decide whether to give it a go, two recent books I read and loved were 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and Underworld by Don DeLillo, and Infinite Jest is satisfying me in the hard-earned way they both did.
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.
>depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc may offer a different lens.
Could you elaborate more on this? I am curious. Maybe I could be right now in that situation. So in that case it would be optimal to start reading it now instead of in a year or two.