Reviews tagging 'Sexism'

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

20 reviews

cryptix's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark informative mysterious reflective slow-paced

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

3.5

This is one of those books where I'm glad it exists to inspire other works that I've enjoyed, but I can't say I'm into it on its own merits.

The central plot, the Navidson Record, is great. I love the formatting tricks, the recursive footnotes, the use of empty space to mimic agoraphobia/claustrophobia and to increase the tension. The prose gets a little florid or overly technical at times but it serves its purpose, I think, as a deep analysis of a (fictional) source material. The ending is perhaps weak but a lot of horror struggles with the ending so I give that a pass.

The framing device of Johnny Truant, however, I could do without. I dislike him as a character, I dislike the gritty traumaporn he brings to the table, and I just find his sections to be tedious interruptions of the story I'm actually here for. Given he's the POV for a good half of the book, I have a hard time fully enjoying the result.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Animal death, Child abuse, Sexual content, and Violence

Moderate: Ableism, Sexism, and Rape

izzydelaya's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative mysterious sad tense slow-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

Moderate: Child death, Toxic relationship, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Alcohol, Animal cruelty, Cancer, Addiction, Bullying, Animal death, Violence, Blood, Child abuse, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Sexism, Racism, Panic attacks/disorders, and Murder

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

katherine_shelton's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

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

3.0

When I started this book I didn't add it to my Storygraph or Goodreads accounts because I was pretty sure I was going to "DNF" it, as the kids say. But for some reason I kept coming back to it. Parts were compelling, parts were utterly ridiculous, the pages with two sentences per page felt like a reprieve from the rest... The book is cavernous and it's flawed. I can best describe it as faux academic satire(?) that is pretentious and dry, but punctuated by occasional brilliance. Is it worth all the effort? Honestly, I don't know. I'm glad I read it, there are passages that I really loved. But it is a book with major snarkiness that will irritate a lot of people. Sometimes it has the energy of College Freshman boys with Madonna-Wh*re Complexes who have just discovered  Nietzsche and Libertarianism for the first time and think they're smarter and deeper than everyone else, and everything they say it dripping with snide irony and contempt. But it's not always like that, and there is value in the book - you just have to go down a hallway that feels like it will never end in order to find it. 

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Content Warnings

Minor: Suicide, Mental illness, Child abuse, and Sexism

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

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.

gentle_garbage_baby's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

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

3.75

Very interesting plot and an enjoyable yet challenging read for the most part, but I couldn't rate it any higher due to the way women are written in the book. Aside from one or two of the female characters, they're treated very much as sex objects throughout the novel and it can be very off-putting and quite annoying.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence, Mental illness, Drug use, Addiction, Blood, Drug abuse, Sexual content, and Sexism

Moderate: Forced institutionalization, Gun violence, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Death of parent, and Domestic abuse

Minor: Alcohol, Car accident, Rape, and Sexual assault

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

nozoh's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

5.0

I still can't fully wrap my head around it, but it has been the most interesting reading experience I've had. It wasn't scary to me but definitely unsettling. Unexpectedly I was moved to tears at some points too! Even after finishing it I spent an hour or so going back to certain pages and appendixes to confirm things and coming to new realizations, and that's pretty special. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness, Addiction, Sexual content, Drug abuse, Sexism, Alcoholism, Gun violence, and Suicidal thoughts

Moderate: Physical abuse, Rape, Death of parent, Cursing, Child abuse, Sexual assault, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Forced institutionalization

Minor: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Ableism, and Child death