there will undoubtedly be spoilers discussed here, so don't read this thread unless you've read the book, and if you haven't read the book GO READ THE BOOK, EVERY WORD ON EVERY PAGE. so, who's read this fucking masterpiece?
I think I gave you my opinion on it earlier, but yeah it's pretty good, although all the footnotes in the later chapters were a bit to much.
I wasn't too fond of the book at first; it seemed too gimmicky with little substance. However, about halfway through, when they're talking about the first major expedition into the house, I just read the rest of the book straight through. I think I was up till like 1 in the morning that night. I just couldn't stop, it was so good. The majority of the narrative of the house parts read like the script to the best horror movie ever made. EDIT: Also, that section of the book where the formatting gets really crazy and there's just that list of things that aren't in the room in the middle of the page for like 100 pages was annoying at first, but then just having a list in front of me of how damn EMPTY it was gave me the chills.
this is EXACTLY what i'm talking about here. my uncle read the book, and said it was weird and it was interesting, but he said it didn't scare or disturb him much. i asked him if he read the footnotes, et cetera, and he said "hell no, are you kidding?" and i said and then when my buddy Jeremy (who is with me in ...an ellipsis) read it, i was talking to him about all this stuff and he was like "i don't remember any of that", and it turns out HE ONLY READ THE STRAIGHT UP BOOK AND NOT A SINGLE FOOTNOTE OR APPENDIX OR EVEN THE FUCKING FOREWORD. i was so fucking pissed. my point is, it is imperitive to read as much as you possible can stand, because it's an overload of your senses, and really sucks you in to the story, the mindset of all the characters involved, and it pushes your mind into places it may have never been before, places it was never meant to go.
Makes me not even want to recommend things to people any more. Same thing happens to me with CDs. I lend them out or make someone a mix and six months later they haven't even listened to it. But back to the book, it shows how little patience and imagination or depth a lot of people have. I liked the book, it was very unsettling. I did give it to a neighbor, who gave it back shortly thereafter because he just couldn't penetrate it at all. I admit though that I didn't read the letters/poems/whatever at the end. Perhaps someday I will. Did you check out his latest book? I took one look at the first page and decided it was folly to even try.
my first copy of the book got destroyed. it took me a long, long time to get through it the first time because i literally read almost every single word. i think this is largely why the book affected me so deeply. you really should read everything at the end aswell, there's so much there. shit, i got the title for my album from one of the appendices. i have not read any of his other books, but i've been told that Only Revolutions is amazing...and i really want to get ahold of The Fifty Year Sword as well.
Only Revolutions? I made it through about 48 pages (24 on either side), and said fuck it. The language was just too bizarre to follow or even interest me. Which sucks, because it sounded incredible from the synopsis.
The Fall of Troy make several references to this novel on Doppleganger, and Erak said the book was an inspiration for him to write the album. I've always wanted to check it out.
Yeah, that's the one. Looked it up again--the synopsis does make it sound amazing. Perhaps someday I'll have the patience for it. I think I have to read Ulysses first or something really far out to get in the mindset.
House of Leaves is fucking awesome. Only Revolutions sucked, though. Pretentious and nearly unreadable (Finnegan's Wake for a new generation?).. although the symmetry of everything is cool.
i've posted it several times, but here's the link(s) again. the coverart assigned is just a placeholder. also, there's a spoken word part for the last track that will be on the final release, which will be coming 9.02.08, with sweet ass packaging et cetera. Quivering Arrows by ...an ellipsis part 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?mxjwwz0ucoq part 2: http://www.mediafire.com/?jnt3z4hycji 01 Empty Hallways Long Past Midnight 02 Always 03 Not a Speck of White 04 "I've Never Been to Texas" 05 Arrows, Suspended 06 A Carrion Dawn for Vultures
I've heard and enjoyed your album a few times before Prae, but I'm reading HoL atm, and it's making a great soundtrack to it. It captures the mood well.
Awesome book. You definitely have to read everything in there too. We're so used to the way footnotes and appendices are used conventionally - i.e. supplemental, related to but still distinct from the main body of text, and not necessarily essential reading - that we forget this isn't a conventional novel, it's a post-moder/avant-garde one and all that "extra" stuff isn't actually extra or supplemental or seperate at all, but an essential part of a singular entity. Skipping any of it in this case is basically akin to randomly skipping pages of a more "normal" work. It's the same as the footnotes in David Foster Wallace's work - they aren't really footnotes per se, they're really just part of the novel presented in the form of footnotes.
I don't remember exactly what those are, as it's been like 5+ years since I read this book, but I tend to think that if the author put it in there, it's relevant in some way. Good writers generally don't include any pointless or extraneous material in their work. Everything serves some purpose. And there are lots of different ways that something could be considered purposeful or relevant. but even if you're not convinced of all that, it's a pretty minor exception to what I said originally and I think my point still stands.
The way I see it is that the author included the extended footnotes (often with false references [which Johnny Truant acknowledges] and passages that lead nowhere) to show the mental condition of Zampano before he died. It's kind of the same way he wrote all the XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX passages to show coffee spills and whatever to show the condition of the papers that Johnny found in Zampano's house. Either way, it kicks ass.
there's secret messages hidden in a lot of those "pointless" passages. i haven't dug in to it that far, but theres examples on the wikipedia page.
