Review: House of Leaves

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Can seem kind of intimidating-- I mean just google pictures of this book and you'll know what I mean-- but honestly not as difficult to make sense of as other well-known convoluted books (I'm looking at you, Infinite Jest). Though it still takes a bit of effort to read regardless.

The main storyline itself is pretty engrossing and made me wish I were watching a film adaptation of it right now; it's basically like reading the script to a good horror film, considering it literally is the description of a film. I wasn't into Johnny Truant's story as much in comparison, though, and honestly I got tired of the randomly inserted academic criticism... not sure if it's saying much that I almost couldn't tell it was supposed to be satire at first, or if my opinion of academic literature is just that bad haha.

I feel like if I had read this book a decade earlier (like literally when I added this on goodreads) I probably would've appreciated it a lot more. It's making me wonder how much my opinions might have changed of other notoriously difficult books from the past. At this point I think age is making me have less patience to put the work into trying to decipher stories that purposely try to be as laborious as possible (thinking particularly of one of the letters in this book).

Or rather, I think I can still appreciate it if I believe that the themes are worth it, but I'm not entirely sure if I feel that way here. If anything the criticism already in this book, satire or not, actually turned me off trying to actively think about the story in more meaningful ways... even though I can tell there are more interesting interpretations behind some of the events that happen here.

All of that said though, it's a cool experiment in trying to capture some of the more claustrophobic/film inspired moments in metatextual form, and I'd recommend this as a gateway book for people looking to explore more difficult/oddly structured forms of literature outside of the usual stream-of-consciousness fare (Pale Fire, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, etc.)