Adventure Gamers - Forums

Looks like they were paying attention when they read the (awesome!) book House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

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Never heard of House of Leaves, but Timovieman made it look intriguing, so I first read a review and then of course bought it. Loving it! Isn’t that strange when I hate mazes in adventures (unless there’s a clever way out). I’m at the part with the morse signals and I couldn’t resist the temptation to write them down like a good adventuregamer.

Karlok - 29 January 2016 06:59 AM

Never heard of House of Leaves, but Timovieman made it look intriguing, so I first read a review and then of course bought it. Loving it! Isn’t that strange when I hate mazes in adventures (unless there’s a clever way out). I’m at the part with the morse signals and I couldn’t resist the temptation to write them down like a good adventuregamer.

I hope you got the full colour edition!

And did you notice that the front cover is cut a little too short on the right? That means the book is bigger on the inside than on the outside!
House of Leaves is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Favourite quote:
“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”

Despite the book’s attempts at doing nothing but subverting book and genre conventions, it’s actually incredibly well-written. A masterpiece, imo.

Btw, most of the time I used three bookmarks to get through it, and at one point even a fourth!

TimovieMan - 29 January 2016 07:29 AM

I hope you got the full colour edition!

Yep. I colored the word house blue, didn’t I.
I read in a review that in other editions the word house is gray.

And did you notice that the front cover is cut a little too short on the right? That means the book is bigger on the inside than on the outside!

I love that kind of detail! Right now, I’m somewhere near the pic you posted, trying to keep track of everything in the various stories. It really does make me feel like I’m lost, turning the book this way and that, desperately hanging on to Ariadne’s thread by following the scattered footnotes in the right order. 

House of Leaves is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

I’ll let you know if I share your opinion once I’ve finished it. Which may be some time, I try to read 20-25 pages a day, not skipping days because that’s not a good idea with this kind of book, but 700 pages is geen kattepis. 

Karlok - 29 January 2016 05:25 PM

I’ll let you know if I share your opinion once I’ve finished it. Which may be some time, I try to read 20-25 pages a day, not skipping days because that’s not a good idea with this kind of book, but 700 pages is geen kattepis. 

Don’t worry. There’s a section where you’ll fly through 200 pages because they contain only a few words each.