17. The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

It’s nice to read an international bestseller now and then, to consume something "of the now" so I can feel like a part of the crowd or something (and also have an opinion if the occasion arises).  The Midnight Library was one of two bestsellers I’ve read this past year (the other being Gone Girl).

 

The Midnight Library was also chosen for the last book club meeting at my workplace.  Although I haven’t participated in the book club for some time (I tried once with Wherethe Crawdads Sing),seeing that they were doing The Midnight Library spurred me to read it on my own as I had a copy thanks to my last visit to Encore Books.

 

As expected, The Midnight Library was an easy, breezy read.  It was like a “feel-good” version of Ken Grimwood’s Replay.  Instead of dying of a heart attack at 43 and waking up 25 years earlier in your younger body with all your memories intact over and over again, with each "re-awakening" having the opportunity for a do-over, Nora Seed overdoses on sleeping pills and ends up in The Midnight Library, a magical place containing an infinite number of books each representing a parallel life of yours had you made different choices, big or trivial.  The library is managed by someone who was dear to you (in Nora’s case, her school librarian Mrs. Elm, and is also a place where time stops at midnight as you hover between life and death.  While you’re in this state, you can slip into another version of your life in a parallel universe simply by choosing a book and reading the first line.

 

What reminded me of Replay was in one of Nora's lives as a glaciologist, she met a man named Hugo, who was also a “slider” or “life jumper”.  He had the same ability as her, except that he’d done this a lot longer, having sampled dozens, if not hundreds, of lives.  Instead of a library though, Hugo’s quantum Shroedinger-esque in-between state was represented by a Midnight Video Store.  Pretty cute, huh?

 

While Replay was also an awesome sci-fi/fantasy novel, The Midnight Library was merely appealing and cute, as author Matt Haig had aspirations for his novel to be inspiring, life-affirming, etc. etc. I've read feel-good books that have really rubbed me the wrong way, like The House by the Cerulean Sea, which I truly regret reading.  Had I known it was going to such a saccharine piece of tripe, I wouldn't have read it.  Actually it's not fair to tripe, which I would've probably derived more enjoyment out of consuming.  But The House... was something that would've belonged in my very own Book of Regrets.  Or more like Book of Books I Regret Reading!

 

In any case, I don't regret having read The Midnight Library. It was better written than The House by the Cerulean Sea, and I even got emotionally caught up in parts of it.  Also, Matt Haig is really British while TJ Klune is American trying to write British.  I also, by default, like any book featuring a cat.  Still, The Midnight Library had its flaws.  There were parts that were a little too simple, or indulgent, or went on for too long.  For example, the part where it listed all the lives that Nora lead.  Whatevs - I just skimmed that section.  Also, some of the lives Nora lead were a little far-fetched.  In one life she was the Olympian swimmer she could’ve been. Ok fine. But in another, she was a famous rock star who was as big as Radiohead (and had dated a famous Hollywood star)!  Some metaphors were also a little too pat.  Like the protagonist's name, for instance.  Nora Seed.  She has to experience the multiple branches of her life before she can truly appreciate her “root life”.  Get it?

 

I can also see how The Midnight Library would’ve been The House by the Cerulean Sea for some readers, as it really does over-simplify the complexities of why someone would want to end their life.  One Goodreads reviewer summed it up nicely:

I liked this book until it suddenly decided to moonlight as a self-help manual, replete with messages that would look great and profound on an Instagram post next to a well-posed cup of coffee with those foam pictures on top. Or embroidered on a pillow — pick your poison.

And these messages have the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Another Goodreads reviewer also had a good point about how The Midnight Library could even be problematic in regards to mental illness:

I also have issues with the core messages in this book. Nora finally learns her lesson, but it's only after having fixated on each regret, remade every decision, and lived all subsequent lives. Like come on, at some point, you just have to be okay with who you are and the decisions you've made without knowing every single possible outcome.

 

But my biggest issue is that I'm really uncomfortable with this book's implication that if you're depressed, you only need to change your mindset and you will feel better. That goes against everything we understand about mental illness, including that it's important to seek professional help, that it can be chemically based, and that it's not a matter of not trying hard enough.

 

We already have enough trouble as a society getting depression and mental illness taken seriously, without a "feelgood" book coming along and implying that you need nothing more than an attitude adjustment to cure it. That puts the blame squarely where it doesn't belong, on the hundreds of millions of people who are suffering from depression. But it isn't just the layman who harbors such misunderstandings. It also includes people who work in the mental health field, and even some therapists and psychiatrists. So you can understand my dismay at the continued popularity of this book, which further perpetrates this extremely toxic point of view 

In any case, I wanted to get this review done so I can pass this book on, probably resell it even.

