No.14371
House of Leaves was a book i remembered hearing about a lot from Silent Hill fans back in the early 2000's. They described it as the ultimate note taking mystery. A puzzle you needed to deep dive into and spend years unravelling. I always meant to get around to it but only recently did and boy was this an oversold product.
The 'puzzle' is that its a book about a guy finding a dead mans unpublished novel about a movie that doesnt exist and the junkie burnouts notes as he tries to put it together. Somehow this drives him insane though i think the point was meant to be that like his mother he was suffering an illness already.
The big let down however wasnt the story which was a fine enough piece of meta fiction but the sheer childish nature of the 'hardest book you will ever read' i was sold on. Sometimes you have to read a page in a mirror. Or turn it upside down. Sometimes the amount of text on a page gets smaller and smaller as the formatting squeezes it into a smaller box of broken words to convey the feeling of the characters in a shrinking hallway. Yeah i get the symbolism here. That doesnt make it a puzzle though.
I finished it in about 4 days of casual reading and left it with a resounding 'okay, that was it' but i see hipsters gushing about it on youtube who seem like they desperately want to be 'part of the smart kids club' about this and i feel like its a case of it since many say they took over 8 years to read it.
I feel like it was probably a lot more amazing at the time it came out with all the experiments in media at the time but compared to a game like Silent Hill 2 or a multimedia project like This House has People in it the whole thing came off as outdated and bland.
Am i crazy or is this just some hipster badge of honour shit at this point?
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No.14424
sounds so fucking bad and gay, im sorry you endured it anon
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No.14440
>>14371
>Sometimes you have to read a page in a mirror. Or turn it upside down.
Maybe if you're a brainlet.
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No.14460
no competition for this one
ta da Infinite Jest
worth reading all the way through to appreciate what an utter waste of time writing it was in the first place, unless it was produced by a machine linked to a medical thesaurus
oh … wait …
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No.14467
>>14460
i'm saddened to hear that. people are always trying to get me to read DFW and I kinda want to, but never have.
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No.14469
>>14460
That's a memebook just like pic related and written in same vein. You can simultaneously crown yourself as intellectual for having read it, status signal to lesser folks who haven't read it just by namedrop, and gain ability of laughing at it with other insiders who know what absolute garbage it actually is after a few drinks, thus marking you as one of them, ironically raising your status as only people who want to be high status and thus end up crawling higher in society than averages bother after page 1.
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No.14545
This is a newer meme book. It's like a Right Wing Death Squad Pepe the Frog executing an anime Tumblr slut in book form.
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No.14688
I've read it and it feels like the Blair Witch of books. At the time it must have been new and fresh. Today its an outdated version of memeshit made on the cheap. Like a precursor of viral marketing and ARG's but so simple and innocent that it feels antiquated.
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No.14690
>>14460
I didn't even get 100 pages in and I quit this twice.
I've since nursed a mild disgust and hatred for DFW and I am grateful that I got as familiar with him as I did (also read oblivion and a few others) because it enables me to enjoy the delicious takedowns that his ex girlfriends and Bret Easton Ellis dish out every few years.
His ex GF Karr is shit talking him on twitter in jsut a few months ago as part of the MeToo movement, giving out dirt on his private behavior. I love it!
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No.14705
>>14469
Reading translations
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No.14937
>>14371
Most overrated? I don't know that I'd go that far. Though I didn't really have the perception of House of Leaves being some kind of ultimate note taking mystery book. Indeed, the preconception I went into it with was actually quite different - that it was a critique of contemporary academic citation and research methodology.
*shrug*
I liked it, but I read it quite a while ago, and I've read a great deal more of horror in the meanwhile. Perhaps my remembrance is rose tinted.
Still, I remember liking it. I'd still recommend it to someone who was looking for 'weird house horror' or for someone who is looking for a bizarre take on modern horror.
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No.14962
>>14545
I'm going to say it looks like reactionary hipster trash, but I have a copy on its way to me.
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No.15228
I will get shit for that, but well here we go. The Prince I found to be hyped way more then it is worth reading. Maybe at his time this was ground breaking, but well. Anyone following politics should pick most of what is written in the book up automatically.
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No.15229
>>15228
>Maybe at his time this was ground breaking
Easy there, Sherlock, don't solve mysteries that fast
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No.15233
>>15228
Totally agree. I have been working my way through classics this past year and was fairly interested.. was pretty let down. I didn't really learn anything I didn't already know either. Overall a lot of it seemed to apply only to his time period as well.
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No.15234
Reading Crime and Punishment ignited a deep love for classic novels, and easily is one of my favorite three books now.
Decided to take a spin with pic related for my second journey into a Dostoevsky full length (read the double, winter nights, and a few others I cannot name by memory) and a few months later I am still currently slogging through it. Part I was decent, but now starting Part IV it is like the story resets itself every time and characters seem to be brought into the story mindlessly and just give you more to keep track of. Perhaps I am feeble-minded but I created an entire character map to identify and follow along with the characters two to four names they are called by… I never have before but I also find myself looking up chapter summaries to recap before I start reading again just to know where the plot has been going as it seems like the entire value of the book could be obtained from reading the seemingly randomly brought up rants (although they are usually fairly profound/decent rants) that Dosteovsky will get into every few chapters. The plot should be shortened to 100 or less pages, and he should have taken these rants and made short stories out of them instead of a work with seemingly no real direction.
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No.16247
>>14467
its memed as the most patrician book you can read, so people read it and think its complete shit. its pretty god, but no masterpiece so people feel betrayed and post endlessly about what a bad time they had.
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No.16253
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No.16263
>>15234
The Idiot was great. Don't bother trying to keep track of all the characters; most of them are unimportant. You may as well be laser focusing on every redshirt character in Star Trek TOS; they're mostly just there to fill in the background. All you really need to keep in mind is Muishkin, Nastasia Filipovna, Rogojin, and Aglaya Ivanovna. Ippolit gives an interesting rant that provides some foreshadowing, but other than that there's really no point in the book where anyone other than the main four becomes important.
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