I know what you're talking about, (ie. the MARK Z DANIELEWSKI footnote initials, and several other ones).. those are in the normal footnotes. Unless I'm missing stuff. It's been a while since I read it.
i stopped introducing this book as "the only book that's ever made me cry, and i don't mean tears of joy or sadness, but tears of absolute terror". and i especially stopped telling people which part induced this reaction from me, because it made them wary of it, and ready for it. this book has to take you by surprise and have it's way with you.
as narrow as i know it is, i read almost exclusively fantasy. like, Wheel of Time and Song of Ice and Fire. i've been reading a lot of Stephen King lately. thinking about diving in to some Chuck P. books, but i'm slightly put off. straight-forward books bore me to death. i read about 10 Grishams and 10 Clancy's and really don't like either. if it's an out-of-the-ordinary plot or something, that satisfies my need for the "fantasy" element. i took a sci-fi lit class in college and my top picks were Time Machine, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (and i've read all of them since then, brilliant). i'll also read the random political or humour book if it strikes my fancy.
I'm just posting in this thread to make ogre stop complaining about how no one posts in book threads.
House of Leaves is one of my favorite books; I even wrote a review and posted it around these parts about six months ago, but no hard feelings . It is a masterpiece. So fucking creative -- two subsequent stories, both incredibly well realized and terrifying. It's unlike anything I've ever read. I'm tempted to stop what I'm reading right now (Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia") and read it AGAIN.
Considering Dark Ambient scares the shit out of me, I'm guessing not well. I've been spending the last few hours reading other peoples' thoughts on the book. I have to go to bed now but I'm nowhere near done
@Praemorior: Read Rant by Chuck P. I think you would enjoy it. It's written in an odd way and there are some very strange plot twists.
I'm posting this without having read the topic. I got this book from my girlfriend for my birthday and plan on reading it during my two week holiday starting next week. Can someon PM me or AIM me yo let me know if this is possible or if I would be rushing through the book (I heard it's quite difficult at certain points without footnotes/reflections and such)? I don't feel like checking the topic and reading spoilers. Thanks,
So, I finally got around to reading this even though when you first showed me ...an ellipsis, I neglected to check it out. It requires a re-read.
you might be able to, but i'll just let you know that it took me a month my first time though, and even longer the second time. i wouldn't recommend rushing through it if you have a deadline. go ahead and start it, but keep your options open to not finish the whole thing on vacation.
Not entirely. All of it makes a shitload (this cannot be stressed more!) sense than when I initially heard quivering arrows. "Empty Hallways Long Past Midnight" and "i've never been to texas" remind me EXACTLY of those parts in the book (especially "i've never been to texas"). I will buy this come Friday - I only checked it out at the library, not sure what to expect. But, even after taking two weeks to fully read it, it still requires more reading. So many ideas and thoughts in those pages, no way in hell somebody could digest them all in a single read, or even two, three, four, fucking five reads. edit: I must ask, was anyone else creeped out at seemingly odd places in the book? where you wouldn't expect it? A spot for me is when they are going over entries from the journal found of the men trying to find food in the winter? once I got to "ftaires! We haue found ftaires!", I literally had to stop. Something about it literally made me tense up, for some reason.
also Daniel, which parts didn't come out? i'm assuming the album title and Arrows, Suspended remain a mystery... did you read all the appendices?
they do. I went through the appendices, briefly, but didn't really read it. Just skimmed through. But I've got all day tommorow and the rest of today to bore into it. But I stayed up all night (12AM to roughly 6:30AM) this morning finishing "The Navidson Record" bit of it, so I am taking a break
haha, nice. well both of those came from the same excerpt, so you can kill two birds with one stone there. i'm also curious as to how it affected you when you came across a part that you recognized from the album. did it accentuate/magnify those points? or was it just a sort of "oh there it is" moment? or something entirely different?
If I recall correctly "empty hallways long past midnight" is the first phrase I completely recognized and it did throw me for a loop, I didn't expect you to lift entire phrases out (no offense, but it just didn't seem you~ish, maybe 'cause I read alot of what you posted at LPMB and I distinctly recall you saying titles were a big deal to you). But after that, when the following phrases come up, they did not suprise me, with the exception being "i've never been to texas'. That song sums up exactly how that entire passage feels to me when I read it, so when I saw the last line I was like "winner!"
that first one was a bit blatant, but that was sort of the point. it's right at the beginning, and sets the tone for the whole novel, and the whole disc. and it's just a really descriptive line altogether, and it really creeped me out when i was first reading the book, and imagining that line. i had a bunch of more obtuse titles, but no one would be able to pick up on them without explanation. so really, i got the exact reaction i was looking for, because i wanted to immediately associate the book and the album. and yeah, the texas thing hit me hard, through me for a fucking loop for sure.
Exactly! I think what makes it a good line is "long past midnight". Empty Hallways are one thing, but for some reason adding a time to it makes it seem..desolate, almost. As if they will never be occupied again. I dunno, I suck at verbalizing feelings. And the texas bit may be one of the strongest parts of the book. edit: this talk makes me want to reread it even though I just (sort of) finished it D:
