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Better check this out sometime

House of Leaves thread. I got into it after watching a video by French YouTuber Alt236: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkZOF9Wk3Zc Alt is very good at telling stories and this video was very immersive, it’s no wonder I’ve become a little obsessed at wanting to eventually dig my way inside the real thing. So far I got my hand on a copy and I just started reading it. What are your thought on the book, did you enjoy the time spent on it ? How many lains dived into it ? Also does anybody have a PDF better than mine ? (And parts of the original version that was published on the web long before the book got printed.)

i got a copy off lainchan like 5 years ago, will post if i still have it

I stopped reading it about half way through because of one of the main characters. The general idea is that the house of leaves (the book that you as the reader reads) is an annotated version of an annotated version of an academic paper about possibly fictitious documentary. The documentary is about a house that is bigger on the inside than on the outside. A simple thought, but quite fascinating the more the story progresses. The book goes in and out of the documentary being described by the paper, and the life struggles of the guy who found the academic paper. That guy was so obnoxious that I finally stopped reading. You have to sit through him talking about his bar adventures and trying to pick up women, being in love with some "alt" tattoo artist girl, and enjoying an older women putting her thumb up his ass, among other things. That together with the sometimes too long asides that the academic paper portion makes from describing the documentary made me give up on it. The idea of "an house bigger on the inside than out" is good enough to make it worth at least trying to read it, and I think it is possible to skip most of the other parts (should you not like them) and still have an enjoyable time with the "documentary portion". However trying to read it all turned me off completely. Also some people recommend reading it in print (and not digitally), because the exact layout of the book is important to one of the 25 different meta-levels the book operates on.

>>8125 thanks for explaining, first time i read it i went in with no context and wasn't sure if it was fiction or the non fiction of a madman

Oh! Awesome! I was looking to get the physical copy of the book. Glad to stumble on a PDF form first. >Also does anybody have a PDF better than mine ? (And parts of the original version that was published on the web long before the book got printed.) is something wrong with the copy of OP? (other than lack of quality, but i never expect amazing quality from pdfs most of the time)

My ex-girlfriend kept this book when we broke up. From time to time I remember it and wonder if I should buy a 2nd copy or not. It is one of the books that don't make much sense reading on a digital format (except maybe with an e-reader with a big screen that you can easily flip around). I read it once, but I feel like a 2nd non-linear read would be interesting to try to catch some hidden messages I may have missed in the first time I read it, I remember joining the first letter of paragraphs can lead to some hidden messages, but there should be more to it. I also recommend Rabbits book by Terry Miles if you liked this book. It does not have the same chaotic layout found in HOL but it gives a similar vibe of a mix of fiction and reality that is half absurd half plausible to have happened in the real world.

>>8125 My exact experience. I just skipped the meta-meta stuff and read the sections describing the documentary as if it were the book itself (which it could have been). Have to remember this was written before the WWW as we know it brought the idea of "alt tattoo girls" and being an edgy lonely guy in his mid-20s who reads occult forums to the mass/Reddit audience, so it was genuinely kind of cool to read that in, like, '97 or whenever this was published. It's more or less cringe-inducing today. Proof that the idea itself is interesting/relevant can be found in the absurdly popular net-mythos of the Backrooms, which is essentially just running with the exact same idea (itself just an expression of the social atomization caused by networked social life)

>>8125 Also halfway through the book here. I've stopped reading it for a while because it's oppressive and genuinely unsettling despite not being outright horror. For me, the dichotomy between the Navidson Record's intrigue pulling you in and the format of the book pushing you away is one of the most interesting facets so far. The book actively tries to stop you from reading it, and Johnny's frequent run on paragraphs are absolutely intended to be skimmed and cause some degree of frustration. The metatextual elements got to me where I'm at. And the more it gets to me, the more I dread picking it back up again. Although I will.

The story of the Pekinese is definitely the highlight of the novel.

>>8122 I just skimmed through the pdf for the first time, though I initially read it straight through as an epub (which someone must have lovingly transcribed). It's a pretty fascinating book. I enjoyed the three main narrations, as they were all tied together by themes of the perception of space and of reality, each coming at it from different perspectives: a pseudo-intellectual academic's, a photojournalist's, and a psychologically disturbed young slacker's. As an amateur photographer I found the pseudo-biographical basis of Navidson on Kevin Carter the most fascinating, as we have come to understand that his most famous photograph (The Vulture and the Little Girl) isn't quite what the mythology built up around it purports to be. As with most things, when we begin to tug on the threads we are rewarded with more questions than answers.

>>8746 I'd say the backrooms is more based on the same fear behind fear of the dark - an uncomfortableness about not knowing your surroundings and therefore not being able to tell if there's any threats.Why do you think so many people decided to add "entities" to the backrooms? Because adding "known qualities" like them made it easier to pallet as it deviated from this fear.

I might have watched that video too

>>10375 oh you got the french version! I'm curious to see how it stacks up to the english version. I was afraid the translation would leave much to be desired so I got the english version. (Really the only version that was available in my local library)