They're long videos, but it's a pretty long book

December 21, 2022 7:20 PM

Night Mind on YouTube brings us his exploration of one of the most labyrinthine novels, Mark Z Danielewski's House Of Leaves. In three parts: Secrets In Sound [1h39m], Labyrinth In Letters [1h37m], and Rest In Roots [1h46m]. It's a great round-up of the book if you've read the work. If you haven't it's full of spoilers but leaves SO much unexplored that you might be driven to crack the book yourself. It's a difficult book to describe, but this comes pretty close.

I'm interested in more quality HOL content, if you know of any.

posted by hippybear (15 comments total)

I love and still champion House of Leaves. I love and get choked up listening to Poe's album Haunted.

The video's narrative nasal buzzy narration style is making me not want to listen to it - which is a shame because it seems like the creator and I would have tons to geek out over.

Maybe I'll try again with subtitles only.
posted by abulafa at 7:30 PM on December 21, 2022

Ooohh i look forward to diving into this!
posted by supermedusa at 8:10 PM on December 21, 2022

Thanks for sharing, I will definitely dig into these when I have time. I loved House of Leaves, and most any other book that so lovingly plays with form. There is a tactile and participatory pleasure to HoL and books like it, that I appreciate even more now that I primarily read ebooks.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 8:26 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

HOL is one of those books I've bought more times then I've read, and I've read it a fair bit. After the first few copies never returned it was always easier to loan it out and not expect it back, but give it freely with the caveat to pass it along if the borrower enjoyed it.

There was a party at college where in a moment of synchronicity Poe's Hey Pretty came on the TV as background noise. I was already a bit in the bag and couldn't process why the passage I had just read the night before was being broadcast. I grabbed my copy and got a roommate to confirm it was the same one. We were all a bit dumbstruck and I really couldn't explain the book so we just passed it around and people puzzled at the backwards and sideways texts.

For a book - a tome really, in heft if not literary significance - based so strongly in defining a form and then pushing the boundaries of the same form, that moment really stuck with me as something special.
posted by now i'm piste at 8:59 PM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Ooh these look great! I love house of leaves. These days I read mostly on ebooks because it's more comfortable, and because I have a small house and don't like caring books around. But house of leaves... You can't really make a decent ebook it of this thing.
posted by Braeburn at 12:29 AM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I read HOL probably 10 years ago and loved it, but now it's like a fever dream and I recall very little save the opening premise. I should give it a go again. thanks for the reminder, great post
posted by lazaruslong at 1:23 AM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

House of Leaves was an incredible experience for me and also one of the very few books I will never read a second time. It struck some deep primordial fear in me that I never want to revisit. And yet, I still think about it often. Thanks for sharing these - I’m going to dive in and see if ai can revisit the book one level removed.
posted by Silvery Fish at 3:45 AM on December 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Next on my list after i finish "Valley of the Dolls"...
posted by Czjewel at 5:48 AM on December 22, 2022

Slight derail, but since there are a few Danielewski fans here...anyone tried "the Familiar"?
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:15 AM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

HoL left quite an impression one me. I recently started Piranesi by Susanna Clarke because I saw it listed as comparable (in terms of the subject matter being a sprawling, dimension-violating house). I already loved Jonathn Strange & Mr. Norrell, so I knew I was in good hands.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 10:58 AM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

OHenryPacey, Danielewski failed to hook with me with his follow ups but I kind of scratched the itch with "Flicker" by Theodore Roszak (yes, that guy). My 2005 edition of "Flicker" teases an upcoming movie adaptation directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Jim Uhls that Wiki just confirmed is never going to happen.
posted by now i'm piste at 11:41 AM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Agree with Poe's companion HOL album Haunted, which is one of my all-time favourite albums.
posted by pised at 1:57 PM on December 22, 2022

For me, the main insight in this book lies in the title House of Leaves. Leaves are pages, a house of leaves is a book. The house in the story is bigger on the inside than on the outside. And that describes a book. A single book can contain immensities. Living in an apartment full of books, I feel as if I am living in a cosmos, as I can move from ancient Egypt, to the inside of an atom, to Dickensian England, to highly abstract mathematical forms, to Dublin on June 16th, 1904, to myriads of other places, times, subjects, etc. House of Leaves made this explicit point about books right up front and, in the design, it created for the reader the labyrinth that the characters explore. If anything, this book shows what the ancient technology of books can still do now.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:58 AM on December 23, 2022

Yes to all of that, njohnson23! One of my favorite things about the book has always been how the experience of it as a physical object, as a book that is its own house of leaves (the front cover is even 3/4 of an inch smaller than the book, IIRC!) , is so inextricably tied to the text and the narrative. This is one of the few books that I will always insist is a vastly superior reading experience as a physical book rather than an ebook, and not just for that resonance, but because of those moments where the text goes in strange directions and spirals around or gets narrower and narrower, so you're flipping the pages faster and faster...it's really a unique reading experience in that way, one that takes full advantage of its form. Though I do think you could "adapt" the book to a wholly digital format in interesting ways; it'd make for a hell of a text-based game, for example, though whew, that would be quite the undertaking.
posted by yasaman at 10:41 AM on December 23, 2022

Keith A. Smith, in his books Structure of the Visual Book and Text in the Book Format, describes a lot of the features of these “ergodic” books. Just turning a page can be a reveal, books as slow motion cinema, in a sense. Smith opens up the format of books into way more than just a series of pages holding a compressed linear sequence of text.
posted by njohnson23 at 11:30 AM on December 23, 2022