 

 

16. The Woman in Black

By Susan Hill

15. straydog

By Kathe Koja

14. Gone Girl

By Gillian Flynn

 

13. The Annotated Gilmore Girls: Footnotes to the TV Series

By Anonymous

 The Annotated Gilmore Girls

12. Interior Chinatown

By Charles Yu

I'd only heard of Interior Chinatown vis-à-vis the recently released TV series starring Jimmy Yang and Donny Chieng (with a fair amount of Asian Americans as major creatives).  I was spurred to seek out the book when my friends John and Christine had started watching the show, and promptly borrowed a hardbound copy from my neighbourhood library.

 

Within the first twenty pages, Interior Chinatown was already a let-down. I was able to finish it within 3 days, mostly due to a lot of page-skimming, and how the bulk of the book was written like a screenplay.  The central theme of internalized racism in Chinese American men was explored in such a simplistic, repetitive, and heavy-handed way.  Interior Chinatown could’ve been more relevant had it been published twenty, even ten, years ago, but in 2020, it seemed dated somehow.

 

Perhaps the book had the bad timing of being released on January 28, 2020, just before the Covid pandemic fueled anti-Asian racism.  Many people, Asians and non-Asians alike, experienced a crash course on institutional racism, white supremacy and identity politics.  But even if COVID had never existed, Interior Chinatown was still painfully cringey in its portrayal of internalized racism through the POV of a struggling young Taiwanese-American man. 

 

Willis Wu dreams of being the star of his own show.  The show, known as Black and White, is fictitious, but it’s also the world that Willis inhabits, which is a construct, just as Chinatown is considered a western construct 

because its spatial and cultural boundaries were largely defined by the dominant Western society, which isolated and exoticized Chinese immigrants and their communities. These enclaves functioned as "other" zones, concentrating negative stereotypes about Chinese people into a single, contained, "Oriental" space. While originating as a reaction to racial exclusion, Chinatowns have been transformed into sites of commodified culture and tourism, and their meaning continues to be debated by diasporic and neoliberal forces. 

The television show format is also a metaphor of what the American Dream means for Chinese immigrants, especially the First Generation descendants, who don’t fit into mainstream society, ie. black and white.  Willis longs to be Kung Fu Guy, but due to external and internal forces, is always relegated to Generic Asian Man, or Oriental Guy Making a Weird Face, or Guy Wo Runs in and Gets Kicked in the Face.  As an Asian man, Willis is invisible in the world of black and white. 

 

The problem with Willis is that being Kung Fu Guy is his only M.O.  He has no other interests, other than comparing himself to others.  Unlike Willis, the mother and father are given a bit of backstory, which is well-written in prose, but you wish for more, as the prose is the only opportunity to imbue some depth into the thinly drawn characters.  We know Willis' dad loves to karaoke to John Denver, but what does Willis love?  Eventually, Willis meets a Pretty Girl of mixed Asian-ancestry and he becomes Asian Dad.  But he’s still obsessed with being Kung Fu Guy, his unconscious desire to assimilate into white dominant society.  Yu attempts to consider the POV of others, but barely.  Willis is not just obsessed with being Kung Fu Guy, he’s obsessed with how the system is rigged against him.  By the end of the story, he learns a painful lesson.  But the reader has to suffer through Willis’ narrow, colonized mindset, which gets tiresome real fast.

 

I’m sympathetic to the plight of the Asian American man.  I know there are many who are like Willis Wu.  But I’m not sympathetic to whiny self-involved, narcissistic behaviour. During the COVID pandemic, I was on a FB group that offered a platform to talk about Anti-Asian racism in Montreal. I ended up discussing with other women about their experiences being exoticized or harassed as an Asian woman.  A Chinese guy went on, saying how this is nothing compared to what Asian men have to go through, how they have it much worse, how he’d get beat up, bullied, etc.  Basically, being resentful and minimizing our experiences.  Thankfully, quite a few women did not let him off easy and gave him a piece of their mind.

