Books

Finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski late last week, then read a 70s crime/heist novel called Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake over the weekend. Now I'm reading Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers.

House of Leaves was a horror novel that was also a very weird parody of academic writing. I may come back and read it again in the future and it did make me want to delve further into ergodic literature - literature that requires non-trivial effort just to read (a couple other examples I'm aware of are Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall). On the horror front, to me, it wasn't particularly scary at all. It was extremely metatextual and made me frequently consider what was actually real inside the books universe - there are multiple layers to the narrative and there is the legitimate possibility that even within the book's universe, almost everything in the book is fake. I think it even goes so far as to essentially make the book a metaphor for itself and makes the reader a character or entity within the book.

Hot Rocks was a much simpler book to read. It really felt almost like reading a movie. A very needed reprieve after House of Leaves. It is a pretty funny story - basically a group of thieves are hired to steal an emerald and end up having to pull off a multitude of different capers due to bad luck leaving them without the rock each time.