House of Leaves

Early this year, I basically consumed the book House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. It was like nothing I'd ever read before, and for several reasons. First of all, there were three different storylines going on all at once. There were layers of stories upon layers of stories, which made it altogether entrancing. Somehow, each storyline was kept seperate so confusion was barely noticable.

Another reason was the gigantic and numerous footnotes. It was crazy how many footnotes there were in the whole thing. And sometimes, one footnote would run for pages. But the footnotes were like their own story, which made the stories blend closely even though they were totally different despite similar themes of chaos and insanity.

But the third reason was the typography of the book. Danielewski played with all sorts of text layouts, font changes and colors and all sorts of ways to keep the reader turning pages such as: footnotes that ran for pages as mirror-reflection text, pages with 1-10 words on a page to keep the suspense high and text that comes in designs to represent something from the story.

After finishing this book, I was hoping that I'd be able to find some sort of movie version of The Navidson Record. Everything in the novel made all documentation of the House seem eerily real, like something that could be transferred from pages to real life. It's a novel that would be stunning as a film, but there's no way to conquer something so conceptual as House of Leaves. It is something that must be kept as a book to be cherished that way by everyone dedicated enough to hack through the mystery of its pages.