why infinite jest is the ideal travel book

ok, so at 1000+ pages and roughly 5"x10", it sits like a brick, perhaps two, in the backpack; but considering my pack is between 30-40 lbs already, percentage wise, its not really too bad. indeed, the thickness of the book makes it an ideal pillow when a shirt is put on top of it.

it also seems to impress japanese people, who seem uniformly taken aback by its substantialness; perhaps they, already shy of the english language, feel some sort of animal anxiety / anguish just at the thought of the volume of vocabulary, idioms, grammatical exceptions contained in this tome. maybe its like someone afraid of water staring into the marianas trench.

of course, the main comfort is knowing there is an almost infinite (ha) amount of dense erudition available at hand as the minutes and hours of travel burns into ones idle soul.