house of leaves wasn't that good 💀

hello hi welcome back to my channel my name is matt if you're new here i hope your day is going well we're going to talk about house of leaves today as you can see it's it's here i'm not going to hold it because it's heavy as [ __ ] so i read this book and it took me about like a week or so and it almost put me in a reading slump so i want to talk about my opinions on it so let's get into it house of leaves is what people call post-modern or post-post-modern fiction it's [ __ ] with your mind fiction steve get over yourself this is the type of book that people are like it's so scary at college parties but they've not actually read the book i love this goodreads review that reads totally infuriating it made me feel dumb bored and annoyed all at once if you if i wanted that i'll date my first boyfriend again and also it's like one of those very psychedelic albums from the late 60s where they do all those funny stereo effects and all that phasing or whatever it was called all great fun but you still have to have good songs which comes to the point of my video which is house of leaves cool concept execution needs work now i know this book came out in 2000. there's some clear indicators of that like the gratuitous sexism and degradation of women kind of strange outlook on alternative lifestyles like our framing device johnny truant is a guy that answers phones and a tattoo shop which is actually kind of a cool job if you're looking at it in a 2021 perspective but in i guess early 2000s they were kind of thinking that all tattoo enthusiasts were sexual deviants and drug addicts plus the constant shaming of sex workers and exotic dancers and demeaning them to a tattoo they have wasn't great either it all kind of boils down to glorifying alternative communities in the late 90s but also not understanding those communities at all johnny's part of the book kind of boils down to yeah i'm rock and roll and i'm losing my mind but it doesn't have any depth to it nor does johnny ever become a full-fledged character in his own book which isn't great considering that this book has been out for a while it has definitely influenced other works of literature and other mediums like one of my favorite books which is s by j.j abrams his name is attached i don't know why but this is a really interesting book that it was pitched to me as like house of leaves which i had not read house of leaves at the time but i bought this i was kind of a poser this came out in 2013 and is about a author who may have been murdered by a secret society but the way the story is told is one of his novels is being written on by two different characters as they try to unravel what happened to him this book is really interesting and is so immersive and it's not necessarily about the novel that they're writing on more about the two characters themselves i regularly say that i lost two weeks of my life to this book because i was so immersed in this story and it was such a mind [ __ ] so i would say that the idea that and house of leaves is the most innovative book of this type is not necessarily true anymore even jay kristoff has used footnotes and stylized passages to give the reader a sense of unease and movement in the story it is effective but it is still a gimmick and even another book that has the same kind of mixed media and unreliable narrator aspects was knight film by marisha pessl i didn't love this book necessarily but it has that same kind of vibe and if you liked house of leaves i would recommend night film but it's definitely on the similar wavelength even american horror story did a season of found footage and interviews that's very reminiscent of house of leaves so i don't know if that was a direct influence on that season and now we'll go to some found footage of maddie reading house of leaves hi i haven't finished a book all year and instead of like doing like something like reading something small and light i i think we need i think we need to read house of leaves i'm not going to update you more you'll just have to find out what happens next hi i got a big boy today i'm 43 pages into um house of leaves stress level is high okay but i like this line so i'm gonna read it to you so i am 53 pages into house of leaves um i don't know why i'm telling you what book it is you know what book it is um and it says uh there's basically this part just going on and on about this hot chick and it's it's honestly not that interesting um but i really like this um this this this line here this run-on sentence let's be very clear um it says quick note here if this crush swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach if you've never had a similar experience then you should come to grips with the fact that you've got a tv dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone let alone you to climb into i just like the concept of a tv dinner for heart because i've been called cold-hearted before but i've never been told i have a tv dinner by heart so house of leaves you got me there so house of leaves follows johnny troon as he follows his friend lewd into the apartment of an old blind shut-in named zampano who died recently so they break into this guy's apartment to steal [ __ ] and johnny happens to see some deep gouges in the uh apartment floor next to the dead body of this man um doesn't think anything of it for some reason and takes home full a trunk a trunk full of papers that this old man had been scribbling on which at first glance is kind of just a douchey thing to do and then in retrospect was just the dumbest [ __ ] ever so johnny starts reading the old man's work and comes to discover that it's an analysis of a indie documentary film called the davidson project this film according to johnny doesn't exist and all of the people referenced in the book in this analysis written by zapano doesn't know anything about the film nor zimpano himself the film itself follows the davidson family as they move from their like city life into a kind of rural home in the middle of nowhere to restart and refresh their their lives together things quickly get weird as [ __ ] so i'm thinking of filming on my phone don't really know how this is gonna go but um i am reading this guy i don't really have an update for you my life is kind of in shambles right now so i'm like let's just read a psychological thriller to get more [ __ ] up i guess i don't know it's been it's been a [ __ ] year and it's the [ __ ] 13th okay so i am now 120 pages into the house of leaves and it's starting to look like this and i have no idea how to [ __ ] [ __ ] read this um the treatment of women not great um i feel like a lot of these types of books have this where all women characters are just used as [ __ ] toys or plot devices and that's my biggest gripe with it so far because i haven't been enjoying that the um footnotes have been fine until like right about now where i'm like i don't even know how to process this much less what this narrative is supposed to be telling me i guess i'm enjoying it i'm not saying that i'm not enjoying it i'm just saying that this is [ __ ] weird like everyone says it's just [ __ ] weird so i will give you an update um after i fought through this section i actually need more coffee so i'm gonna do that first okay so the family moves into this house and there's some weird [ __ ] happening the house is way bigger on the inside than it is on the outside by like three quarters of an inch or so i don't know there's a hallway that shouldn't exist at all and fun stuff like that and instead of i don't know moving the [ __ ] out like any normal people would davidson the dad who goes by his last name decides to get a whole bunch of his buddies together and go on an expedition