Welcome to Litsy!

@BarkingMadRead finally home to open #sss thank you so much! This edition is gorgeous of the tagged book & I‘ve been dying to read Chestnut Man. The wine stoppers are hilarious. Mom tried to steal the candle already 😅 Happy holidays!

@Avanders thank you for hosting & happy holidays!! 🎁🎄

Prompt 29 - #dread #wickedwhispers

@alwaysbeenaloverofbooks @Eggs

#challenge #reads #book #readerscommunity

The freefall continues. The blueprint grows. There Might Be Cupcakes Podcast returns to the House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski for the sixth time to discover its roots. If there is no Minotaur, is there no labyrinth? Is it a maze, or a spiral, everything coming around again, mimicking the beginning?

“Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?”—Taylor Swift

You‘ve been in the dark such a long while. It‘s time. Soon.

#leaves
#coverlove

Been on my shelf for years.

“She was last seen in a Los Angeles bar smoking cigarettes and talking about moonlight and why you could find so much of it in Hollywood.”

#goals

Dang, Johnny gets a lot (“alot” as he‘d write) of action. He‘s gotta be so brooding lank-haired 90s boy hot, a real sexy tortured package.

I knew immediately what I will be choosing for #TPRC Katherine Martell - a book you had/will have to push yourself through.
My kryptonite book is House of Leaves. I tried solo, buddy reads, chapter a day. Only to pull the parachute cord and bail. 🪂
YouTuber Oskar/A Theory Reader has taken on the brave task of audiobooking HoL. I want to wait until he‘s finished with it before I make another attempt at it.
@Yuki_Onna
Links in comments ⬇️

Book club pick! 🤓

I LOVED this book! It really makes you work for it though and by the end you‘re still confused. I‘d 10/10 read this many more times.

I loved the concept but did not enjoy this and dreaded reading it 😂. Would've dnfed but it was for book club 🤷🏼‍♀️🤷🏼‍♀️

New favorite book dedication just dropped

I loved it? I hated it? I didn't actually read it all? I read every word? It's actually two books in one? I'm not sure if I understand this book at all?

... I'm still mulling this one over.

Ok, so I‘m finding a lot of this book to be meandering and pretentious AF (and I‘m somewhat feeling like that‘s a little bit of the point, but idk tbh)… but little nuggets like this keep me reading. I feel this description is so very apt.
It could also be that it‘s late and I‘m looking for any kind of resonance in a book that frustrates me. 😂

“Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow.”

This took me back - anyone else remember how in the mid 90s the Benedictine Monks had a massive selling album? Wild times 😄

This book seems kind of tedious so far imho and I‘m not sure if I should tough it out or not. If you‘ve read it - is it worth it?

#wondrouswednesday @eggs

1. I enjoy a good sci-fi story, so near/far future?

2. Started The Snow Child, but first completed read was Victor LaValle's Destroyer comic

3. Most pages: The Stand. Close second (and took the longest): House of Leaves

Play @WildAlaskaBibliophile

While this book was one of the most interesting reading experiences I've ever had, it sure was tedious! There were parts that I absolutely raced through, and others that were such a slog.
Overall, I was left a bit disappointed by the overall story. I put in all that work to reference the ~500 footnotes, 2 appendices and a handful of exhibits only to feel like I was left hanging at the end.

I fear an inability to summarize what it's about or how I feel about it is not an original conundrum for readers of this book. Is it perfect? No. The gimmick of formatting goes a bit too far, the break off of text gets a little too convenient in places. Is it haunted house/descent into madness horror mashed with critical reflection mixed book-in-book, mashed with experimentation in form akin to an art piece mashed with domestic drama? Partially.

Today's 'scratched my brain just right' sentence.

These two quotes are on either side of the same page. Apparently, I've reached the, 'ouch, right in the feels' part of the book. 😔💔

Everything I've read so far leads me to support Mosley's summary. 🤨

Combines the two classics: "don't eat me because it's bad for your health/digestion" and "don't eat me, I won't taste good." ??

Not to be a buzzkill, but when it comes to multimedia, I feel like there's a point at which 'formatting to facilitate story theme/mood/character's mental state' becomes 'reader comprehension level: hold my beer.' 🍺 😵‍💫

Isn't that nice, a little festivity in the mania. 🎄

Feels like this MUST be a reference to House of Leaves itself: we're getting Zampano retelling Navidson, and Truant retelling Zampano.

Zampano's digressions? You're gonna talk about ZAMPANO'S digressions? You better laugh when you say that Johnny. 🤨

Well, I finished this book today and I‘m still not sure what to think. It‘s a story-within-a-story-within a story which is very creative. It‘s also an example of ergodic literature—the author plays with the text itself, which you can see in this photo. Sometimes the text is backwards, written in a swirl, or maybe a whole page with only one word. Again, very creative, but I‘m not sure what it all added up to in the end.

