My friends have seen me read House of Leaves recently. They watch me turn it upside down to read footnotes or flip back to pages to reorient myself with Zampono’s narration after an interruption from Johnny, and they always ask what I’m reading. You can’t just give a quick explanation to describe this book, but … Continue reading Suspense in House of Leaves Read more →
House of Children
What is it about children in scary movies and books? In House of Leaves, the children transform the story of the house from a concerning tale to a realistic nightmare. Without the story, the house appears as an inconvenience. The house has strange noises and impossible measurements, but overall, I was not frantically turning the pages of … Continue reading House of Children Read more →
Not just a cigar
The House comes to symbolize a million things at once. One of which is the speculation that the internal structure of the House fluctuates and changes based on the person and his experience of the House: a kind of architectural Rorschach Test, so to speak. This is a clear parallel between the House of Leaves and the House. From page 246 to 252,… Read more →
Lack of Braille in House of Leaves
I know last week when the subject of braille was brought up, we ultimately decided it was because having braille in a mass-manufactured book with thin pages would be impractical. However, I also think that there is some symbolic significance… Continue Reading → Read more →
A further look into the opening quote of ch. 6
As I read through House of Leaves, I have thought much about the different quotes at the beginning of each chapter. While some quotes enhance a key idea within the plot, others serve as a kind of foreshadowment. Although strange and difficult to analyze, I figured I would take a stab at one. In reference […] Read more →
The Bookness of House of Leaves
370 pages into Mark Danielewski’s Houes of Leaves, I’m struck by how much of a physical book it is. Almost every feature of the book itself seems to have some sort of meaning. Danielewski takes what are just normal features of a book and uses them to create or add possible meaning to the story. Continue Reading Read more →
The Bookness of House of Leaves
370 pages into Mark Danielewski’s Houes of Leaves, I’m struck by how much of a physical book it is. Almost every feature of the book itself seems to have some sort of meaning. Danielewski takes what are just normal features of a book and uses them to create or add possible meaning to the story. Continue Reading Read more →
The Labyrinth
After going through the second portion of The House of Leaves, something that really stood out to me was the idea of the labyrinth within The Navidson Record. So we know enough now to understand that we’re not dealing with a simple hallway, but rather an intricate maze, aka a labyrinth. On page 113, Zampano […] Read more →
The Irony of House of Leaves
The second chunk of assigned reading for “House of Leaves” significantly differed from the first in terms of complexity. When I started to read the book, I tried to just attain a system of reading the two different passages by Navidson and Johnny. However, when I sat down to continue my reading this time, I was bombarded with various boxes, rotated font, and font that was red and scratched out…. Read more →
Irony in House of Leaves
The section of House of Leaves with paragraphs that were in blue boxes, upside down, or rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise was crazy (pages 119-148). What would posses an author to spatially arrange paragraphs on a page like that? Was Danielewski just trying to be really unique and avant-garde without meaning anything by the positioning? When…