House of Leaves; Better to Buy or Rent?

I really liked this book when I was in college. It's about a house that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The house grows. People use spools of string and flashlights and paint to find their way, but get lost anyway. Reading it is very much the same experience. 

Reading it blew my mind in the same way that first seeing a Mobius strip blew it. Following the text itself is sometimes like looking at a Mobius strip. Here's a sample page:

I reread this book recently, and it's not at all the book that I remembered. It's frustrating. I want to call it gimmicky, but at some point a gimmick can gain enough sophistication that it becomes art, and I'm not sure on which side of that line the book falls. 

Let's keep this in mind: I went to see Danielewski read at the Tattered Cover a few years ago, and something like 80% of the audience could be categorized as Single Male Computer Nerds Wearing Black Clothes and Pimple Cream. It's not the audience Danielewski deserves, but he did manage to bring out the Dweeb Club in full force. Yes, good point--I read the same books that the Dweeb Club reads. Let's move on.

At what point does a gimmick become art?

While rereading this book, I swung back and forth between two judgements of it; the first being that underneath all of the different typefaces and colored text and complicated page layouts, there was merely one cool idea strung out for a lot of pages. Just like the Wizard of Oz was merely an old man behind a curtain. However, at other times, the book really was amazing, for several reasons, and I wanted to believe it was more than pyrotechnics and projections designed to draw attention away from the curtain behind which the faux wizard hid.

The biggest problem with calling the novel gimmicky is that each of my frustrations with the book was echoed in the text itself. For example, if I found a passage to be a tad maudlin, then a fabricated source would be footnoted giving the same opinion and several possible explanations for the sentimentality. This is one of the many ways that reading Danielewski's text is like exploring Navidson's house, and why it's a book I enjoy thinking about more than I enjoy reading. Does that mean that Danielewski's has succeeded?

There are a lot of shifting walls in House of Leaves, and I don't mean to suggest that readers will use these walls to bang their heads against. Reading the book is very much like exploring the House, and Danielewski had to write really to make that happen. Perhaps the best compliment that I can give is that there aren't many books I read ten years ago that I would care to read again.

This would be a great book to read in the winter, when it gets dark early and you want to sit in your living room with a cup of tea and remember why you never go down in your crawlspace.

Some tips for exploring Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.
1. For goodness' sake, don't take your rifle into a haunted house.
2. Use the buddy system.
3. Somewhere near the book you will find a pile of dust that used to be your bookmark. Don't panic.
4. Carry your Dweeb Club card at all times, I guess.
5. You can watch the author dance in leather pants in a video on YouTube.