Continuing on the last scribbling’s subject, I would like to write about a specific book I read. As I previously mentioned, I do order three books at a time as per my method. I want to write about a specific batch of books that included a very special book; a batch that consisted of Ikigai, The Pragmatic Programmer and, today’s main course, House of Leaves.

Disappointingly enough, I have little to say about Ikigai or The Pragmatic Programmer. Sometimes I have difficulties with choosing my Soul book, and going through the list of potential candidates on my regular online book retailer, I chose Ikigai for its pleasant appearance, length and price. I had heard of this book, mostly in the context of discussing coffee table books. You know, books that look pretty on a coffee table and mainly serve as a conversation starter rather than as a reading experience. But since it’s a fairly popular book I purchased it, read it and put it in my bookshelf after. What do you want from me? It was an alright book, telling about a specific Japanese lifestyle that enables some people to live in their nineties and beyond. Nothing world-changing but there was nothing wrong with the book either. I enjoyed my time with it and now I’ll probably never think about it again.

The Pragmatic Programmer was a book I picked up to hone my programming skills. Even though I consider myself a pretty seasoned software developer I still like to keep my basic skills sharp and shiny. The Pragmatic Programmer is a book about general programming paradigms; the does and not-does of software development. The book did teach me new things and things I already knew just bolstered my pre-existing knowledge. I do think it’s a very good book to read whether you are a novice programmer or a very experienced one. Moving on.

I did not know much about House of Leaves getting into it. I did know it was considered a cult classic, I knew that there was something peculiar about the style of writing and I knew the story had something to do with impossible geometry, and that’s about it. Boy howdy was I in for a treat.

I must preface this by saying that I love House of Leaves. It might even be my new favorite book, but as I will explain later, that is very hard to qualify. One reason I say that is that House of Leaves is a book I find myself thinking about a lot even months after finishing it. It really is a book so special and masterfully written that I find myself considering if I should call it a book in the first place; perhaps a written experience is a more accurate depiction, since the word book carries several connotations.

When you think about book as in the concept of book, you usually think about a written sequence of words, fiction or otherwise, that goes from point A to point B in some fashion within the confines of the stack of papers the words have been printed on. Nonfiction usually deals with presenting information, starting with the abstract and getting into more detail from there. Fiction might tell a story, usually in a three-act structure. Nevertheless, books are by design intended to be read in a linear order from page one to the last page, correct? By this I don’t mean fiction that plays with a non-linear sequence of events in terms of the story’s chronology. There are several books that have a non-linear narrative where some events are read about before other events that, in the context of the story, happen before said events. No, even in that case I mean that the reader is expected to read the book in the order of the physical pages from one, two, three and so on until they reach the last page with no backtracking needed.

Also, I used to hold the firm belief that a book’s quality can be measured on a single thing; whether a book makes me feel something or whether it makes me bored; bored being the absence of feelings. The Wager by David Grann was a gripping book that kept me on the edge of my bed throughout the whole story. That is a book that made me feel excited, worried, terrified and sad for its characters. On the other hand, I felt nothing for the cutout archetype characters of The Fatherland or its stupid story, so I didn’t even bother finishing it. It made me feel numb, which I used to interpret that the book is unequivocally bad.

I will come back to both of these points.

House of Leaves not only provided me with one of the greatest reading experiences of recent years; House of Leaves changed how I see books as a medium. And now that I’ve been building up this book as some sort of holy grail of literature, let me tell you what it’s about.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is a book that involves several multi-layered stories. At first hand one could easily state that there are three stories, a story within a story within a story, but as is the case with many things in this book, there are arguably more depending on how you interpret things.

The first level in this wedding cake of a novel is the Navidson Record. The Navidson Record is a seemingly fictional documentary about Will Navidson, a journalist, and his wife and two children, and the titular house they move into in the beginning of the book. The Navidson Record is a the story of Navidson finding that the house his family has moved into contains a door that leads into a seemingly infinite labyrinth of empty rooms, doors, hallways and staircases, all of which couldn’t possibly be contained in the small house alone. Navidson ventures into the maze several times, deeper and deeper each time, hires help investigating the house’s secrets while trying to keep his family together as the appearance of the mysterious door causes his relationship to his wife to rupture.

The Navidson Record in House of Leaves is the center point of an academic dissertation by a man called Zampano. This is how the Navidson Record is presented to the reader; as the subject of an academic paper that discusses themes, psychological motives and symbolism in the documentary recorded by Will Navidson. The academic paper quotes several real-life people and professionals in several fields dissecting the events and characters presented in the Navidson Record like an actual piece of academic writing. This is the first layer of the book.

The first layer is the academic paper regarding the Navidson Record and written by Zampano. In his paper Zampano assures that the Navidson Record is a real documentary and has been published and documented by several other people. However, as the second layer starts to unfold, Zampano is blind, and there seems to be no evidence that anything in the paper is real, and none of the people being quoted in the paper are aware of such a documentary.

