The Reader Travels

So I stared out the window of my fourth floor cubicle yesterday for a half hour. There was a guy who looked like he was waiting for a ride, and at first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was on one of those phones that attaches to the side of your head.

But the more I watched him, the more I figured he really was having an argument with the voices in his head. I had to sit on a jury for a competency hearing once, and they told me to watch the guy’s eyes. If he blinks a lot, it’s a sure sign he’s got something going wrong with his head. Well, I couldn’t see this guy’s eyes, but his whole body was blinking like mad.

A friend told me tonight he couldn’t finish Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. He just wanted to read a book without having to wade through a bunch of footnotes written by a crazy person, and without having to turn the book sideways and upside down and backwards and forwards to figure out what the hell was going on. Personally, I loved it. It was a helluva ride and an incredible work of art, even if it was a total mind f***.

Remember if you want to get the most out of the spookiness that is House of Leaves, you have to put on his sister’s album entitled Haunted.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 7:52 pm and is filed under meanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.