I was planning on double majoring in English and History. Then in the winter quarter, I got back from a trip from the Middle East and an hour after leaving the airport found myself sitting in one of the core introduction courses for English. The professor, who had too much energy for my jet-lagged haze, went deep and enthusiastically about transportation in "A Tale of Two Cities." Which I did not understand.
This kind of inadaptability to academia made me become an English minor in an instant. It's the same kind of inadaptability that lets me appreciate House of Leaves so much more. I hate citations too (I'm a law student and scored 50% on them, so maybe that's a sore point to my lack of diligence though). I found it both fascinating and incredulous how people try to dredge so much meaning and analysis (from their lens) into something. But it's what we want to do naturally, with Freudian, critical theory, and so on. But I don't think I was a good English student since a lot of the time I did not know what I was writing about. :000
Someone on the internet called HoL an "essay about writing books." Yes, in the physical- Zamano had lots of ideas behind creating materials- and also in the responsive- its fans remain debating the last page, for example, 23 years after release. Even if it was "not for you."
I'm not sure what to make of the "meaning" of the book so far. So many layers, of mythology, and pop culture embedded. I really enjoyed it even with the deliberate frusrations. Johnny's story was the most interesting part for me but also the most frustrating!

Worth a read just for the mindfuck/typography experiment.

Muita firula pra pouca história.

8/10

A postmodern haunted house story, whose motivating concept is a house larger on the inside than the outside. The book is an ambitious work of creativity, labyrinths, and literary theory. The various puzzles and codes beg the reader to actively participate in deciphering the text, leaving them to take notes, hold it up to a mirror, and follow circular footnotes. The layered levels of narration can make certain parts of the book difficult to assess. For example, the running commentary by Johnny Truant seems a bit overwritten at times - Johnny is on the one hand not particularly well read and consistently makes mistakes such as writing "alot" rather than "a lot," but at other times writes esoteric poetry with highly obscure vocabulary. But is Johnny even supposed to be real or is he a literary device created by another narrorator (coded references to Zampano in Johnny's mother's letters suggest the latter (and of course all the narrators are literary devices of MZD))? So then can we say some parts are overwritten or are those intentionally done so for the sake of narratological tension? The book resists any such resolution - reminding one a bit of Nabokov or Borges, though still well shy of these masters' elegance. Over all the book is fun, creative, and at moments truly beautiful. Some stylistic quibbles aside, I'd recommend it to anyone looking something different and that enjoys trying to unravel all the ciphers that I have only begun to unpack (there is a big online forum of people doing the same). While it's not Shakespeare, Joyce's quote on those seeking secrets in the bard's work feels appropriate: "Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance." MZD has created a playful labyrinth for literary obsessives well worth exploring.