 

I just don’t see how Interior Chinatown would help this guy, or if he’d even bother reading a book like this.  Taking a look at the first few pages of Goodreads reviews, the readers were primarily made up of white men and women, and East Asian women, but I couldn’t find a single review from an Asian male.  If Yu wanted Asian-American men to be his target audience, he failed.  Maybe Asian men don’t read these kinds of books, probably preferring to escape into well-written fiction!

 

I think if you were quite ignorant of American history and the current socio-economic realities of minorities, it would be eye-opening, but Yu kept repeating his central theme over and over.  So much so that there was very little substance in the narrative or in the character of Willis Wu, who merely served as a Cipher for the author to ram home his points.  Worst of all, Yu committed the greatest crime of all by shoehorning didactic expository monologue literally spelling out its central themes (in case you hadn’t caught on to what the book was about from page one), as well as a quick history lesson, into the bogus court room scene towards the end of the book!

 

Here's an example.  When the judge asked Willis what he had to say for himself, Willis finally spoke up in a monologue that reminded me of America Ferrara’s painfully didactic speech from the Barbie movie:

 

It sucks being Generic Asian Man. But at the same time, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance beings. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category… By putting ourselves below everyone, we’re building a defense mechanism. Protecting against real engagement. By imagining that no one wants us, that all others are so different from us, we’re privileging our own point of view.

 

Yikes. Ugh. I'm sorry, but this was Just. So. Bad.  There was also another passage that struck me:

 

But how often do you, or you, or any of us think the thought, I’m an Asian man? Almost never. Not until someone reminds you. Some guy bumps you at a bar, and makes a comment. Or you overhear some people talking, and one of them says, oh, our Asian friend so-and-so. And in that moment, we all become the same again All of us collapse into one, Generic Asian Man.

 

This insight is objectively true – anyone who’s a “visible minority” would not normally self-identify as “I’m Korean”, or “I’m Columbian” while going about our day-to-day lives.  Like anyone else, we see ourselves as individuals, ie. “I’m Stephanie.”  It's the structured racism that always reminds us of our place in "Western" society.  

 

However, this is not the case for Willis Wu, who's always obsessing about his own race!  For the past 200 pages, he has been constantly reminding the reader how he’s Background Oriental Male or Generic Asian Man Number Two/Waiter.  He never sees himself as Willis.  Even people with internalized racism don’t think like this.  You can't sympathize with Willis because he's never portrayed as an individual at all, he's simply a Cipher for All Asian American Men.  And he was annoying as f***.  

 

I was really surprised Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award.  I suppose this makes sense in the context of mostly white foundation members who may not read a lot of Asian American literature… but, that can’t be, as there has been decades worth of excellent Asian American literature exploring the immigrant experience with real depth and nuance that is sorely lacking in Interior Chinatown.

 

I still plan on watching the TV series though, as adaptations can sometimes do something more, or different, with the source material.

 

This Goodreads review summed up my feelings about the racial politics of Interior Chinatown really well:

 

Cringey and anti-Black. I'm so disappointed.

First of all, placing an asian sadboy (lmao) into a "White and Black" cop show is soooo "bbbut what about Asians??" whiny. The narrative that "yellow people are forgotten in a white-and-black-world" idea is so problematic. To complain that Black people get to be represented in the media more, when in reality they are stereotyped and relegated to minor roles even when they are represented, is dismissive, self-centering Asians at the expense of other minorities, and completely ignores our own active role in racism and violence against Black people in America. We, as Asian people, are and have always been anti-Black as fuck, and now we're complaining that Black people are more visible than us?

 

This book gives me very "pick me" vibes (along with a lot of recent Asian American literature, to be honest) and its popularity makes me extremely worried about the future of Asian American racial politics and our continued obsession with "existing" in America while putting down other minorities and doing nothing to acknowledge or remedy our own anti-Blackness.

Secondly, stop romanticizing Chinatown. It's a real place with real lower and working-class Chinese immigrants. In real life, post 1965 Hart-Cellar Act educated Taiwanese immigrants like Wu's family would have CHOSEN not to live there because they have the capital to live in wealthier neighborhoods with better schools. They aren't forced to live there because of racism. This is dangerously rewriting history in a way that lumps together the educated Asians of today (like the author himself who went to UC Berkeley and Columbia Law School) who are not invisible and are doing quite well in society, with the true lower and working-class Asian immigrant diaspora.

Also the switching between screenplay and prose was weird.

11. Are You Willing to Die For the Cause?

By Chris Oliveros

Got the signed English version (149/200) of Mourir pour la cause for Olman as a Xmas present.

