We recently "incensed" John Brownlee of Table of Malcontents with our simplistic instructions for reading House of Leaves. He responded with the passion of a book lover and a description of the novel's layout, including a page scan. If you honestly need help approaching the book, see his post. We remain resolute in our position that if you can't figure out how read it without an explanation, you will have problems understanding it. Instead, might we suggest something in either a James Patterson or Sidney Sheldon?

Smooches to Ed Champion for defending us.

Let's see whose query we won't answer properly today.

Search String: book report on charlie and the chocolate factory

Do your own homework, kid.

Search String: comments about "If on a winters night a traveler"

Considering that the Book Mistress didn't make it past the first chapter of Italo Calvino's novel, which is written in the second person, before casting it aside and telling it to shut up, we have no comment.

Search String: what did brother francis eat AND "canticle for leibowitz"

Is this important to the plot of the above by Walter M. Miller, Jr.? Why would anyone need to know this? Is this a question from some kind of fact-based assignment in which a teacher naively expects to discover whether or not you did your reading? Or are you working on cookbook targeted to nomadic priests in the post-apocalyptic future?

Our wonderings aside, the best way to find out is to either actually read the book or try Google Book Search, but we'll tell you what he didn't eat:

"Yesterday. There was this lizard, Father. It had blue and yellow stripes, and such magnificent hams—thick as your thumb and plump, and I kept thinking how it would taste like chicken, roasted all brown and crisp outside, and—"

"All right," the priest interrupted. Only a hint of revulsion crossed his aged face. After all, the boy was spending a lot of time in the sun. "You took pleasure in these thoughts? You didn't try to get rid of the temptation?"

Francis reddened. "I—I tried to catch it. It got away (pp. 33-34)."

Search String: WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHEN A PERSON LIES ALOT

It means that person is a liar. Next?

This morning, I received the copy of Demon Theory I won from The Litblog Co-Op. Thank you, MacAdam/Cage for such quick shipping!

According to the dust jacket:

On Halloween night, following an unnerving phone call from his diabetic mother, Hale and six of his med-school classmates return to the house where his sister disappeared years ago. While there is no sign of his mother, something is waiting for them there, and has been waiting for a long time. Written as a literary film treatment littered with footnotes and experimental nuance, Demon Theory is even parts camp and terror, combining glib dialogue, fascinating pop culture references and an intricate subtext as it pursues the events of a haunting movie trilogy that is all too real.

It sounds a lot like Scary Movie meets House of Leaves.

In flipping quickly through the book, I couldn't not notice the footnotes (and footnotes to the footnotes) appearing on nearly every page. I absolutely loved House of Leaves, which uses footnotes and appendices as integral literary devices guiding the reader through its labyrinthine eponymous character. It wouldn't have been the same book without them. Over at the LBC, much of their Demon Theory discussion focused on the footnote issue, and the consensus was that they distracted rather than moved the story forward. I'm looking forward to reading it and drawing my own conclusions.

But (You knew there was a "but" coming, right?) seeing Demon Theory's page layout reminded me of a semi-unpleasant cereal I recently tasted. Last time I went grocery shopping, I bought a box of Kashi Go Lean because I had a coupon and I'm one of those intestinally-challenged people who needs a lot of fiber. Although I'm no stranger to eating sawdust, I like my sawdust to be appealing. The front of the box describes Go Lean Cereal as "crunchy fiber twigs, soy protein grahams and honey puffs." Despite wondering why Kashi couldn't come up with a more appetizing word than "twigs," I figured the "honey puffs" would be okay. They're not. They look deceptively like Kellogg's Honey Smacks, but taste every bit as twiggy as the "twigs."

On the surface, Demon Theory looks kind of like House of Leaves. I hope there's some honey in it and not a whole bunch of twigs.

You sought answers. BookBlog responds to your desperate pleas.

Search String: is the movie Shopgirl Steve Martin's autobiography

No. The movie Shopgirl is based on a novella (i.e. short novel) of the same name and is Steve Martin's first published work of fiction. It is about a lonely young woman who sells gloves in Neiman's. Unless Martin was once a girl behind a counter in a department store, odds are it isn't his autobiography.

Search String: what are the points of view in reading

There are many. A story can be told from the point of view of the main character, an objective observer, an unreliable narrator, multiple narrators, a third-person omniscient, etc. The best way to figure out point of view for a particular book is to read it. Your job, as a reader, is to understand and interpret what you read, which includes identifying point of view. For example, this paragraph is written from the point of view of the Book Mistress. Now, don't you feel smart?

Search String: how to read "house of leaves"

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski may seem like a daunting read but can be easily conquered by following these steps. Begin at the beginning. Follow the pages sequentially. When you come to a footnote, read the footnote then return to where you left off in the text. If you are directed to an appendix, read the appendix then return to where you left off in the text. You are finished when you reach the end.

Search String: running with scissors fact or fiction

Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors is a memoir, a genre that is not held to the same rigorous factual standards as a biography or autobiography. Some of it may be true, some of it may be based on what the author remembers as being true. Often, memoirists use will impression, interpretation, and fictionalization to tell their stories, so memoirs should be read with the foreknowledge that not everything may be completely accurate. Burroughs has asserted that his memoir is factual, but the Turcottes (portrayed in the book as the Finches) disagree. They have filed a lawsuit.

Search String: my name is oliver. i m a 33 year-old living in toronto canada. i have many interests but i ll list a few; i love to read watch movies listen to music and write. i m an author with a passion for writing so i spend much of my time doing that. i m a huge tennis fan...so i usually spend much of my time watching the grand slams.i m interesed in communicating with guys from all over the world. i consider myself to be a friendly honest guy and look for the the same. i am single and i live alone but much of my time is spent around family and friends

Dude, the Book Mistress can't help you.

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.

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.