This post is titled:

House of Annoyances

After years of responding to questions about it with "No, but I love the album," I am finally reading Mark Z. Danielzewski's "House of Leaves".

I've been enjoying its complexity and multi-layered structure quite a bit actually, but when he stoops to directly ripping off Jorge Luis Borges on page 42 I begin to suspect that I won't respect him in the morning. I'd chalk it up to homage, but this book is literally thick with footnotes, and not using one of them to cite the source of your device is academic dishonesty. It's quite possible that the book is constructed of such blocks lifted from other authors, and this is simply the first one I actually recognized, but if the whole point of the book is to impress upon me that I did not pay enough attention in college you're not about to see a lot of counterargument here.

2008.03.12 at 8:00am EDT

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