House of Leaves

What makes a good book is how much you put into it. Most good books don't tell you their meaning up front. You have to invest in the book to get something out of it. Mark Danielewski takes a radical approach in challenging the conventions of writing with this postmodern read. The very structure of the book creates visual experiences that convey meaning (even if it's small) in addition to the content of the book. This book explores structure and the style of writing, not just the content. The perfect blend of the two makes it a novel experience in enjoying both the challenging story, narration styles, and structure/form of the story to create a unique experience unlike most other novels you will read. This is not by any means even a moderate read - it is a hard read. But any good book is worth it if you stick with it and really try to understand it. Most people rate it poorly, even if they are avid readers, because it is not an easy read. It takes effort, but so does all good reading. Reading is not always so light and easy. There are books to enjoy that are more towards that end of the spectrum, but this is a highly rewarding text for its complexity. It is highly worth it if you understand that books don't always have immediate sense to it. That is what makes it a postmodern book, a book that challenges everything we know to be true and sensible in a "novel." I have read the entirety once and will do it two times again this next quarter in university and I look forward to it so much. Allow yourself to fall down the rabbit hole and discover a radical challenge to every convention of writing you know. An amazing book if you understand that you have to give yourself to a book in order to be impacted and changed by it. An amazing text if you approach it with an open mind. That is the only thing that is constant in this novel - open to the chaos, madness, and sheer beauty we find in Danielewski's vision of what is possible in a piece of written art. Art does not always make sense. Just as Oscar Wilde writes in his prologue to The Picture of Dorian Gray, "All art is rather useless." If you seek to understand the wicked truth in this novel, you will look into the abyss and the abyss will look back into you. There is beauty in the ugliness, there is peace in the chaos, and logic in the nonsensical rollercoaster of a ride this text is. It is a postmodern text that uses the conventions of the English language/syntax/grammar to break the conventions of English, showing its absurdity. It is truly amazing. So worth it if you allow yourself to be humbled and open to learning from a text as an intellectually honest person. A lot of people who read a lot of books become arrogant and lose their ability to have a growth mindset that can adapt and learn the value (or create value where you can't seem to find it readily) of a text that challenges what they expect or want out of a text. In school, college, university, and throughout life we learn to be skeptical, cynical, and rebellious to all things we encounter. While this can be useful and healthy, most everybody never learns to balance it out with an inquisitive, open, and empathetic side to it which helps you to not just tear down everything you don't understand but helps you to see the value in something novel. I feel bad for the other people who did not have a good experience reading this text and rated it poorly. A lot of them sound like they either gave up because it is a difficult text to read (not a very healthy way to read, which is to challenge and grow yourself while also enjoying the pleasure of prose and verse) or they were unable to see the value of something that seems immediately harmful because it challenges your worldview and assumptions as to what "good" (or what is safe) to read. Not all of them, but some of them are close-minded and do not allow themselves to adapt and change, to learn and grow from this text, even if it challenges everything you know to be true and good. Identify yourself with our amazing ability to change and adapt and to be smart, and you can't go wrong. Even "bad" texts can teach us something. Take the leap if you dare. With the right mindset, there is so much in this text to experience and to learn from. A truly challenging and amazing text to read.TLDR: it is so worth it. Open your mind to it, and let it break down everything you know to be true and good in our Western mindset, and in our limited English sense of grammar. Have the growth mindset and an inquisitive attitude and you will be fundamentally changed by the power of this book to restructure the way you think, freeing you from the captivity of our modern conventions of thinking. Radically changing book.

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski is very hard to define in terms of genres. It is most often attributed to horror books because of the story's mysterious nature but House of Leaves can be classified as anything from fantasy, mystery, or even a nonfiction book if read through the right lenses. There are several reasons why House of Leaves is so difficult to define, but one of the most prevalent reasons has to do with the book's overarching narratives. Essentially, the book switches between a report written about a film called The Navidson Record and the perspective of a character named Johnny Truant. The report was originally written by a character named Zampanò. Zampanò is an old blind man who lived as a hermit, and through the use of transcribers has created a report on a possibly fictional documentary called The Navidson Record. Zampanò has died from unclear causes and his report was found by the character Johnny Truant. Johnny starts to edit the report back together and as the book goes on we start to see Johnny slowly fall into mental instability. Johnny is both the main editor of the book and the main protagonist. To convey both of these storylines simultaneously Zampanò’s report is written in times new roman and is the main focus of the book, while Johnny writes in courier and keeps the majority of his story in the footnotes section of each page. While this form of writing is unorthodox, it helps convey a sense of mystery, while also preventing the audience from getting disorientated. The Navidson Record, as described by Zampanò, focuses on Will Navidson and his family moving into a new home in Virginia. The house starts normally, but as time goes on, the house starts to grow in a way that defies laws of space. After a trip to Seattle, Navidson realizes that the interior of the house is larger than the exterior of the house (rooms of the house are larger on the inside than they are on the outside). At first, this phenomenon is confined to only a small portion of the house, but it soon grows. One day, the family finds a new door on an external wall of the living room. The door should lead outside, but instead, it goes to a cold, dark hallway that seems to go on forever. Navidson and his family hire a group of explorers to go into the hallway, to get a deeper understanding. Going into any further detail on the Navidson Record would lead to spoilers, thus, instead of going on with detail, I will go into detail on how parts of the book made me feel. The book is very confusing. The book asks plenty of questions and the book never answers the juicy ones and that can annoy some of the readers. Other than that, both of the main storylines will often invoke a feeling of intrigue. For example, as the Navidson Record progresses, I never got bored. There was always something that gave me the drive to read on. The same is true for Johnny’s storyline. The audience gets to see how Johnny’s mind is slowly degrading and how he starts to develop symptoms of mental instability, leaving the audience to wonder if he’ll be able to finish his work on the report before he loses his mind. All in all, I would recommend that you read House of Leaves. The book is by far one of the more interesting novels I’ve ever read and was one of the few books that kept me engaged from cover to cover. On top of that, House of Leaves is one of the few books that you can read multiple times and still discover new secrets hidden within the text. Secret messages and hidden meaning can be found throughout the book, making it one of the best bang for your buck books that you can buy. However, House of Leaves will leave you with more questions than answers, and you always be wondering about what happened at that house on Ash Tree Lane.