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Notes -
I read House of Leaves after seeing it recommended so many times. I cannot recommend it honestly, because I don't think I understood it. However I liked the experience of reading it, because I like solving puzzles and I enjoy books that are interactive which this one definitely is. It rewards the work you put into it and you really have to be alert and pay attention as motifs and words are repeated.
No spoilers but this book has so many layers that you can keep peeling back one after another after another but never get to a core. It's unreliable narrators all the way down nested within each other. The, I guess what you'd call the main narrative, a house with a mysterious pocket dimension, is certainly compelling and creepy. There is a lot of pretentious academic analysis and digressions, which I got the sense the author was poking fun at that sort of thing so I felt free to skim or skip large chunks of that. Whatever its purpose, it did bog down the narrative because it was just everywhere and I would have enjoyed it more without that element.
The most unrealistic element that I keep coming back to - there's a story supposedly written by a blind man praising at great length the visual cinematography of a film that he could not have possibly experienced firsthand. The blindness is only mentioned once or twice but that fact colored my reading of the rest of the book. I don't do drugs but if I did, I feel like a drug trip would feel like this book.
I read it after falling for the hype. I thought the notion of a house that is irresolvably slightly larger on the inside than the oustide was an original surreal idea. The rest of it was just a haunted house story wrapped in layer upon layer of meta. That might be thrilling if the reader isn't familiar with meta-reference but if you are it begins to feel over indulgent.
There's a good enough short horror/surreal story at the core, but it's not quite as big and clever on the inside as it looks on the outside.
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I read it back in high school during the mid-aughts. I remember liking The Navidson Record, but not particularly caring for the Zampanò and Johnny Truant elements of the story. I was too impatient at the time to fully investigate the footnotes.
I found the story structure more interesting in theory than in execution. It felt like a critique or deconstruction of something I was unfamiliar with.
It was okay. Kinda gimmicky. I think The Navidson Record is a nice little horror story.
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I dropped the book halfway through, it was far too insufferably into sniffing it's own butt crack to be worth the slog. And it wasn't even particularly scary, which might have salvaged the more pretentious parts.
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