Rating: 
Summary: promising plot hijacked by sorry concept.
Review: -if you have time to read this review (not the book), I recommend it. It will save you money, and... and please remember that I am trying to be fair... Summary: a self-obsessed substance abuser (Johnny) from LA finds a manuscript that a recently deceased old man left behind, almost finished. It tells of a documentary film about a house that gets bigger inside and swallows people up. Fair enough. Johnny gets absorbed in the book and lets his life fall apart. The book is 'complsively' filled with footnotes to such an extent that most of the time we are reading ficticious footnotes about fictitious references to the ficticious film, and journal-entry footnotes describing johnny's screwed-up fictitious life in LA. Sound interesting? It is. For about the first twenty pages. Groan... the author has tried to create a fiction around the book, to create a buzz, with fictions such as: - it was distributed as a stack of loose typewritten pages,
- people studied it, people read it.
- people liked it. for many that may be enough to make them think it IS good. not for those who never forget that they could be reading something better. Nevertheless, I always give an author a chance to change my mind, and I read it through. I even enjoyed bits. Especially that house theme. But... before I get too in too deep like the author himself and his characters, allow me to mention that the book binding is inadequate and it WILL be reduced to a stack of loose leaves in a week. Is this by design? Maybe. Or maybe because the book which could have been good at 200 pages, was filled out to over 700 pages, with lists of made up names, blank pages, x's and o's, anything to give it the illusion of disorder, with the following results: a. the interesting plot inside, which at least could be made into an interesting movie, is buried by the book's lack of economy or taste. The novel's finer points are reduced to a sad footnote to poor craftmanship. it's attempts to exhalt itself seem feeble - "this book will change your life." sorry, but it won't. phony references are clever up to a point. till they get too boring, lists of names and nonsense. should the excessive and bizarre be mistaken for an indication of genius? I don't think so. the often-absent narrator, johnny truant, loves the fact that he is a twisted information dumpster. but in his tedious waste of paper we find just what we might expect in a dumpster.
really, garbage is called garbage (and not art) for a reason. b. like a fortune cookie fortune in a dumpster, there are some fine sentiments expressed in the book, but it's too much to ask the reader to sift through and rinse it off, after neither author or editor could be bothered to do it. for all his attempts to stretch the medium of the printed word, he only goes to show how powerful the print medium IS. powerful enough to regurgitate his attempts to embelish it with wasted space and ficticious appendices. c. appendices - for all the babble about the power of the manipulated image, all there are in the appendices are a single page of unintriguing photos of some home exteriors and some grainy pictures of some 'spooky' crap modeled upon the opening sequence of the movie, 'seven'. seeing that he had his character snapping pictures at an insane rate, he could have at least pretended to include some and created a sense of authenticity. but what he ends up with is about as realistic as the blair witch project, which the behavior of his characters somehow resembles. summary: for all the talk of "space", this book lacks any. the numerous empty pages with single words or sentances say one thing: !!This book is an environmental disaster!! thanks for managing a book that uses up twice the paper as neccesary. trying to look unedited is no excuse for being poorly edited. promising plot hijacked by sorry concept.
publisher should be charged for negligence. Do the earth a favor. wait for the movie.
Rating: 
Summary: If you don't like thinking, you won't like this book
Review: It's important to note that at the time of this writing I am only halfway through the book, but utterly enthralled.
Fans of e.e. cummings will rejoice at the fantastic wordplay and utter avoidance of traditional structuring to be found in this novel? word-picture? primitive cuneiform using modern english? The story follows a young, somewhat troubled man who discovers one of his neighbors has been laboring over a volume dissembling a fictional(?) documentary called "the Navidson Record", named for the photojournalist Will Navidson, who with his wife Karen and their two children move into an unassuming, rather charming house on Ash Street.
What follows is three, possibly four different stories all occuring in the same space. Through voluminous footnotes that often exceed the length of the chapters it annotates, we see more of the young man, (whose name I can't recall at the moment), Zampano, the original writer of the treatise on the documentary, and Will and Karen Navidson's troubling encounter with the uncanny, the ultimately unknowable.
The house is built over what is repeatedly referred to as "the Labyrinth", and ultimately that is what the book symbolically represents, using the words on the page to wrap and warp and force the reader to navigate, as it's characters do, through its dark and twisting pathways.
Cerebral and complex and amazingly disturbing in the most unexpected ways, this is a book that creeps up on you, wondering at times "why am I bothering with this meandering narrative written by apparently extremely disturbed individuals?" before sucking you back in with a seemingly completely unrelated tangent that tells more about the story then the entire "record" combined.
As I said in the subject line, if you don't like thinking, or enjoy books with more substance and variance then anything on the market today, don't bother. But if you want a verbal ride through the human mind, then read it.
Read it now.
Rating:
Summary: Read me now
Review: This is one of my favorite books. It's one that I can reread and always find new things. It's one of the most complex and unique books. I can't even describe it. But buy it, and read it...and invest in a good tape measure.
Rating:
Summary: Break the Codes!
