I don't think I'm an obtuse reader. Maybe I am. I don't know. I zipped through House of Leaves without leaving a single subnote, endnote, footnote, or secret letter unread. I praised that title to my friends and experienced Danielewski withdrawal once I was done, finding nothing on the library shelves or in bookstores that filled my brain quite so well.

Imagine how good it felt to get my hands on this latest work, only to be left confused, frustrated, and generally dim-witted. I look forward to someone out there correcting my misconceptions and lack of understanding.

The book is meant to be read from cover to cover, twice, eight pages at a time, so that as a reader, you can get a sense of a rollicking thematically-repetitive relationship told from the perspective of both yellow-eyed Hailey and green-eyed Sam. The tale is told in verse, which is fun to read out loud, but burning rubber on my brain stem til there wasn't enough left for me to figure out exactly what the list of historical events on the left side of each page had to do with the tale told between the lines.

It's cool that Danielewski did his research: the verse shifts from era to era: sometimes Hailey and Sam are living out their love in Harlem and sometimes they're jitterbugging and sometimes they're rolling with California motorcycle gangs. Hey, I'm a big fan of time travel and super-dimensional interplanar visitation but I still walked out of this book feeling like I got pounded in the head with a tale I've heard once before: love goes round and round and the violence of it is what's ripping this world to pieces and opening up whole new ones.

Maybe I'm being too critical. I'll give it a try in ten years or so, or maybe twenty, when I'm more well-read and more mature and more patient. Danielewski, you're brilliant. Write me something new. I'm waiting! You're just moving too fast for this pea brain.