This is where we arrive at Johnny Truant, an orphaned man who together with his friend find Zampano dead in the man’s apartment, where Johnny incidentally finds the paper discussing the Navidson Record. Johnny’s story is told as footnotes to Zampano’s paper; he starts reading the paper he finds and gets practically consumed by it, and starts documenting his own thoughts in the footnotes of Zampano’s paper. Sometimes he talks about the paper itself but more often than not he goes over things happening in his own personal life. As Johnny’s story is written in footnote format, both stories, Zampano’s paper on the Navidson Record and Johnny’s journal, go on simultaneously on the same page throughout House of Leaves. On top of that, there is the third level of storytelling, which is another set of footnotes to Johnny’s footnotes, written by people only referred to as “the editors” and that seem to have been written after Johnny’s notes, commenting on them. So, in House of Leaves, there are in total three simultaneous stories going on on every page.

I said earlier that the book is masterfully written. I do really think so because Danielewski takes the concept of an academic paper, usually the most boring and least engaging form of writing and turns it into something so surreal and yet so gripping, and uses footnotes and margins as a way of telling a story which is absolutely fantastic. If this was not enough to turn this book into a cult classic then let me tell you, reader, that Zampano’s notes contain references to other notes or citations to other sources, as is usual for academic writing, but this feature turns the whole book upside down. As I mentioned earlier, a book is usually designed to be read in the order the pages are layed out. However, with this genius idea of writing, following Zampano’s notes and citations the reader is encouraged to jump from page to page, sometimes backwards, and sometimes ending in a literal dead-end. The reader could traverse the pages in order, or discover alternate routes and secret paths throughout the stories. I loved reading it, never knowing what I might uncover next.

The thing in House of Leaves that made me change my view of books as a medium was a chapter very early in the book titled “Echo”. This chapter involves Zampano discussing a moment in the Navidson Record where Will Navidson prepares to determine the size of an impossibly large hall he found within the house by the means of sonar measurement. Zampano’s paper goes on to infuriating details about the concept of echo, its symbolism and meaning in different cultures. This chapter goes on for pages without much action and it was truly a slog to get through for me.

However, the geniusness of the chapter lies in its boredom. In the context of the Navidson Record, Navidson’s exploration of the house has started to affect his relationship to his wife, and their mutual communication has started to cease. More to the point, the hallways and rooms Navidson comes across in the house, completely alone both physically and increasingly also socially, are described to be completely featureless, and as Navidson descends deeper and deeper into the house, also quite chilly. The way Danielewski uses boring academic writing peppered with dense jargon through Zampano really emphasizes the loneliness Navidson experiences in his exploration into the house and the constant dullness of his environments. Empty, featureless room after empty, featureless hallway with nobody to talk to; emphasized by paragraph after paragraph of boring, rambling discourse on echo and its presence in Greek mythology.

Using previously mentioned techniques and styles Danielewski is not only writing about a maze; he has written a maze. Several notes and references that take you from the straight path and sometimes leave you to nowhere, paragraphs of text that have seemingly nothing interesting to them only to simulate a long journey through a labyrinth with no stimuli whatsoever. If the echo chapter was not as boring and difficult to read as it is, I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it more. The fact that Echo is as boring as it is makes it good in the end, because it really ties back to the subject matter and the themes of House of Leaves, that I can’t in good conscience use boredom to measure a book’s quality ever again.

This is why I’m not sure if I should call House of Leaves a book, since it breaks so many rules of writing a book that I have previously taken for granted. It is by no means linear in its physical appearance and it does have intentionally boring parts, but all of these techniques work to its advantage. I am yet to mention the appendices; if you’re like me and you buy the edition that includes the Whalestoe Letters, a series of letters written by Johnny’s mother Pelafina to her son featured as an appendix, then once you reach the end of the book you are left wondering if you missed a completely sectioned-off part of the book. I don’t want to spoil anything, but much like Zampano’s paper, Pelafina’s letters contain several passages that the reader is required to decrypt. There is one particular letter that is very heartbreaking, and the way it is meant to be read really punctuates the emotions in that letter. The letters, incidentally, raise the question if there are more than just these three stories I described going on in the book, or whether there is something bigger the reader might have missed. At least I felt that way.

I am aware that Danielewski has encouraged this kind of speculative interpretation of his book, and that there are internet communities sharing and discussing possible clues and additional paths in the labyrinth that is House of Leaves. I do love the book but I do think discussing it like a sort of Da Vinci Code style riddle would diminish its value for me. Someday I will pick up the book once again, and much like Will Navidson, Zampano and Johnny Truant, I will go back to the maze again. House of Leaves is a book I could talk about for hours and there are still so many unique little characteristics that I haven’t even mentioned, but it also makes me a little bit melancholic. House of Leaves was such an unique and unforgettable reading experience for me that I fear I will never come across a book of its equal again. A book that is so memorable but a book that also changes how you view every other book from here on out.

I could end this piece of writing with some sort of poignant pun like I usually try to do, but having finished writing I find myself in a wistful mood. Instead, I would like to close this with a poem included in the book’s appendices:

You shall be my roots and

I will be your shade,

though the sun burns my leaves.

You shall quench my thirst and

I will feed you fruit,

though time takes my seed.

And when I'm lost and can tell nothing of this earth

you will give me hope.

And my voice you will always hear.

And my hand you will always have.

For I will shelter you.

And I will comfort you.

And even when we are nothing left,

not even in death,

I will remember you.