Good evening everyone!
Man, I have to say, it's been a long time since I read such a complex work of literature that really got me to think, but also left me feeling like there was so much I didn't understand yet. It's a book I read for pleasure that I plan to do a lot more research on because I think this book is utterly fascinating.
As soon as I finished I began looking online for reviews from other bibliophiles, and I found this wonderful review from I Read Odd Books. I really enjoyed her review and her take on the character Johnny Truant, but honestly for me the most fascinating aspects of the book were A) the layout/the text as a work of art and B) the Navidson Record. I completely understand that the book is really about Johnny more so than it is anything else, and he was a very compelling character and I enjoyed reading about him, but there was something alluring about the house and all its secrets.
Anyway, there are some spoilers below the line, so if you don't want to have details shown to you before reading, here might be a good place to stop. (To make some sort of a page break, here I'll insert some pictures from select pages that show off why I think of this book as a work of art as much as a piece of interesting literature.)
One of my favorite things about this book are little passages with nuggets of thought or clever writing that made me stop and think. One such passage shows up fairly early on in the book, on page 73. There's just been a discussion about echoes and how they work, and it's before there have been any explorations of the hallway. Navy is with his daughter, Daisy.
"Come play with me Daddy."
Navidson lifts his daughter onto his lap.
"Okay. What do you want to play?"
"I don't know," she shrugs. "Always."
"What's always?"
...
Then again, "always" slightly mispronounces "hallways".
It also echoes it.I was pretty taken aback when I read this for the first time. It was just a very interesting point to make, and shows the intricacies of the people who live in the house and how they are being affected by it.
Here's another good quotation from the book:
Strangely, then, the best argument for fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction. Thus it would appear the ghost haunting The Navidson Record, continually bashing against the door, is none other than the recurring threat of its own reality (found on page 149).Something I agree with the author of I Read Odd Books is that I marked up my copy with little flags for everything I found interesting and wanted to write about, and found, when I went back, that I couldn't remember why had marked half the things I did in the first place. I started to take notes in a little notebook of mine, but I still found myself rather lost at the end.
Here are some resources if you too are interested in this book:
- A Guide to the Book
- The Weirdness in House of Leaves, a review
- 21 C Magazine Review of HoL
- An explanation of ergodic literature
- Another explanation of ergodic literature (from the U of M, my school! :D)
I can't really think of this review as an ending, for me - rather this is just the beginning. I feel there is still so much I have yet to understand and that I need to go over to fully understand this text. Maybe I'll report back once I've done some more digging.
If you want to see what else I've been reading lately, or to see how far I am on the 2014 reading challenge, check out my goodreads here.
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