I finished The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. I think Gita Jackson recommended it on twit? This book was awesome. Definitely better if you don’t know too much about it going in. Basically it’s 1997 and time travel is top secret and real, but if you actually time travel, you will have a very very bad time. Kind of fucked up in a good way, and there’s some scenes I’m still thinking about weeks later.
started house of leaves. i had forgotten about the “guy who doesn’t get out much affecting a badass narrator’s voice” style, kind of a tv writer vibe. its bad. i will keep reading
Just because there are so many other narrator voices in that book, I think that character is unlikeable and corny in a feature not a bug way. I also hated him and his parts of the book. I’m not a huge fan of House of Leaves, anyway, and wouldn’t be too fast to stop someone from dropping the book if they felt compelled to.
the voice has incredible r/nosleep style; im sticking with it because i remember this thing being interesting,but it feels like danielewski’s reach exceeds his grasp
I try not to talk about House of Leaves much because I know some people really love it, but as much as it in theory is exactly the sort of thing that should appeal to me, I didn’t care for it at all.
I loved it since it manages to still ground (at least one) of its narrative threads with an emotional core so it doesn’t become pure self-reference. Metafiction has a tendency to get wrapped up in itself and the central mystery of the house and the lives of the people within it are the thing that grounds it for me. Also there’s some fun cyphers if you have the time.
I really hate when a book becomes incredibly popular only because the people reading it are unfamiliar with the breadth of literature that exists. I don’t even have to do a high brow citation of Pale Fire or Julio Cortazar’s books for examples of books that do the same thing better than House of Leaves. Pulp SF writers like Alfred Bester have played with page formatting to convey mood and instill an uneasy sense of horror in works like the Demolished Man.
The worst thing a book that’s trying something ‘clever’ can do is draw attention to the author patting himself on the back and saying “look how clever I am”
More than academia being wordy and navelgazing, it felt to me like a good representation of the kind of termite-like energy of scholarship which can go on to being a very paranoid and intensely inward looking (either the self or other things) activity. Not exactly novel in its own right, but the form of the book and its subject afforded a representation at a level of fidelity or intensity that at least isn’t common.
The is one of the main things about it that bothered me. While I thought some of the ideas were interesting even if not totally original, he couldn’t seem to stop pointing out how surprising and weird the story was.
Within the book itself, I mean. I have no idea what he said in interviews or anything.
i always like to tell people i read house of leaves in pdf format on a tiny android phone, and i think all the turning and zooming really was what i liked about it. basically having to physically navigate the pages like a little maze was pleasing
I’ll agree on its intense obsession aesthetic being strong but this will depend a lot on people’s familiarity and interest in feeling that. There’s a section which presents endless categorical lists and the form gets messy to echo how pointless it is writing this stuff out for a reader who barely cares (which can happen in academia) but it reflects its target too well in some cases. Like it often felt more like a study of graphomania rather than academia as such.
I do still think it’s a good entry level/gateway for this kinda fiction even if other stuff does this kinda thing better.
You need to read Doomed City. A dream you can’t convincingly argue yourself to wake up from. A book by old masters, eyes and hands failing and forced to watch the death of all youthful ideals. Pessimistic even for them, I think it’s their best.
