so the new mark z. danielewski

This book is amazing and I thought House of Leaves was a pile of shit fwiw.

heh. i liked house of leaves, mostly for the effective creepiness it managed to evoke at times (the "something is right behind you" bit in the intro worked so well that i got hooked).

this, on the other hand, i attempted and found completely unreadable.

I'm trying to read it less as a novel and more as a pair of parallel poems. It's much more engaging that way than it was when I was waiting on the coherence to start.

poems, if anything, should be more concise than books.

wha

Well, not necessarily, no.

unless you're homer??

I have been thinking about this a lot, actually! Last week I was travelling around the states and wondering what an American history of America would look like? And thinking it might happen in parallel rather than in series, would be in a sense only revolutions - then I remembered this book! I should probably re-read it.

I have never thought this dude was really a writer but then again I am a huge snob

I liked House of leaves for its ideas, exuberance and appealing horror/fantasy aspects -- this in spite of the borderline terrible prose style. I'll sometimes suffer bad prose if there's something interesting underneath it.

But I'm not willing to do the same when it comes to poetry. I will not read shitty poetry for any reason. And that's exactly what Only Revolutions is -- straight-up shitty poetry. A lot of it. All the value-added conceptual/design frippery only makes it that much more depressing.

Really do love House of Leaves, though. Can't/won't defend it, but I've read it cover to cover at least three times and I'm still not through.

i've never heard of any of this shit... is it good

Hard to call House of Leaves good. But it's endlessly fascinating, and I've had a great time wrestling with it on and off over the past half-decade. Basically, it's a postmodern/horror mystery novel about a house that's bigger on the inside than the outside. Among LOTS of other things. Several levels of dubious authorship, absurdly labyrinthine structure, historical/literary gamesmanship til the cows come home, puzzles, acrostics, tricky page layout, and so on and more and more and more. It's an overdose in every conceivable sense, pretentious as hell, resolutely insoluble, and kind of embarassing, but it moves at a good clip, and some of the ideas are hard to shake, once they get their teeth in you. As prose, it can get awfully clunky, and nothing really rings true (characters, plot, setting -- none of it), but if you're willing to put those concerns aside, it's dazzling, maddening, and just plain great. One of my favorite books, though it's something of a guilty pleasure.

House of Leaves is a great haunted house tale! But I don't read a lot of horror stuff so my tastes maybe aren't as developed in that direction. The sendups of 80s/90s academic prose are fun the first time through, totally skim/skippable on reread though. The less said about "grungey tales of increasingly-crazy-dude-in-LA," the better.

That's a pretty good breakdown of what works/doesn't work in HoL (with a triple-bold emphasis added to that last sentence). There's a fourth, puzzle-solving level, though, and it's arguably more important to the book's success or failure than the three threads you mention.

Xanther shifts in her seat

I felt a wave of nostalgia for being so immersed & enjoying HoL back like ~15 (?) yrs ago that I purchased this new one --- read like the first 100 pages and it strikes me as like the worst thing ive ever read

sorta don't even want it in my house, might just leave it in a public place somewhere

bit unfair to judge it without reading all 27 volumes

I know right

i'm glad this guy's not a big deal anymore though i do every couple years take a hankering to reread HoL

Main characters:
Xanther Ibrahim: a twelve-year old girl in Los Angeles with an idiosyncratic personality whose parents decide a pet may bring her out of her shell.
Luther Perez: a gang member in Los Angeles going through his initiation.
Anwar Ibrahim: Xanther's adoptive father and video game designer.
JingJing: a man in Singapore who assists Tian Li, a healing woman.
Astair Ibrahim: Xanther's mother and a therapist.
Cas: a computer scientist in Marfa, Texas in possession of an orb, a mysterious artifact.
Özgür "Oz" Talat: a Los Angeles detective in the gang unit.
Shnorkh Zildjian: A taxi driver in Los Angeles.
Isandòrno: An existentialist in El Tajín, Mexico.

I bought Vol 1, will start it on Jan 1st and report back

Cas: a computer scientist in Marfa, Texas in possession of an orb, a mysterious artifact.
Özgür "Oz" Talat: a Los Angeles detective in the gang unit.
Shnorkh Zildjian: A taxi driver in Los Angeles.
Isandòrno: An existentialist in El Tajín, Mexico.

yeah good luck w that i guess

i gave up on vol 1 around 100 pages in.

opening sci-fi pages are abstruse, interesting
little girl chapters have nothing happening
the first latin chapter is blatantly an exercise in vernacular dialog
that's where i gave up

you guys need more patience

Pre-order now