This book is SOOO divisive!!! Either you totally hate it or you're obsessed and can't stop thinking about it... I'm quickly becoming the latter!! I love the sketchy lore being developed, I love that Johnny is so unreliable, I love that I'm questioning what I'm even reading!

Used the first day of #20in4 #readathon to finish this weird book. @Andrew65

What ever was this? I didn't like it and only finished it for this challenge.

#ChosenBecauseOfAWeirdReviewOrBookWasMoreWeirdThanYouExpected
#Booked2023 @alisiakae @BarbaraTheBibliophage @Cinfhen

This was the most interesting and frustrating book I've ever read. It took me a long time to get thru it. Would I recommend this book.....No. there's a lot of reading in there that just felt like a waste of time and in my opinion added nothing to the story.

Still SLOWLY chugging along with this book. On page 384 out of 528. The rest is exhibits (seen above).

A good read but boyyy is this long. Been reading this for 2 years but I always come back to it!

I had a great Independent Bookstore Day! I visited three stores, and purchased five books! Two of the stores were giving away ARCs, so I picked up another two books!

House of Leaves, or When Houses Attack!

Thank God that's over.

The Pan relates to my reading experience. I do have respect for this book's originality, complexity, and creepiness, but boy did the whole thing give me a headache.

I hated most of this, and yet it is something of a creation.

Esoteric, unconventional, genre-defying, masturbatory, sanity-draining - this is a book that will truly divide opinion.

⭐️⭐️

So, after 3 years of fortunately avoiding COVID, I've finally been infected 😭 Feeling very sorry for myself.

I can't do anything useful, so it's reading time.

Considered starting something new to cheer myself up, but no... back to my old nemesis 😵

A tortured-soul tattoo artist becomes unmoored from reality as he diligently edits a blind man‘s pretentious commentary on a fictional(?) documentary film chronicling the terrifying experiences of a family who discover that their house is bigger on the inside than on the outside. Much, much bigger. This visionary, unclassifiable novel is a maze of footnotes, parallel frames, astounding imagery, fear, satire and psychedelic imagination. Amazing.

This is more my kind of page 😁

Danielewski finally giving my eyeballs a rest. Thank you.

#BookMail I blame on @RaeLovesToRead

I have the eBook, but the regular Paperwhite doesn't do colours, so I got the remastered full-color edition in print as well.

You ever get the feeling a book is trolling you?

🤣🤣

Personally, I like a bit of inscrutable physics in my bedtime reading. Pickles is out though.

Good Lord, I should have taken the "This is not for you..." to heart. This book is making my head hurt.

Along with use of the second person, detectives chatting up their suspects and anything by Chris Cleave, one of my biggest literary bugbears is FOOTNOTES ???

And this book is endless footnotes!

Plus every time I think I understand what's going on, there are pages of weird babbling to decipher.

Send help! ??

#bookspinbingo @TheAromaofBooks

I haven't peeked at the grid or selections yet, I promise! Got plenty of books for challenges this month... let's see if I can make some headway 😁

Well OK then...

My Pickles challenge this year will either be:

House of Leaves

The Tale of Genji

Infinite Jest

The Second Sex

Sooooo big and daunting 😱😱😱

I‘ll admit I was daunted by this book. It‘s been on my nightstand for a couple years, and I‘d randomly pick it up and thumb through it and be like, “Not ready yet.”

It‘s a demanding read, but I wouldn‘t say frustrating. The experimentation with typography is cool, and by the time it really starts going all out, you‘re invested.

Parts of it drag, especially Johnny Truant‘s rambling, but all in all, I‘m glad I finally walked down this staircase.

#Leaves 🍁 🍂 #OminousOctober 🎃👻🐈‍⬛🧡🤍🖤

#BookNerd 🤓💙📚

I imagine this will be a popular pick for #Leaves 😂

I haven‘t read this, but I am so intrigued. It has been sat on my litsy tbr for years, so maybe this is the year I buy it for myself 🤔

#OminousOctober #Scarathlon2022 #TeamMonsterMash

Went on a bookstore date and finally got a copy of House of Leaves! Excited to dive in but tbh I'm not sure if I'm clever enough for it hahah. We'll see!

Husband picked up the new James Butcher novel which he was really looking forward to.

Hopefully you‘ll be able to make sense of what I can represent though still fail to understand

This is the only book that I recall feeling #scared by as an adult. It wasn‘t a “run for your lives” sort of scared, but an unwavering sense of dread that some of the terrible things that happened in the book were going to happen to me…it‘s really a fantastic book! 😂

#scarathlon #scarathlondailyprompts #TeamMonsterMash
@StayCurious