Review: What I enjoyed most about this book is it's ablility to offer a challenge. It is not only two stories, it is hundreds. Wound among the metaphors and myth are codes for the reader to find and break. Careful calculation and patience will make this the most interactive novel you have ever read, and re-read.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing read
Review: I won't rehash what others have written in other reviews about the content of this book - if you wish to read a summary of the plot then go through some of the other reviwers' comments. Yes, this book is clever, yes it it is large in its scope. But to what end? I kept waiting for a purpose to the whole Navidson Report (the fictional report that is discovered) to appear - and was disappointed. Endless footnotes - but again - to what end? Not really worth the effort it took to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Strange and unusual
Review: House of Leaves is not light reading. That's one fact you should be aware of before you pick it up. It's not even heavy reading; it's in a class of it's own. The story as best it can be described, is a mix of two stories at once that somehow connect to each other. The first is of Johnny Truant and Zampano, the second of The Navidson family and their experience in the house they live which ultimately becomes a series of home tapings of the events later called The Navidson Record. The book is filled with hundreds of footnotes, strange sentence structure, omissions, two appendixes, a set of letters from Johnny Truant's mother to him during her stay in a mental institution called The Three Attic Whalestoe Letters (now a seperate book in their own right), collages, photos, poems and other odd bits and pieces; an editors worst nightmare. But don't let that detour you; if your willing to sit down and read something to challenge your mind, and maybe even scare you (in the sense of chilling suspense rather than horror), then this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: I'm sure it would be great if I knew where to keep focus
Review: When I listened to Poe's CD "Haunted" I heard this talk about a book her brother had written called "House of Leaves" and that if I "reeeally" wanted to get the concept of the CD, my best bet was to read the book. From that moment up until I finally bought the book (I found a first edition autographed for $70 and some odd cents on e-bay), I figured it would be worth the time and money. I couldn't have been more wrong than Donny Osmond at a strip club.
Needless to say, this book was very overrated and boring. This book reminds me of the quiet so-called "artsy" student in the back of your literature class, and said complex sentences with large words just so they could make themselves feel like they made a point that didn't even exist. The book itself is choppy and second rate as far as writing elemens go. Am I saying that it is complete trash? No. I might have taken the book out of context. Hell, I might not have even read the book the way it should have been read. Zampano's literature and Johnny Truant's footnotes, autobiography, and sexual escapades just don't belong in the same "novel". And since Mr. Danielewski himself couldn't stay on task, I (and apparently others who read this book) felt as though this was a complete waste of time and money. Reading Zampano's story then immediately cutting to Johnny Truant's passages made it hard for me to answer questions like, "who did what?", "who said what?", and "does this have ANY signifigance to what happens later on in the story?" . I can't even figure out why this book was so popular. I'm not going to recommend this book to anyone because I'm not sure WHO I should recommend it to.
Rating:
Summary: Mind-Bending
Review: Let me first start by saying that you don't initially read House of Leaves - you experience it. Pick a copy of it at your local library or bookstore and thumb through it. Then you will understand. It is likely that you have never read anything like the way this novel is constructed and that you likely have never "experienced" a literary style like Mark Danielewski's. Like it or hate it (there is no middle ground) you will find yourself drawn into discussions/debates with anyone you find who has also read and experienced this book. The storyline unfolds when the protagonist Johnny Truant discovers notes to manuscript belonging to a deceased, blind tenant in an apartment. As he begins to put the notes together the uncompleted manuscript begins to tell a seemingly surreal story of a photojournalist who moves into a house that slowly begins to manifest supernatural characteristics. Then a second story develops within the book's footnotes (and there are many, many footnotes) which begins to describe the changes happening to Johnny Truant as he becomes obsessed with the manuscript. House of Leaves is not a easy read but will highly reward those with the perseverance to stick it out.
Rating:
Summary: Fun
Review: Its a shame to see such intelligent people so readily discredit themselves by declaring that this book is plotless or pretentious. Its a shame to see people uncomfortable that they might enjoy the same thing as the trendiest bohemian hipster at NYU. Of course, as soon as a book reaches that type of individual, it becomes the "really intellectual" reader's responsibility to dismiss it as postmodern flash. Now...surely not everyone is going to enjoy reading this book. And I'll admit that when you strip away all the things that make this book unique, you are left, essentially, with two somewhat derivative tales. But that can't feasibly be done until you've experienced the book. The book is thrilling, intriguing, funny, sad, and overwhelmingly strange. But above all, it's fun to read. So pick this book up and let it absorb you...you'll find it a rewarding experience. That is unless, of course, you can't stand the fact that so many people have now read it, and that it is to the point of underground trend. If that bothers your poor soul, then go find something deeper in the recesses of modern art, or you can just resort to the classics. No one can criticize or label you for reading some Mark Twain, or Hemingway.
Rating:
Summary: Seductive despite the details
Review: I was a little confused by the sequence of events as I started this novel, but that was quickly over and I grew to really love the book. The characters are well developed and the story is fascinating. Danielewski did delve a little too much into details about the technicality of some aspects involved in the plot of the novel, though, but I'd have to agree that even these elongated and boring bits added positively to the novel. I was even a little spooked by this novel and, at times, saddened by its content. Not to mention this book as obscured text on the page which definitely draws attention to it in a line-up. The ending was a bit abrupt and I felt Danielewski was just trying to end everything without having a reason to. Great book, though.
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