@chai2,
chai2 wrote:
kickycan wrote:
I am reading the craziest book ever right now. House of Leaves. Anyone heard of it? It's basically a haunted house story, but the way it's written, the way the story unfolds, the massive amount of footnotes and reference material, and the crazy typesetting peculiarities throughout take it way beyond being just another book.
Oh **** kicky, I've been encouraging people to read that book for YEARS!
I especially liked how I would get more caught up in the footnotes, than the actual story.
I re-read it maybe a year ago, and found new things that I didn't see or "get" the first time around. I'm sure if I read it again in a few years I'll find more stuff. The last time, I had found this weird symbol of some type, and, know nothing was in this book by chance, actually spent way more than an hour (maybe 2) backtracking, going forward, backtracking again, sliding sideways, tumbling perpendicular to a viewpoint, tracking down the origin. There is no way, because there was no reason, to have connected the two points by going forward, you had to do it by going backwards.
Since you're reading the book, I'm sure you're the only one who understands what I'm saying.
GO MINOTAURS!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyug0q9eyqw[/youtube]
Yes, it's a cool book. I think I know what you mean. I know there is this symbol that looks kind of like a "K" but with the extenders not going all the way to the top and bottom, that I noticed throughout the book, which would take you back to the beginning of a chapter somewhere in the beginning. Is that the symbol you mean? What page is it on? I'd like to see if I can find what you're talking about. I read the whole book and then re-read a big chunk of it again right after I finished it, because I felt like I missed a lot. I did. I'm sure I missed a lot this time too.
What about the checkmark? There is a checkmark at the bottom of one page, and in the letters from Johnny Truant's mom in the loony bin she does tell him to put a checkmark at the bottom of one of his return letters to let her know that he got her letter, but the one in the book on whatever page it is (I can't remember now) obviously can't mean the same thing as the checkmark she asks Johnny to make.
Speaking of Johnny, his part of the story was at times kind of a distraction, although I liked the parts where he'd talk about how his life was spiralling downwards. It bugged me to be in the middle of something and then have to be derailed about five pages with a totally unrelated story about how he or his buddy got laid.
But mostly, I thought the book was pretty f---ing awesome.
So what do you think? Is there an actual monster (the minotaur?), and if so, is that what the growling is? Or is the growling sound just the sound of the
house reconfiguring itself? Is the monster the darkness itself? I loved the part where Holloway was "erased" by the dark (Supposedly. It could have been just his flare going out, of course. Nothing is concrete in this
house.).
Did you know that "leaves" is a publishing/printing term that signifies pages in a book. So the "
house" in the story could actually be the book itself.
