I picked up the book House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski as part of the Literary Exploration book club (check out my review) and while it is a weird postmodern novel, I think it is art more than literature. So I wanted to talk about my thoughts on this book as art. First of all Postmodern is a weird concept that I don’t fully understand; surrealism makes more sense to me. So I wasn’t really sure what I was getting myself into.
The book starts off like a normal book; in the sense that it’s formatted normally and you just read down the page. But then it turns into something weird. Different fonts, different coloured writing, upside down and even backwards writing spread out all over the page. It’s at this point where you have no idea how to read it.
Just looking over the book before I even started reading it, I got the sense that this was insanity written on the page, with the multiple voices represented in different typesets. But there is more on the page. The word house is represented in a blue font; even haus and maison show up in blue as well. This was a weird experience for me in the book, my brain wanted to tell me it was black writing so sometimes my eyes played tricks on me with that one word.
Mark Z. Danielewski’s sister, Anne Danielewski, known professionally as Poe wrote an album called Haunted which is meant to accompany this book. While I didn’t read the book while listening to the album, it gives this whole experience a multimedia experience. It is an interesting experience reading excerpts and hearing songs with similar themes. I believe they both toured together for a book tour.
As a piece of literature, I raged, but if I look at this book as art, there really is something unique about this book. Apart from making me pretentious for reading it and having it on my book shelf, this book has a very strong visual component to it. It is what I respect the most from this book. What do others think of this book? Literature or Art?
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The 2012 Man Booker long list was announced today. Here is what the judges thought were the best books of the past year;
The Ned Kelly Awards are closely associated with the Melbourne Writers Festival and recognises Crime fiction within Australian Literature. The 2012 long list was recently announced.
I wanted to do an overview of my first subject at university but I’m finding that very hard to do. The whole thing was on the concept of Truth and trying to understand how to think of things critically and determine what truth really is. My last post on the encyclopaedia was also a result of this subject; it was actually one of my assignments. The basic concept of the subject was trying to get the students to work out if Truth is subjective or objective, relative or absolute.
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As I try to explore books both old and new, a best of 2012 list is difficult. Do I do a list of the best books released in 2012 or just pick from the books that I’ve read in 2012? I took some time to think about what I wanted to do and I decided to would be best to give my top five books I would recommend to read based on the books I’ve read this year. So here they are;
