House of Leaves

a fun and healthy challenge. i approve.

Initially I was really excited. I have wanted to read this book for a while. It was supposedly a complicated experimental, weirdly formatted horror novel that was ‘very scary' to quote a vague memory I have of someone somewhere saying that. But sadly it wasn't that great. 

First off, it really wasn't that scary. There were some parts that were scary, notably one in the beginning and one at the very end. However that was really it. The way this is told in this academic analysis of a film totally takes you out of the narrative. It not only does this in tiny snippets but also in giant pages and pages long chapters that really serve absolutely no purpose other than apparently explaining the nature of an echo for 20 pages. 

But besides that, this novel was incredibly sexist. All of the female characters are described as beautiful, they mostly all fuck Johnny for some fucking reason. Vividly described sex scenes in the middle of scary passages exploring a creepy house are not only completely unnecessary and not at all adding to the plot or the vibe or literally everything, but they also show the characters to be extremely misogynistic. Not only the natator but also basically every character in this whole fucking book. It is honestly a miracle I got through it at all. 

By the end reading this had become a chore because I could not leave a 700-page book unfinished when I was already halfway through. The idea was so interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed the pages of passages describing the explorations and rescue attempts. However I do feel about 300 pages could have been sliced and it would legit be better. Those extra words didn't add anything to it and only made it worse. 

I am highly disappointed and I would not recommend this at all. 

DNF

20 000 characters are not enough to describe this book, haha.
Just experience it for yourself. Be sure to pull through even if it distracts you. It's a book you will remember for years.

I finished the book last night but it's still on my mind this morning because I can't find the words to... summarise? Explain? Express how I feel?

It's a helluva book. Some parts were difficult to read because of how experimental it is, but I'm glad I powered through. There are beautiful quotes dotted throughout the book, and the story is hauntingly beautiful.

I've yet to come to my own conclusion about what the message behind the book is, but I have a feeling it will come to me in a slow, unsuspecting method and will blow my mind again.

Please read this book. But then again, please don't read this book.

Pale Fire meets Ficciones meets Annihilation meets (the good parts of) Skinamarink meets Infinite Jest meets I don't know what. if there exists anything more up my alley than this, I have yet to find it

I did have some issues with a lot of Johnny's digressions and found some of the shape poetry stuff a little gimmicky, but god I love this book

phenomenal book. this is impossible to compare to any other piece of contemporary literature.

Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. Fun at times but I was constantly pulled out of the story going, “oh, the author is doing this, that's clever, that's stupid,” etc.

Terrifying and mind-blowing. Fascinating characters keep increasingly absurd situations somehow completely relatable. On one level it's simply a story about a family and an architecturally “unique” house but on another level it's an insane mind game. I think I have like 15 pages of notes just trying to piece everything together. And even if it's impossible to tie every string together and catch every unspoken story and find every underlying connection, the surface story is fascinating enough on it's own. It isn't really a book you read so much as participate in.

I'm doing it (bought HoL again to attempt to read it)

This is not for you.

I bought my first copy of House of Leaves in 2005, twenty-five and heavily pregnant with my second child and entirely unaware of what I was getting myself into, with regards to the book at least. I spent my last trimester poring over it, pouring myself into it, scribbling notes in the margins, sourcing works referenced in the footnotes, reading those, coming back to HoL, reading that footnote with new eyes, writing out my theories, plotting connections, drawing labyrinths, dreaming of Johnny and sunken ships and sweeping hands and Sarawak.

HoL changed my life. It changed me. It changed how I think, how I write, the media I consume, my art. I've never read anything like it, before or since, and for a long time I struggled to read any other fiction because nothing lived up to it. ‘I only read non-fiction,' I declared to my now husband when we met in 2011. He thought it was a bit weird but he went with it, thankfully. From 2005 to 2015 I read HoL at least once a year, usually twice, sometimes more, my pencilled marginalia smearing beneath my fingers as I expanded and clarified my often prolix - your word - notes. In 2015, lured by the pull of BookTube, I decided it was time to make a conscious effort to get back to reading fiction. I put HoL down and didn't pick it back up again for a long time. I'd quit smoking the year before, a twenty a day habit. Quitting HoL was a hundred times more difficult.

Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error. 1
–p107

I dabbled, of course. It haunted me. Rarely a day goes by went by that I didn't think about it, some small part of it. I picked it up here and there, read a few pages at random, maybe looked up a line that was nagging at me, checked a footnote or two. When my eldest showed an interest in reading it, we puzzled through the first few chapters together. But I didn't commit to doing a proper read-through again until last month when I turned forty three. Call it a birthday present.

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a compelling work of post-modern, ergodic lit, narrated by four characters who exhibit varying degrees of reliability. The text is almost a character in its own right, expanding and contracting as the story progresses, shifting and dancing through the pages, demanding that you rearrange your body to accommodate it. It's about a film by photojournalist Will Navidson, which documents his family's experience of living in a house that's bigger on the inside than on the outside, and what happens when he decides to explore it. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is a complex academic study of the aforementioned film by an elderly blind man, littered with footnotes and peppered with references to other works that may or may not exist. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is the story of Johnny Truant and how his life progresses after his discovery of the aforementioned academic study, told entirely in the footnotes of the main text of the book. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is the epistolary story of Johnny's mother, who was committed to a mental institution after she tried to strangle Johnny when he was a child. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is none of these things and all of them at once. It's an endless, impossible labyrinth of a book, and if you don't keep your wits about you it will trap you inside its ashen walls.

The idea of a house built expressly so that people will become lost in it may be stranger than the idea of a man with the head of a bull, and yet the two ideas may reinforce one another.
–Jorge Luis Borges

Returning to HoL after seven years with fresh eyes and a better brain was a joy. It was almost a clean slate. There were parts of the text I had completely forgotten about, and it was like reading them for the first time. Sections that had made no sense to me in the past were suddenly clear. I could follow references that I hadn't understood before. I was making connections between disparate parts of the narrative that I'd previously had no idea existed. But the thing about HoL is that it can be tricksy, and the older I get, the more simplicity I crave.

“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.'”
–p34

All the puzzles and riddles, the winding, convoluted narrative paths, the whorls and loops of footnotes that ensnare you when you least expect it, the cross-referencing, the looking up quotes, the knowledge you're forced to assimilate in order to move through it all, all of that is a distraction from what lies at the heart of this book: not a Minotaur, but a beating heart. House of Leaves is a story about love, obfuscated by detail, and it's beautiful.

Maze treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted and fragmented, suffer confusion, whereas maze viewers who see the pattern whole, from above or in a diagram, are dazzled by its complex artistry. 2
–p113

I once read an interview with Mark Danielewski in Flak magazine. “I don't consider myself a horror writer,” he says. “(Though) I think anyone that deals with big questions could be defined as a horror writer. If you're Melville, if you're Hawthorne, if you're Emily Dickinson. If you're Nietzsche. And I name those names not to put myself in their company — I'm just saying that you can pick a diverse range of writers who, if they really approach the deeper questions are ultimately going to unveil something that's terrifying.

“I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, ‘You know, everyone told me it was a horror book but when I finished it, I realised that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right.” he explains.

I never understood that until now. Perhaps I wasn't meant to.

Why did god create a dual universe? So he might say, “Be not like me. I am alone.”And it might be heard.
–p45

So this is it. I'm writing this because after seventeen years, and for the first time, I feel like I've finished the book. Will I ever read it again? I expect so, but the near constant nagging urge to just pick it up has left me, and I'm sure that if I were to hear The Song of Quesada and Molino today, I'd be able to sing along.

I've done it. I've finally found my way out of the labyrinth.

Known sum call is air am. I'm free.


[1] Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering. –Virgil, The Aeneid
[2] From The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, by Penelope Reed Doob

Bizar en boeiend.

