Hi, y'all. I hope everyone has finished House of Leaves -- I know it was a big one. It took me fifteen days, and I took copious notes.

There's obviously quite a bit to talk about regarding this book, so while I plan to pose some questions below, don't feel like you have to stick to answering them. I'm sure there's tons and tons of stuff I haven't thought of, so please feel free to make random comments and ask questions. That said, here are some questions I jotted down while reading. I'll list page numbers where possible.

1. We all know the book is multilayered in terms of narrators -- there's the movie, and Zampano's book about it, and Johnny's edition of Z's book, and Ed (as I like to think of the editors that occasionally comment), and then the finished product that we each held in our hands while reading. It's not always easy to tell what layer a given part of the book corresponds to. For example, the jacket flap (in my copy) says that the book was originally released on the Internet. Is that "true" in in our (your and my) layer of reality, or is it just another layer of fiction? What about at the bottom of the copyright page where different editions are described -- full-color, two-color, etc.? Are these "real" in our reality? What about the editorial reviews on the first page of the book?

2. The book has some supremely boring sections, most notably the pages-long treatise on the mythological and scientific aspects of the echo. What's the point of these? Did Zampano/Johnny/Danielewski really find this interesting, or was he trying to bore us, or was he making a statement about academic writing, or...?

3. What made those claw marks on Zampano's floor anyway? (xvii)

4. How unreliable is Johnny? We know he lies several times - he admits, for example, that he just made up an entire section about living with a pediatrician and drinking carrot juice, etc. His footnotes are often false as well -- as early as page xx, he's wrong about the existence of the book The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft (it's real). On page 16, he admits he added a word to Zampano's narrative so it would better parallel his (Johnny's) life -- or so it would give him the opportunity to tell a story, in which he admits from the beginning he told a giant lie.

5. How much should we trust Ed, the ultimate level of narration? Is he just Danielewski, or someone else?

6. Did anyone find an instance in which "house" is not in blue? (I did not.)

7. What do we really know about Zampano? All that even Johnny knows about him is that he wrote The Navidson Record and that he took a walk every evening with some stray cats hanging around. We don't even know if he was actually blind, nor how he died. We do have some evidence that volunteers read to him a lot, so he at least convinced them that he was blind, and some of them say he asked them to help fabricate lists of citations for The Navidson Record.

8. What did you think of the crazy labyrinthine text mirroring the action in the house? I have to say that I loved it, and that it might be more than it seems to be. For example, I certainly didn't bother to read all of the long, long lists of authors or house-facets, because they seemed like dead ends....and then I realized that there were lots of unexplored hallways and rooms in the actual house, too, because Navidson and the rest of the bunch didn't have time to check out every one. Then I realized that "dead end" itself is a spatial metaphor that I was using to describe literature that describes space both in words and on paper. Then I got lost in a tangle of postmodernism....and "lost" is a spatial reference too...don't worry, I'm stopping here, but you get the point.

9. What other books have you read that are like this one? For me, the answer is simple: none. I'm not generally a reader of experimental literature, and I haven't even read any of David Foster Wallace's fiction, although I love his essays.

10. So like I said earlier, there are four or five layers of narration. They all remain pretty traditionally separate throughout the whole novel, until near the end when the book Navidson is frantically reading with his last few matches is called House of Leaves. All of a sudden, we have to question what the hell is going on here. Did Johnny make up that book title just to freak us out? Did Zampano name both Navidson's reading material and Z's own treatise that just to confuse us? Why is the book that we all just read called House of Leaves anyway? One interesting note is that Navidson's book is 736 pages long, whereas my edition of House of Leaves is only 709, including the index. Oh, and so Navidson has to burn earlier pages to read later ones -- is that related to how Johnny found Zampano's manuscript burnt and ashy in parts?

Also, here are some links of interest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_leaves is Wikipedia's rundown of the book. It tackles a lot of the important issues and shows some hidden codes, but I think it's important to remember that it was written (presumably) by just another House of Leaves reader like ourselves and should not be taken as authoritative.

http://www.houseofleaves.com/forums/ The official site. It's interesting that it contains no actual from-above information -- it's just for readers to toss around ideas.

http://thatskannada.indiainfo.com/chowchow/picfortheday/images/sudan1.jpg The picture of Delial that Navidson took -- in "real" life, of course, it was another photographer. He won the Pulitzer Prize, took a lot of flak for not helping Delial, and then killed himself.

