House of Leaves

Jessica titled her post on House of Leaves as "complicated houses" and I think she's absolutely right. What a strange trip this book is! I have read and taught this book a few times in the past but this weekend when I hopped on the G train, I once again missed my stop because I was so enveloped in the book (the second time this has happened this semester). Crazy! Disturbing! Confusing! Weird! Smart! All words (shouted at you due to my exclamation points) that I would use to describe this book. But probably the best one is "experience."



Reading House of Leaves is a reading experience. No two of us will have the same experience as we read it--which footnotes did you examine? Which parts did you skip? Did you read The Three Attic Whalestone Institute Letters (pretty frightening--you were instructed to read it in a footnote and it's worth it)? Did anybody youtube clips of The Navidson Record (here's a good one)? Did you find yourself skipping through Zapanos parts and focus more on Johnny Truant's sections?



Obviously, you will not be able to read every footnote or every digression. This book is forcing you to think a bout your own reading strategies and comprehension. Jessica wondered in her post if this book makes sense in our current fast paced world and I think it does--it mimics our ability to read three different texts while texting a friend, listening to an ipod and surfing the web (do people even use the expression "surfing the web anymore? I'm getting so obsolete). Tom, for example, not only reads this monstrous book (pun intended) but is also reading Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and talks about them both here. In fact, as I am writing this post, I am currently writing a talk I am giving in Tennessee, signing up to be a test subject for a research group (Focus Point gives out money to be test subjects to review products and tv shows) and clicking on Amazon to see if the New Guns N Roses album is out yet (okay, okay, I'm joking on that one). That's what I love about this book--it becomes about the reader experiencing this very weird and disturbing story about a hallway that begins to expand.



And let me tell you, for some reason, this is frightening to me. Try reading this book late at night in the glare of a flickering tv screen as everyone else in your apartment is asleep--creeks begin to to on a whole new meaning.



But I also admit that it is a long complicated one as Peter mentions a few times in his post. And I also don't make any apologies for this. It will take you awhile to read this book and I also realize that many of you also may not enjoy this book as much as some of the others. But stick with it. Keep pushing forward through it and keep reading; there is so much to talk about. But if you come to class NOt having read this book, if you think the house is red and not blue, if you don't know that Johnny Truant works in a tattoo parlor or that he is in love with a girl named Thumper, if you do not know that Zampano is blind, if you saw a footnote on page one and put the book down, then you are really not doing what a LITERATURE class demands you to do--to read and think about literature in all of its complicated ways.



So keep going! But always keep one eye behind you, you never know what is creeping up when you are not looking.



......not sure but I think we have to do something in our discussion that reflects the nature of this book....I'll think of something......