Book #13 of 2011:
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
I feel like this is an easy novel to appreciate but a tough one to cherish. Yes, it’s different than anything else I’ve ever read. Yes, it was startlingly original. Yes, parts of it were very well-written, and yes, several of my friends love it. I can almost even see the appeal… but I found actually reading this book to be a very frustrating experience. Its innovations largely struck me as pretentious, and most of them interfered with my ability to read the book without really adding anything substantial to my understanding of events or characters. I’m talking things like text written backwards, footnotes that wrap around page edges, and sections that were nothing but lists of names. Presumably all of this was done to illustrate the mental instability of the narrator(s) and/or the chaotic nature of the titular house, and I commend Danielewski for trying it… But for me, at least, it did not succeed in its goals. I just thought it made for an irritating reading experience.
Plot summary in a nutshell, in case you do think all this sounds interesting: a man finds a manuscript of a book about a documentary about a house that appears to hold a dark labyrinth of infinite size within its walls. The house shifts, the people in the documentary believe/act as though the house is real, the manuscript takes a scholarly approach to the matter in extensive detail, and the guy reading the manuscript can find no evidence that the documentary or the house ever really existed. Except he’s quite clearly crazy, and after you finish the ordeal of reading this book, you’ll probably feel that way too.
I applaud the bold experimentation, but there are really too many artistic flourishes here that simply don’t amount to anything more than a gimmick.
★★☆☆☆
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 
Leave a comment