House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of House of Leaves
Book Review: A great summer read.
Summary: 4 Stars
A friend recommended this book to me. She said it was really scary and life-changing. I did not find it in the least bit scary. I would describe this book as a cross between The Amityville Horror and The Blair Witch Project. I thoroughly enjoyed the dual-action throughout the book, and was really sorry when it was finished. My only disappointment was to find it was more "lightweight" (MUCH less horror) than I had expected. Otherwise, it was a fun, quick summer read.Book Review: A hilarious and creepy puzzle of a book
Summary: 4 Stars
I really wish the sex in this book had been less graphic. I understand why it's there, but if Danielewski had found some way to stay true to his phenomenal vision while being a little more subtle about the sex, then I could buy a copy of this book for each of my friends without feeling like a pervert. Because, the pornographic parts aside, this is one of my favorite books ever. It is basically a love story of a complicated family made of complicated people, and they find themselves in a Gothic horror story, which becomes a fictional documentary, which is analyzed in a pseudo-academic work full of hilarious footnotes to sources that don't exist, which is then edited by a hopeless but lovable loser who watches his life fall to pieces as a result, and the book finally reaches the reader with one more layer of visible editorial input. This is definitely a book for people who like reading footnotes - I feel snobby when I say this, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who hasn't done at least a semester of college to get familiar with an academic writing style. It is also hilarious, deeply unsettling, and challenging on a number of levels (for example, when characters enter the labyrinth, the footnotes become non-linear, so the reader must navigate the labyrinth of the book itself to know what's going on, and sometimes the words take on a visual dimension, as a character climbs a ladder in a passage that can only be read from the bottom line to the top, or he squeezes through a passageway that is so small that the author can only fit a few characters on the page). For all the creepiness, this is a pure joy to read, and I devoured five hundred pages of it in one day, with a hunger for more. It has been a long time since I've read any book that I've been so eager to recommend to friends - at least, the friends who won't be too offended by the sex.Book Review: A huge, sad dissapointment
Summary: 1 Stars
After all the hype and all the raving reviews posted here I was expecting a wonderful, innovative and daring novel. What I found, however, was a dull and boring exercise in what seems to be a certain "culture of cool" kind of fashion products that gather almost fanatical cheering at the beginning and then dissappear as the next big thing comes. As I finished the novel, I though I smelled a Quentin Tarantino here. Slick package, some clever bits, yes. The triumph here is a triumph of marketing, design and hype spin. I wanted very much to like this book, but ultimately I found that not only the characters, the plot and the ideas here were re-heated material borrowed from other sources and guilded with a sheen of snobbery, but it guilty of the worst sin: BORING. Profoundly so. It bears it "deepness", "daring" and "innovation" like a press release for the Grammy Awards. Surely, this is the sort of thing that passes, at least for 15 minutes, as a masterpiece in the age of publicity and pandering, but my advice would be, before investing in this product, at least take the time to read a couple of chapters in your local library. The dedication, in a flashy, shallow display of coolness, reads "This is not for you". Well, I'm afraid it is, very much so. I bet advertising execs in Manhattan think this looks so cool on the cofffee table. Sorry about the sarcasm. Every book merits the respect of the effort put into it. I'm sure that once this author outlives his status as the dear of the publicity department, he'll move on to write something that goes beyond plastic and Details magazine "deep art".Book Review: A little help with a thick book
Summary: 3 Stars
Danielewski wrote a long book, but I think I can provide some help with a short review. The most striking thing about the book, perhaps besides fun visual arrangement in some chapters, is the copious amount of footnotes. So here is my suggestion:1. Skim the introduction, and skip it if it bores you.
2. Skip all the normal footnotes with dates and names.
3. Skim read all the personal footnotes of Johny Truant- marked by the shift in typeset. Many times you can skip whole paragraphs and still get the jest of what is being said.
4. Read the body of the Navidson record, carefully at times- but if you feel like you're getting bogged down, skimming large sections here won't hurt either.
I think this is fair because the footnotes, in my opinion, are meant to impress by their sheer volume, not their content. I spent twenty bucks on this book and at first I thought I had wasted my money, not making any progress for two months. But when I read it following the criteria above, I was able to finish the book in a week and I really began to enjoy it. By the way, the book should really be rated 3.5 stars, plus I'm not into horror or sci-fi, so for a fan of this genre, the rating might go even higher.
P.S. No one gets as much anonymous sex as J.T. and his friend Lude, but it was still fun to read.
Book Review: A maze it is, amazing it is not
Summary: 1 Stars
This book is a very contrived attempt to get the reader lost in the various levels of narritive. While the structure of the book is interesting, and it's great fun to tell others about what you're reading, one is unable to loose oneself in Danielewski's labrynth of leaves. It's not that the book is too complex, although for some readers this will undoubtedly and issue, but the book is needlessly complex. As a matter of fact, the idea behind the book is too push the limits of one's ability to withstand complexity and 'lose' oneself in the text. I really cannot stress this term 'lost' too much in relation to Leaves. In relation to this work, the term becomes some what of a double entendre, as far as the term is broadly understood, anyway. That is, the author's intent is for the reader to get 'lost' in the book, as in to be absorbed by the book. However, the reader becomes so innundated with tangents that they become 'lost' in the sense that they cannot remeber what is going on in the multi-layered narrative that may or may not be a 'plot' (certainly not in the strict sense of 'plot'). While 'plotless' works are the epitome of the post-modern narritive structure (i.e. Seinfeild, Mark Leyner's work), Danieleski simulataniously embraces this technique and attempts to circumvent the ubiquitous question 'what was the point?' by layering meta-narrative in Leaves like layers of rust-proffing on your grandfather's old pick-up truck. And like your grandfather's old pick-up truck, Leaves is going to fall apart before your able to haul that last load home.