Having finished reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle in record time - for me (I usually drag it out when reading long books, get distracted by other books and lose focus) - I have decided to undertake one of the unread pile of books marked 'massive books I own but may never read'. The one in question is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

Others in the pile include Moby Dick, Dune, Don Quixote, and of course Ulysses by James Joyce. One of the books on this I highly doubt I will ever read. See if you can guess which one. Spoiler alert, the answer is Dune. I read the first chapter or so and the best I can say about it is, what a boring load of shit. Very much like Tolkien in that sense, a boring load of shit.

It took me forever to get through We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen, but bloody hell it was worth it. Read it, it's incredible. I have the next four days off work so if I sit here reading without eating or breathing I might be able to make a significant dent in Infinite Jest's 1000+ pages. That's if I can concentrate what with it being Halloween, all these bloody ghosts everywhere, getting on like they own the place. Putting the willies up me, and whatnot.

We never get trick or treaters, which is lucky because we have nothing to give them. Doubly lucky because my wife isn't in right now, and she is the one with the patience for all that stuff and nonsense. I'm a Halloween Scrooge.  They can all piss off, grr.

Infinite Jest is extremely exhausting to read. Especially compared to Wind Up Bird... which I finished last night. Maybe it's just because the words are much smaller. And there is more of them. And the sentences are just so long. Or the book is much heavier and it hurts my delicate little hands just to hold the book. Or because I am suffering from reading fatigue after yesterday's Murakamiathon. Any of these could be the case. Maybe it's just harder going, in a general wishy-washy un-defined sense that I can't explain, yes, that might maybe a little bit be it.