Mark Z - what are you up to?

I've always been fascinated with form and layout, not just text in itself. A book that has a nice layout (and/or a cover) is way more interesting to me than a book with a bad layout. Sometimes the layout makes reading almost impossible when the text goes all the way into the binding, which annoys the hell out of me. On the other hand I get excited about books that play with the layout and form of the text, especially if it's done properly and isn't just a gimmick.

I share this passion with a friend. She once wrote a paper for our post graduate seminar in two columns each with a different story and a different style. So she told me about this completely weird book by Mark Z Danielewski called House of Leaves. I got the book, read it and loved it. Sure the frame story of someone finding a mystery chest containing the story of a mysterious house is a silly one and even sillier when the guy who found the chest gets scared by what's happening in the story he's reading. But the actual story of the House of Leaves got me totally hooked.

The style of writing varies between the frame story and the story of the House so you know from the font which one you're reading. But as the story progresses the writing starts to follow the events of the book. Or maybe it comments on them? Either way, when things start happening quickly you suddenly read really fast; when things slow down, so does your reading. At one point people are in a maze and the text all of a sudden is a maze too.

I admit it looks like a gimmick and it does take a bit of an effort to read, but the text is all there, you can really read it and it makes total sense. I remember being overwhelmed with the effect of the form imitating or commenting on the text and loving every moment of it. 

Now as you can imagine, when someone's this excited about something, they're bound to tell about it, right? So I recommended the book to another book loving friend with whom I've shared many a book in the past (she once dropped my Sex and the City book into her baby's bathwater which may very well have been the most appropriate place for it even if I didn't appreciate it at the time). So, imagine my disappointment when it turns out she hated House of Leaves! She found the story tedious and implausible and didn't get the thing with the form at all. And after glancing through a few comments about the book on a sellers website I see now that she's not alone: you either love it or hate it. Now I can no longer recommend it to anyone and can probably never read it again being a afraid I'll hate it too...


Mark Z clearly isn't one of the Productive Writers. Or one who publishes his works often. After House of Leaves (published 2000) came Only Revolutions in 2006 and now this year I came across The Fifty Year Sword (published 2012).

Only Revolutions was a strange tale of two youths, a kind of a love story I guess, but told from one end of the book from her point of view and form the other from his. They had their own colors (gold and green) and there were two bookmarks (one of each color) to help with the reading. It didn't make as great an impression on me as House of Leaves had earlier, but I remember enjoying the experience of the book. It was advised that the book should be read a chapter at a time first from one persons and then the others point of view. Reading the book I kept thinking how different the experience would be had I chosen to start from the other end. The writing was more or less stream of consciousness and at times it was hard to tell what was happening, but the charm of the book at least to me was how differently we interpret things that are happening to us; how we misunderstand each other and how love affects us. Again, I'm not sure I recommend it...

Now The Fifty Year Sword remains a mystery. I was going to start reading it but noticed that it was an autumn book so it makes sense to postpone reading it until next autumn. But as expected the book looks to be more than the writing. The cover has little holes in it like it has been punctuated from the inside. And there are different colored marks that symbolize different things (or people, perhaps?) in the actual text. But this I will find out come autumn. In the mean while there are a few peculiar Facebook updates to ponder. The last one from April 11th: "50-84779-2-89552". Mark Z - What are you up to?

Color co-ordinating your books

We've all seen pictures of color co-ordinated bookcases in fashionable design magazines, right? They look fabulous and create a great visual element in a room that with an ordinary bookcase would look, let's face it, ordinary. So when a friend of mine a few years ago moved we suggested she organize her books by color. Now she's a very visual type of person so she decided to give it a go and I have to admit her bookcase looked pretty darn fab by the time we were finished with it. She says she can find her books, so I suppose it works for her.

Now encouraged by this positive role model I decided to try it myself. I'm sort of living in two places: my old house where I used to live and my new house in the city where I work. Being a manic book lover I've got plenty of books in both places. The old house has 3 pretty big bookcases organized by genre and alphabetized by author, so I wasn't going to start with messing that up. But with so many books some of them are in two rows and they're not organized by anything, so they became the perfect target for my experiment.

I was and still am pretty pleased with how they turned out. I tend to fill this bookcase with books I've already read, so finding them isn't really an issue.

With one successful project behind me I now turned to the bookcase in the city where I work and live. Now this one I share with my darling partner, so I not only had my own books to sort out but his as well. And much as you'd expect, there were more of them, too. But in the end I think it turned out quite well. In fact it looks exactly like the other one, doesn't it?

The trouble only started once you tried to find a particular book. Now the problem with living in two cities simultaneously is that you can never be 100% sure the thing you're looking for isn't in fact in the other place. With my new order finding books became almost an impossibility. Sure you thought you remembered what color the book was, yellow, right?  Only it wasn't the spine, it was the cover and the spine was black. Or red. Or even blue. And then when you can't find what you're looking for you wait until you're going back for the weekend to your old house only you won't find it there either because it turns out you've stuffed the book into a cupboard.

We're moving now and last week my hubby said to me: Honey, when we move can we have the books by subject again? I can never find my books anymore...