Reviews tagging 'Misogyny'

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

24 reviews

thetruthatallhazards's review against another edition

dark mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.25

I hate this book, I read it a second time to give it a chance, I am leaving this review for ME to remind myself not to read it again in 3 years. LEAVE IT ALONE FUTURE ME

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Misogyny

transdankovsky's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness, Forced institutionalization, and Sexual content

Moderate: Sexual violence, Child abuse, Drug use, Death, Drug abuse, Grief, and Misogyny

monahed's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Death of parent, Drug abuse, Death, Mental illness, Blood, and Gore

Moderate: Misogyny

mobymaize's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This book is very important. Reading it, at times, is very much a challenge. I had fun with it, despite taking me nearly 5 months to read. Take into advice the first line of House of Leaves: This is not for you, but the novel is also very interesting, so you might want to read it. Be prepared to flip your book upside down, and to be interrupted in the middle of a description of abyssal hallways leading on for infinity with a (NSFW)

very explicit scene where a main character gets a finger up his butt and cums from it

. Great & wild book, will never read again /pos.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Confinement, Drug abuse, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, Addiction, Child abuse, Cursing, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Toxic relationship, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Death, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Forced institutionalization, Medical content, Mental illness, Stalking, Toxic friendship, Violence, Murder, Sexism, Sexual assault, Abandonment, and Vomit

Moderate: Ableism, Animal death, Cancer, Emotional abuse, Infidelity, and Schizophrenia/Psychosis

Minor: Lesbophobia

avacadosocks's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Murder, Blood, Animal death, Drug use, Forced institutionalization, Gun violence, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Sexual content, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Child abuse, Body horror, Child death, Death, Drug abuse, and Physical abuse

Moderate: Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Misogyny, Gore, Death of parent, Panic attacks/disorders, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, and Violence

Minor: Terminal illness, Incest, Vomit, Cancer, and Pedophilia

lynxpardinus's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious tense

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcohol, Child abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Misogyny, Sexual violence, Suicide, Violence, Animal cruelty, Confinement, Death of parent, Drug abuse, Animal death, Drug use, Addiction, Medical content, Eating disorder, Gun violence, Infidelity, Toxic relationship, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Rape, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Sexual content

Moderate: Sexual assault, Car accident, Child death, Domestic abuse, Vomit, Excrement, Incest, Suicidal thoughts, and War

somesapphicsnake's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal death, Drug abuse, Gore, Grief, Mental illness, Misogyny, Toxic relationship, Child death, Forced institutionalization, Physical abuse, Domestic abuse, Fire/Fire injury, Rape, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Alcoholism, Body horror, Cursing, Child abuse, Drug use, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Panic attacks/disorders, Sexism, Sexual content, and Violence

bearystarry's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I was expecting this to be the scariest book I'd ever read, and maybe actually fear doesn't translate well for me through books, but this was much more... sad to me than anything else. I only had creepy feelings a couple of times, but really the main takeaway I had from this book was emotional devastation. (Though that may be due to my personal circumstances currently as well.)

An extremely compelling if difficult read, anyway. And difficult to track your pages read through an app like this lol.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal death, Forced institutionalization, Suicide, Child death, Death, Animal cruelty, and Infidelity

Moderate: Death, Death of parent, Fatphobia, Forced institutionalization, Misogyny, Ableism, Cancer, and Body horror

joshoonet's review against another edition

challenging mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

• The very core story of the Navidson Record is incredibly interesting and thrilling. I love the descriptions of their explorations and the uncertainty that comes with them.
• Zampanòs huge passages of discussing certain words and picking apart their meanings nearly made me stop reading, out of pure disconnection with the content. Even if it related to the core story. My god.
• Can only recommend checking out the appendixes as one goes along, they provide a more thorough understanding of the text. Although the same can't be said about the hints to other chapters. That got too confusing for me.
• LOVED the code that could be found and potentially deciphered here and there. I'm sure i missed some too.
• Overall: high concentration needed to read this, but worth it in the end. I'll keep thinking about it for a while, but won't be picking it up again anytime soon.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Addiction, Violence, Sexual content, Panic attacks/disorders, Gore, and Mental illness

Moderate: Injury/Injury detail, Animal death, Alcohol, Rape, Alcoholism, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Child abuse, Drug abuse, Sexism, Death, and Drug use

Minor: Infidelity, Death of parent, Abandonment, Cancer, Car accident, and Vomit

Long, purely informative passages about the background and meaning of specific terms or topics can be skipped or skimmed. On the topic of sexual content and misogyny:

truant's stories are laden with viewing women only as sexual objects; these parts can be skipped without losing too much of the plot.

melliedm's review against another edition

challenging dark slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

0.5

Boy oh boy oh boy it’s been a while since I read something I despised so deeply. Each page felt wet with masculine hubris as a dreadfully dull and unoriginal tale was told wrapped up in a coat of artistic desperation.

House of Leaves is a stack of papers containing the academic paper an old shut-in wrote about a possibly non-existent documentary film, compiled by a young man who filched the work in progress from the old man’s apartment after he died. And all of that is put together by another editor. The piece is layered, absolutely, but not in an organic way, and not in a compelling way, just in a patience-testing way. 

The academic essay goes from recounting the exact moments of the film to pontificating on echoes to recounting the moments on the film in a format that had me mourning the many trees turned to pulp for the thousands of copies of this book. (Single paragraphs, single words, single sentences at “””evocative””” angles, pages dedicated to telling us that what should be on the page is missing.) the essay is dotted with hundreds of footnotes, which are almost all meaningless, and stretch the read time unnecessarily. The essay is not all bad. On occasion there is something interesting raised, or a tension that begins to build… Each time something intriguing begins to happen in this recounting of the documentary, though, in comes the footnote from our other writer.

His name is Johnny Truant and he does drugs and drinks and has a lot of sex—graphic sex, sex written from the perspective of someone who clearly fetishizes women, to the point of fetishizing their skin colour if they happen to not be white. His constant interruptions to the essay are eyeroll inducing because nothing in his sob story is interesting, nothing in it is gripping, nothing in it makes him a character I feel interested in learning more about. I thought perhaps we were supposed to hate him—but then comes in a letter to the editor from an 18 year old girl who knew him talking about how cool he was. Uhhhh, what? So here I am, reading the women he objectifies in his life as the character objectifying them, but this “from the horse’s mouth” moment tells me that nah, you’re reading it wrong. Christ on a stick. This of course culminates in some horrific, gender-based violence later on, which is followed by some strangers wondering if this mysterious Johnny Truant ever got the love he deserves UWU

Gag.

In short, House of Leaves could have been a perfectly fine story about a strange house and the impact it has the relationship between the couple the documentary follows/is made by, which is the only effective throughline in the book for me. Unfortunately, the author or someone in his circle must have thought that wouldn’t be good enough, so he instead became the thing the first few pages try to satirize: a boring, pretentious attempt at making a mountain out of a molehill. 

YMMV.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Drug use, Mental illness, Sexual violence, Animal cruelty, Death, Alcohol, Misogyny, Addiction, Cursing, Suicide, Sexism, Suicidal thoughts, Violence, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Sexual content, Animal death, and Sexual assault

Moderate: Forced institutionalization, Panic attacks/disorders, and Rape