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Suggestions: August 2006 Book of the Month

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What about House of Leaves by Danielewski?

Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.
Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer?
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blurricus said:
What about House of Leaves by Danielewski?
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It's a book of the month, not book of the year. While the Navidson Record sections are great to read, the rest of the book is a pain in the arse. And that's only the first one hundred pages before the pages start to twist and turn like the house.

Still, had to laugh at the line in bold:

Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves.
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Stephen King at his most cerebral; that doesn't bear thinking about. His next cerebral tome will probably be about a haunted traffic light!
 
I'd like to 3rd this....


'The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West'
by Gregory Maguire

Concetta, you did very well... :D
 
Decisions, Decisions

Love the sound of 'All the Names' (Jose Saramago) and 'The Time In Between' (David Bergman) - closely followed by 'Norwegian Wood' (Haruki Murakami). Sigh.... I'm never going to get through my tbr pile at this rate.
 
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