Although I run an online book club, I?m not very up on book news. I?m more of a reader than an industry watcher. A couple of weeks ago, though, I noticed a lot of subway riders holding James Frey?s A Million Little Pieces. I knew it had been Oprah?s Book Club October selection and was last year?s best-selling non-fiction title. But it?s several years old and it seemed odd that I?d suddenly see it everywhere.

Then I finally caught on. If you?re as news-ignorant as I usually am, Frey?s memoir has been put through an investigative ringer thanks to The Smoking Gun. He's been accused of exaggerations and blatant lies. For example, Frey claims to have spent three months in an Ohio jail for a host of charges, including hitting a police officer with his car, but in reality only did a few hours for DUI before posting bail. He describes his role and subsequent questioning in the train accident deaths of two teenagers, yet no one involved in the case knew his name. And is Frey actually wanted in three states? Nope.

During a recent phone conversation with Barbara, a BookBlog member, she mentioned that she was in the middle of the book and was angry at Frey. All of the recent news was ruining the story for her. Instead of reading the true history of a drugged, drunken, out-of-control enemy of the people, she was reading the fictionalized account of a drugged, drunken, out-of-control frat boy. He lied and she's pissed. Judging by all the press, so are a lot of other people. Except maybe Oprah and Larry King.

The thing that surprises me about the controversy is that A Million Little Pieces is a memoir. Although memoirs are supposed to be non-fiction, you can't take any of them at face value. They're based on memory rather than journalistic research, and memories are highly subjective and unreliable. I've always wondered how memoirists get away with using quotations in recalling conversations from 20 years ago, considering I can't even remember how many cups of coffee I've had so far this morning. When I read a memoir, I go into it knowing full well I'm only getting the impression of truth rather than truth itself. When I read a biography or autobiography, I expect facts.

Despite the lies, some simple truths remain. Frey wrote a book that made him a millionaire. He's been on TV and in the papers and people are talking about him. He has two books concurrently on bestseller lists. Regardless of bad press and Random House's refund offer, he will sell more books and make more money. And we, the book buyers, continue to be gullible. We made Frey rich by believing his story, and we'll make him even richer by not believing it.

By the way, I think I'm in the middle of my fourth cup of joe. But don't quote me on it.

But you already knew that, didn't you?

I'm taking a break from deleting the 2500 or so spam comments and pings that have hit the site since I last went through this process about two weeks ago. Spam is something I've never understood mostly because I don't see how it's a viable form of advertising. I doubt many people click through on purpose, unless I'm underestimating the stupidity of humankind. Well, maybe it's not stupidity. It could be desperation driving some folks to think there really is some over-the-counter product that will enlarge penises and breasts.

Even more stupid and desperate is search string spam. Some moron, who e-mailed me a long time ago about a particular self-published book and didn't get the hint when I ignored her, has been hitting the search box to keep the title in the "top searches" list at the bottom of the left sidebar. The stupid part is that the effort has propelled BookBlog to the number two Google result for the title and author which helps us more than them. The desperate part is that searching for the book here is useless because it has never been mentioned in a post. I'd be happy to review it in exchange for a free copy, but the author better be thick-skinned since I have no problem calling a piece-o-crap self-published book a piece-o-crap and I've already decided, sight unseen, that this one is a piece-o-crap.

I received a very nice e-mail from Brian at Bookland in Keene, NH, saying that he wanted to leave a comment about the U.S. paperback release date for The Da Vinci Code (03/28/06) but was put off by the sex and drug spam. (What? No spam for rock and roll?) He's right about it being a shame how the unscrupulous ruin things for the rest of us.

But, to be honest, the spam problem is really my fault. I haven't upgraded BookBlog's version of Movable Type to one with better spam-fighting capabilities since I've been reluctant to pay for it. The advertising you see on the site, which I hope is unobtrusive, only makes enough money to cover hosting and I do not want to add more. I also haven't been visiting here enough to monitor and delete it due to a shortage of free time in recent months. In addition, the lack of new posts causes older ones to sit on the homepage for months and get hit over and over again.

So I'd like to apologize. I'll try to be better about site maintenance in order to keep BookBlog a friendly place to talk about books.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to Daisy's upcoming discussion of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I've already finished it and found it to be the most interesting experimental novel I've ever read.