everything I'm reading: Currently Reading to the next book: Invisible Cities

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

I have things to confess. Firstly, that I started this book on July 2nd, 2023. It is currently August 21st, 2023. This book is so overdue at the library that they have taken it off my overdue items tab and have placed it into the fines category. Technically, the fine is less than the cost of House of Leaves at Barnes and Nobles, so this is a possible life hack to acquiring books (for legal reasons this is a joke.)

Perhaps more cursed than my poor library account is how I decided to get this book. I lied above, actually. I didn't start House of Leaves on July 2nd--that was the second time I'd started reading it. I got maybe three pages in before leaving it in favor of other books that aren't built like a brick. My spine thanked me for this decision, but elitist readers may not. Anyway, I decided to go back to it because a friend of mine, one that listens to video essays every night to fall asleep, sent me one about this book:

I still haven't finished this book, but I read about 100 pages in, and it's very, very good. And I highly recommend the video essay because it's extremely well researched (and got retweeted by the author of House of Leaves, too) Basically, it's a book where a man finds this research this dead man named Zampano wrote on a (fictional) man named Will Navidson, a famous photographer. Navidson moves into this house that seems to have some interesting properties. For example, it's larger on the inside than it should be when measured from the outside--if only by a fraction of an inch at first. Then, more things start happening--a closet that shouldn't exist, a dark hallway that changes as Navidson walks through it, etc.

But besides this, what makes it interesting as a book and not just a novel is that it's ergodic

At multiple portions, you have to do things like rotate the book, or go back and forth between super long footnotes which are their own perspective on events in the book--framed as editor's perspectives, or life events of the man who finds the research and is re-editing it for publication and losing his mind at the same time.

And this brings me back to the video esssay. Despite its fame, House of Leaves has never, and probably will never have a film adaptation. It would be very cool, admittedly, but also extremely difficult to turn this: