For Further Reading

[heartbreak]

I thought we might start a discussion thread on these books. I know Borges has been discussed in depth, so if anyone gets bored and wants to link up those threads here that would be great.

Mark Amerika, The Kafka Chronicles
J.G. Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths; Selected Short Stories and Other Writings
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch
e.e. cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962
Mark Z. Danielewski, The Whalestoe Letters
Dante, The Inferno
Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Tom Phillip, A Humument
Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of the of Usher
Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[heartbreak]

Last night I started reading The Haunting of Hill . Only a few pages in but I can already see a couple oddities. On page one it says that Hill has stood for eighty years. Which brings to my mind Zampano and his cats. Also, four people are the central characters that go to stay in Hill . Unrelated to of Leaves, I see where King ripped off a few ideas for Rose Red, so far namely the two sisters and how their house was pelted by rocks.

From the list I've read Cryptonomicon, which was an excellent book, Zero, which I need to read again, some of Finnegan's Wake, a chunk of Infinite Jest, and most of Labyrinths.

I wonder if Atrocity Exhibition has anything to do with the Atrocity in of Leaves.

[Nash]

I wonder if Atrocity Exhibition has anything to do with the Atrocity in of Leaves.

Not really. HOL is more connected with "War Fever".

[Ellimist]

I really want to say something about The Haunting of Hill , but I cannot until you finish it.

Anyway, for those who are completely confused by this thread... see this:

http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/1972/leaves1kq0.jpg or here.

Having said that, Great Thread!

Also, I am going to use this post to keep track, struck means I have read it, * means in possession, but unread:

Mark Amerika, The Kafka Chronicles
J.G. Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths; Selected Short Stories and Other Writings
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
*Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch
e.e. cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962
Mark Z. Danielewski, The Whalestoe Letters
Dante, The Inferno
Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill
*James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Tom Phillips, A Humument
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the of Usher
Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[heartbreak]

Having said that, Great Thread!

Wasn't it your idea?

[heartbreak]

Not really. HOL is more connected with "War Fever".

Perhaps, I shall read both then.

[Nash]

Perhaps, I shall read both then.

I prefered "War Fever". "Atrocity exhibition" is a kind of abstruse prefiguration of "Crash" and is far more violent.

[heartbreak]

I have not read Crash, but I have seen the movie. Extremely weird.

Note: This is not the 2004 Crash, but one that was released in 1996 with James Spader. Completely unrelated movies.

[Ellimist]

Wasn't it your idea?

Oh, yeah.

[heartbreak]

I just got back from raiding the KSU library. I now have all but four of the books on the list. How befitting.

[heartbreak]

The Haunting of Hill (Reading in progress)

Bloody hell! They are all meeting at the house on June 21!!!

[Ellimist]

Great fun.

[Ellimist]

Cryptonomicon, p. 229 (small paperback)

Many of the whiteboards are, in turn, covered with cryptical incantations, written in primary colors. Some of them are enclosed in irregular borders and labeled DO NOT ERASE! or simply DNE or NO! ... there is a grocery list, a half-erased fragment of a flowchart, a fax number in Russia, a couple of dotted quads - Internet addresses - and a few words in German...

[Lux]

Last night I started reading The Haunting of Hill . Only a few pages in but I can already see a couple oddities. On page one it says that Hill has stood for eighty years. Which brings to my mind Zampano and his cats. Also, four people are the central characters that go to stay in Hill . Unrelated to of Leaves, I see where King ripped off a few ideas for Rose Red, so far namely the two sisters and how their was pelted by rocks.

From the list I've read Cryptonomicon, which was an excellent book, Zero, which I need to read again, some of Finnegan's Wake, a chunk of Infinite Jest, and most of Labyrinths.

I wonder if Atrocity Exhibition has anything to do with the Atrocity in of Leaves.

I'm about to start reading that in a few days,
it's good, yes?

[heartbreak]

The Haunting of Hill is good so far.

Cryptonomicon and Zero were both excellent, as well as what I've read of Labyrinths and Infinite Jest.

Finnegan's Wake is difficult.

And I have not read any of the Atrocity Exhibition.

Wasn't really sure which book you were referring to, so I hope this is helpful.

[Lux]

Oh - sorry, haha

Yeah i meant hill house :)


I was looking for a "book" called " -And he built a crooked house "
when a friend told me it's nothing more than a few pages long. That left me pretty damn disappointed, I found a strong connection with HOL when I read about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=And_H..._Crooked_House

[heartbreak]

Just a head's up, any url with the word house in them gets fucked up do to the auto blue.

I have not read that story, but I do like Heinlein. Thanks for the recommendation.

[heartbreak]

I've just remembered to mention, Edward Tufte teaches at Yale.

[marsjams13]

Cryptonomicon, p. 229 (small paperback)

Do Not Erase? Nice Find!

The Haunting of Hill is good so far.

Yeah, i really enjoyed that book, but i haven't read it since reading HoL, so i should probably revisit it.

[Ellimist]

I love the explanation for why the house messes with your mind. It's fantastic.

[heartbreak]

I love the explanation for why the messes with your mind. It's fantastic.

I can't quite recall how they explained in the book. It's sort of been washed out by a sea of reading for classes.

I kind of got the impression that everything was responding to Elanor and her own slow slip into insanity or that Elanor was creating the whole thing.

I just finished The Fall Of The Of Usher last night. A creepy little story about twins.

[Ellimist]

My favorite part:

This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

[heartbreak]

Ah yes, now I remember that lovely passage. Sounds like a good friend of ours. *nods*

[heartbreak]

I made it through the first story in Hopscotch and have seen some correlations, there was a passage on keys and a mention of Ygdrasil. As well as people in an insane asylum all having to wear pink pajamas. Could be inspiration for the purple.

Then there was an odd little thing about how the main character much preferred it when you could just open to page 96 of a book and talk directly with the author. Don't know if this last thing has anything to do with of Leaves but was still intriguing.

I'm gonna read some other stuff from the list and then go back and read the other story that hopscotches through the book.

Currently reading At The Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft.

[Ellimist]

I just checked this out from the library, started it a bit...

Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

It is basically an explanation of how graphs work with some examples and deeper insights into it... kinda neat so far.

[fearful_syzygy]

Ell, you put the "eek" in "Geek".

[heartbreak]

I just checked this out from the library, started it a bit...

Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

It is basically an explanation of how graphs work with some examples and deeper insights into it... kinda neat so far.

Yeah, its pretty cool. I've read a few pages of it. Will get around to the rest of it eventually.

[On a Map of Swirling Cord]

There are some interestingly similar qualities between this book and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Especially in regards to the narrator retelling another's story and having travelled so much at sea. From the story told to the two women in black cowboy hats through the chronicles of traveling abroad on ships, HoL echoes Conrad's life and novel as he was himself a sea-farer and Eastern European, to boot. The birds of paradise, the journey into a dark and forbidding land, the personalities...all there in Heart of Darkness. What's more, the film adaptation of the story is not set in the Congo but Vietnam. You may have heard of it: Apocolyse Now. Complete with Satisfaction by the Stone. (fearful will puke about that one)

If you like the absurd and/or would like a good reference book on punctuation you might like Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The New Well-Tempered Sentence.

[Ellimist]

On a Map of Swirling Cord...

This is not a book suggestions thread. This is about the books that Pantheon suggested. There are other threads for your suggestions.

Books like of Leaves

Books related to strange s

Authors that Danielewski fans might like

[Ellimist]

A note now about the physical properties of space, as perceived by human beings imprisoned within bodies of limited physical capabilities. I have long noticed that space seems to be more compressed, more involuted, somehow psychically LARGER in some places than others. Covering a distance of three or four miles in the totally open scrublands of central Washington State is a simple matter, and takes less than an hour on foot, and only a few minutes if you have some kind of vehicle. Covering the same distance in Manhattan takes much longer. It’s not just that the space in Manhattan is more physically obstructed (though it definitely is) but that there is some kind of psychological impact that alters the way you perceive and experience distance. You cannot see as far, and what you do see is so full of people, buildings, goods, vehicles, and other stuff that it takes your brain some amount of effort to sort through, to process. Even if you had some kind of magic carpet that would glide past all of the physical obstructions the distance would seem much longer, and would take longer to cover, simply because your mind would have to deal with more stuff.