I didn't really like this book but, ultimately, I'm glad I read it. I don't think I can live in a world with the amount of digital ink spilled about this book and not have read it. What I do like about this book is the larger-than-life mythos that surrounds it. It almost seems as though all the “this book is life-changing”, “I can't look at things the same way ever again” type of reviews are less about the actual experience of reading the book and more about joining the ranks of those initiated into the strange shared universe of this book and it's cult following. Having read it I'm enjoying cursing around the web carving lines down House Of Leaves reviews and subreddits. The phenomenon surrounding this book is remarkable. While I give it one star as a book I'd give it three or four stars as a shared experience. I'm excited to listen to the Poe album “Haunted” which apparently serves as a companion piece.

idk some man told me it was his favorite book and i thought i liked him but then i read it and wasn't so sure anymore

First off, I didn't find anything in this book scary. So if you are expecting a traditional horror novel, you will be disappointed. I wasn't expecting that and mostly enjoyed it. I liked the academic aspects of it. It definitely made me think about how the author was writing the book. Some of Johnny's parts were good and some were over the top. I was left wondering how much was real and how much he imagined. I guess that was the point. But like in Javier Maria's novel A Heart So White there was too much wondering about real and fake. I don't hate the wondering, but a little part of me wanted proof. I enjoyed it. If you read it as a mental exercise, you will probably enjoy It. If you don't want a mental exercise, don't read it.

This is so difficult for me to rate.

For the unique and intricate structure - and the massive effort that must have gone into writing this book - its a clear 5 stars.

I really enjoyed (?) and was intrigued by the actual narrative of the Navidson Report - 4.5 stars

I didn't really care about the Truant narrative (except his childhood history) - 3 stars.

The academic text was dense and at times tedious (yes I understand that was the point - but it was not an enjoyable experience) - 2 stars.

I did the unfortunate thing of reading this during the Covid-19 pandemic. And boy was that a choice. I was already feeling quite claustrophobic just from quarantine, but this book did well to amplify that feeling tenfold. If you like unsettling and creepy feelings of paranoia, this book is for you. Danielewski does a fantastic job with spacial awareness in this one. And he gets very psychological with it too. I felt as though I was going crazy reading this manuscript too. Felt like I was right beside the characters within the book. Its delicious. And I was and am obsessed.

My God, the blabbering, the endless, superficial, self-precious blabbering!

I don't quite know how to categorize this book. I have been “currently reading” this book for over a year (I only have about 20 pages to go). It's odd, to say the least, and I can't quite figure out whether I want to finish it. It's part mystery, part horror, part science fiction, and part “non-fiction” (through an odd internal story). Give it a try if you're looking for something WAY off the beaten track.

I got to page 13, after the forward and introduction, before quitting. The writing sucks.

Danielewski has managed to find a medium in which he can partially disguise the fact that he's telling rather than showing. Kudos to him, but it's painful to read.

For instance, after a brief scene in which Will Navidson is looking at his partner Karen's hairbrush, we get a whole paragraph of academic analysis about how Will removing a clump of her hair from the hairbrush indicates how much he loves her. Same with a scene in which Karen is anxious for Will to return home, but “has quite effectively masked all her eagerness to see him.” We are told explicitly, “What both these moments reveal is how much Will and Karen need each other and yet how difficult they find handling and communicating those feelings.”

Gee, thanks.

Readers of Ready Player One (also terrible in the same emotionally stunted way) will love this book.

Brilliant and confoundingly strange. To quote a post I once saw responding to how it’s read: “With a headache and joy in my heart.”

This novel has an incredibly creative and enduring concept at its center that Danielewski is determined to rip the reader away from as much as possible. Not exaggerating when I say I would have enjoyed this more as a creepypasta or SCP story, or even a high concept video game (MyHouse.WAD tries to tackle this with interesting results) The frame narrative and academic satire did absolutely nothing for me.

see ja “düün” on mu lemmikraamatud

kirjutan midagi selle monstrumi kohta kui uuesti loen

I did it! wooo

Gave up at 7%.