“House of Leaves” by Mark Z Danielewski

This book took me more than a decade to read. 

No, really. It wasn’t the book itself that was the problem (or at least that’s mostly true); it was my timing. I first started reading House of Leaves right before my life turned upside down (actually, with hindsight, I can see that what happened at that time is that my life turned right side up after having been upside down for years) and I could not continue reading it. It became tinged with sadness.

But I always intended to finish it someday, and so I have. Although even the finishing of it was beset with difficulties. First, I had to start again at the beginning. It had been far too long, and I remembered nothing. Then, after I had gotten perhaps halfway through, we went on a ten-day trip, and if you are trying to pack light, this is not the book to bring. That was last May. I did not touch the book again until this past week.

And the reading of this book was . . . an experience. It reminded me of reading Ulysses, but it was simultaneously both more and less creative. (The similarity was in the inscrutability.) HoL is, shall we say, very meta (in the pre-Zuckerberg sense). The story at the very center is The Navidson Record: a family moves into a house and finds out that it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. This starts as merely an intriguing curiosity but ends up as a horror show, and it is all recorded on film. A mysterious scholar named Zampanò analyzes the film and leaves an unfinished manuscript that is bursting with eclectic quotes and academic citations. LA tattoo apprentice Johnny Truant finds this manuscript and attempts to transcribe it, adding his own experiences along the way. The book itself is full of footnotes and appendices and even a 42-page index that I think might possibly include almost every word in the text (even and is in there, though not the). Many pages have "creative" text placement (upside-down, sideways, diagonal in the corners) and there are even some full-color copies of pages scribbled with Zampano's original notations (many of which I had to use my cell phone camera to zoom in on in order to read). Towards the end, Sam looked over my shoulder and said, Ugh, I feel sorry for you reading that. 

So, yeah, I'm kind of looking forward to reading a plain and simple book next.