there's also this plow line where his wife is cheating on him and it's literally her only characteristic for most of the book and it just felt like the only way that the author knew how to interact with her which was strange and weird so they go on this expedition and things get weird or very very very quickly this is about the time where the book is spooky and creepy and super [ __ ] heavy because i swear to god these pages are made out of bricks like this book is like 10 pounds i swear to god okay so i'm 265 pages into house of leaves and the whole issue that i've been having sorry if it's a little shaky and the whole issue that i've been having when it comes to the representation of women is just getting a lot worse lists are being made about women and the sexual encounters they've had with characters in this book and it's it's taken me out of the story like i don't feel like it's necessary i do think that it's supposed to gross you out it's supposed to be uncomfortable but at the same time i'm like why is this part in the book it's not relevant to the house story it's relevant to the narrator but why couldn't tell you maybe i'll have a different opinion later but at this point i'm just like are you [ __ ] kidding me with this part of the story especially it just reads like stephen king writing really disgusting sex scenes over and over and over again for no [ __ ] reason other than the fact that demeaning women is fun i guess okay so i hope that the washer isn't super loud but i have to read this because it's very much uh r slash men writing women if you haven't checked out that video i just made one of those um there's on page 357 we're interviewing or i don't know karen is interviewing people or she's being interviewed by people and there's just a whole bunch of mansplaining happening and i think it's actually intentional which is interesting but there's this one thing one adding that this guy says notice only men go into it why simple why women don't have to they know there's nothing there and can live with that knowledge but men must find out for sure they're haunted by that infinite hollow and it's since making allure and so they crave it desire it desire its end its knowledge it's to use here a strange lovian phrase its essence they must penetrate invade conquer destroy inhabit impregnate and if necessary even be consumed by it it really comes down to what men lack they lack the holo someone in this book is basically saying like the reason why women don't go into this [ __ ] house is because we got uteruses yo so transphobic first of all and second of all [ __ ] shut the goddamn [ __ ] up that's what i that's that is my review of this book so far and i'm still basically only halfway yay for me so a climax of the plot happens about roughly 200 pages into the book but this is a 700 page book and we got lots of groundwork to go through instead of holding that tension and pulling off what could have been a really interesting found footage aspect to the plotline we kind of lose all of that there's long diatribes about what is the framing device up to now why don't you become someone we kind of feel for and relate to as the book is [ __ ] with us just like it's [ __ ] with him to an overbearing narrator that has nothing to do with the regular plot anymore this is where we get a lot of the unnecessary and gratuitous sex scenes that are included solely for the sake of shock value to be honest and do nothing to further the plot nor show johnny growing in any type of way as a character he also has a problem talking to women in general and tends to sleep with them just cause and comes off incredibly creepy to the stripper that he has this huge crush on and he just honestly started reading like an incel to me someone who treats women that he doesn't care about like garbage and the ones he does care about he puts them on pedestals even though later on in the book we find out that he doesn't actually care about this girl that he has a massive crush on he readily admits that he doesn't even want to know her actual name he also [ __ ] shames her for being with anyone other than him even though he's never really made that intention clear this obviously is the major reason i didn't like this book this is majorly subjective i know that if you liked this book it doesn't mean that you're a sexist i don't hate all men and i do not think that the author is an incel i think that the main character of this book is majorly problematic and it ruined the experience of reading this book for me so who is this book for may you ask according to this youtube review it's for people who don't like reading now i obviously like books so am i not the target demographic for this i would say no because for most of this book it feels extremely academic to the point of being kind of boring at places so i don't think this would be good for people that rarely read because this just reinforces the stereotype that reading is kind of boring for some of the the parts of this book that are incredibly academic and feel like a [ __ ] textbook per the previous goodreads review i do think this is incredibly pretentious there's a lot of posture in this book that may have been less annoying in the early 2000s but now it just comes off as someone's explaining something to you that is incredibly simple that you already understand but it's they're doing it in a way that is intentionally trying to [ __ ] with your head which i don't now don't get me wrong this book obviously has value it is most likely the predecessor of this content that we see a lot of the time like my aforementioned recommendations and as well as movies like paranormal activity cloverfield things like found footage of that nature but that sense of dread i had as the men entered the maze-like bowels of the house quickly evaporated along with johnny's will to live around page 300 the book quickly devolves into tangents and interviews that have nothing really to do with the regular story of the film and by the time that i get to i got to the end of the actual story it felt like the indie documentary was three hours long to include everything that zimpano was saying was in this movie combine that with the nonsensical and unrelatable ramblings of johnny truant and you've got yourself one big snooze fest in the year of our lord 2000 this may have been cutting edge edgy but now it doesn't really stand the test of time a lot of the other things that have come out since then managed to take this concept and execute it well instead of so what at the end of this diatribe of mine is the conclusion i rated this book two stars now that is only based on one read-through and my own subjective opinion i didn't have a spiritual connection to this book in any way i'm not saying that you can't enjoy this book i'm just saying i really [ __ ] didn't and i honestly think that a lot of it is due to the fact that this book aged poorly and it's not necessarily as scary as everyone says it is anymore so there's that if you have recommendations for books like this i am still open to them because i do like this format i do like the style of writing but i am not a house of leaves fangirl we do not stand house of leaves in this house thank you to my patreon supporters and if you guys like this review please let me know down below in the comments i'm enjoying making it uh i'm gonna go now guys like subscribe all the good stuff bye the number you have dialed has been changed the new number is please note the new number is

Channel: a lil bit mads

Views: 5,201

Keywords: books, booktube, booktuber, bookish, book reviewer, bookseller, house of leaves, review, book review, rant review, house of leaves review

Id: -2iyNMxbwXM

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021