House of Leaves

[MakingIn]

I just read the Mark Danielewski book House of Leaves and it is quite possibly the best book I've ever read.
Has anyone else read this? I would really like to hear others thoughts on the story and it's themes.

[Malkavia]

I have it on my bookshelf. I havent started it yet, do you recommend I do?

[Paranoid Theory]

It looks very interesting, but I find some negative reviews on /x/.

Ya got any detailed opinion about it?

[MrDoom]

My ENFP friend has read it and told me about it, he has a very high opinion of the book. I've yet to delve into it but I plan to.

[MakingIn]

I highly recommend this book. The story by itself is intensely captivating but then on top of that Danielewski is pretty insightful too. It's hard to read the back cover and get an idea of what it's about because it's a bit complicated, but I'll try my best to explain a bit. The main story is about a family that moves into a new house, and the father (a Pulitzer prize winning photographer) puts cameras everywhere to document the process of settling in to a new place. They go on vacation, and when they come back their is suddenly a door in their living room that wasn't there before, and when they measure the house, somehow the outside wall is shorter than the inside walls. The house somehow defies physics and through the door in their living room is just endless hallways of nothing but darkness and occasionally doors to other hallways of just more darkness. So the guy ends up making a movie of the whole process of exploring this hallway (I won't say anymore because the explorations are the best part). Then, a bunch of people write scholarly books on the movie, analyzing it. There is a man who is writing a book on the movie that is going to be a definitive book that sort of spans the whole movie. The book begins with him dying, and someone else finding all his manuscripts which he edits and sometimes adds to. So the story of this house is told through a book that is written using someone elses notes about a movie. It might sound sort of silly but it's actually really well done and very interesting. One of my favorite parts is that it has all kinds of footnotes and even footnotes with footnotes that send you flipping through the book to different portions to discover little connections and things. Reading the book is sort of like solving a mystery at times. Also, especially if you're into existentialism at all, there are a lot of themes and insights that are really great. I realize this description is probably a bit convoluted, so let me know if you want some clarifications. Honestly though, the book will do a much better job than I ever could, and I just can't recommend it highly enough.

[Pyroninja42]

I loved what TVTropes said about it:

Wait, no, that's still not right. Okay, you're interested in what House Of Leaves is about, right? Well, this book is about that point directly behind your head. Don't look.◊Ω Don't take your eyes off this page, off the safe glow of the monitor, the comforting shapes of the letters making up this sentence. This is safe. What's behind you isn't. Keep reading these words. If you stop to look behind you, I can't guarantee you'll come out of this ordeal alive, much less sane. Pretty soon you might find yourself doubting what is real and what isn't. Pretty soon you might start to have the nightmares. One day you'll wake up to find yourself an emaciated wreck who can't trust space and time anymore. Whether something is real or not doesn't matter here; the consequences are the same. What you need to realize is that this is not for you.