>>5
I doubt you could have read it in one day, unless you mean 24 exactly 24 hours of reading. Sure, it isn't that long, really, but it's more than an afternoon read.
Also, you put it a good way. Pretentious. The bit I read was just that, and that was one of the most off putting things off all. That combined with the page layout bullshit turned me off completely. I can deal with idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation all day long. And the footnotes/appendices? Poe was a master of referencing things that didn't exist. I had no problem with that either. But the layout shit just makes me rage.
To me, what that says, is he, Mark Danielewski, did not feel his prose was strong enough to stand on it's own, as interesting and experimental as it might have been, so he decided to come up with a gimmick. That's all it was. A pretentious gimmick. The book would have been better without it.
Again, I'll admit that I never finished it. I only read a little bit of it before putting it down.