 

I had assumed that it would be a graphic non-fiction account of the FLQ leading up to the October Crisis in 1970.  Instead, it illustrated the chaotic origins of the FLQ founded by Georges Schoeters, reconstructing the three main incarnations (and waves of terrorism) during the 60’s, up until the imprisonment of Pierre Vallières in 1968.  There was an epilogue illustrating a police raid in early 1970 of a secluded FLQ hideout in Prevost where they found a post-dated ransom letter of a planned kidnapping of US Consul Harrison W. Burgess.

 

It was a relief to see that Book 2 is in the works, which will go into the events leading up to the October Crisis, which is primarily what the public associates with the FLQ, including yours truly.  I was somewhat disappointed that I’d have to wait for at least another year for Book 2, but nevertheless, learning about the early beginnings of the FLQ was fascinating.  I suspect many people, Quebecers included, have little knowledge about the FLQ's early days.  First, it was composed of a fairly disorganized, motley group of disaffected young men.  Second, it was led by a Belgian immigrant, Georges Schoeters, who proved to be a bit of a coward after being arrested.  This is the kind of stuff that patriotic Quebec historians would probably rather sweep under the rug.

 

Author and illustrator Chris Oliveros took pains in making the meticulously researched account as objective as possible.  As Toula Drimonis wrote in the back blurb, “Oliveros reveals fascinating details of a group that, depending on which side you find yourself on politically, was either a ragtag team of terrorists or well-intentioned freedom fighters.”

 

Although I finished the main part of the book around the time I started reading The Decagon House Murders, the footnotes were really dense and interesting.  I wish I had discovered them while I was reading through the illustrated section, but this wasn’t a bad way to go about it either, as the flow wasn’t broken by the constant referencing.

 

It also wasn’t until I finished the book did I realize that author Chris Oliveros was the founder of Drawn & Quarterly and its publisher until 2015, when he stepped down to start writing this book!  So it took him about eight years to work on the project.  I just hope that it doesn’t take him another 8 years to release Book 2!  I’m assuming a lot of the research has already been done and he just needs to put it all together.  Some info I found interesting:

 

·       The footnotes really outline how much research Oliveros had devoted.  He even scoured obscure reference sources that didn’t age well, such as Terror in Quebec by prison psychiatrist Gustave Morf.  Despite its abundance of sweeping generalities (it’s clear he saw the FLQ as lowlife degenerates), Morf seemed to be the only researcher given full access to several incarcerated GLQ members, including François Schirm (a Hungarian immigrant who was part of the third wave that focused on military training in the woods).

·       I think because Pierre Vallières had infamously written Nègres blancs d'Amérique, I always thought of him as a Mathieu-Bock Coté of his time, which was based on not really knowing much about him at all.  Vallières was more concerned about class struggle and how francophone Quebecers were treated as second class citizens.  By 1971, he had denounced the FLQ’s use of violence and sought independence for Quebec via nonviolent means by co-founding the Parti Québecois. Even though he was accused of being a sellout by his former cohorts, he also became disillusioned with the PQ and his later years he foucs on other forms of activism, including LGBTQ rights, First Nations self-governance, and aid to war-town Bosnia. 

·       The book was based his account on a fabricated “lost” CBC documentary from 1975 containing fictionalized interview transcripts from real people.  According to Oliveros, while this narrative device is fictional, the actual content hews very closely to the facts”.

 

 ·       About a year after starting work on the book, he discovered that there was a long-forgotten 1975 CBC documentary on the FLQ, a three-hour TV special called “the October Crisis”, that met “a similarly mysterious fate”!  It did air once, for a single evening in October 1976, and was never broadcast again.  Unlike Oliveros’ fictionalized doc, the real TV special focused on the October 1970 kidnappings, mostly skipping over prior events from the 1960s.

 

·       I find it mind-boggling how easy it was to steal cases of dynamite when the underground Metro was being built.  FLQ members were able to descend the ladders down what was to become Sherbrooke Station and make off with three crates of “EXPLOSIFS”!

10. On the Far Side of the Mountain

By Jean Craighead George

9. The Decagon House Murders

By Yukito Ayatsuji

I first heard about The Decagon House Murders, and the genre of Japanese honkaku, from Olman.  The premise (and cool book cover) seemed very appealing:  a group of university students who are part of a Mystery Fiction Club get dropped off by boat to spend a week on Tsunojima Island, once home to a famous yet eccentric and reclusive architect, Seiji Nakamura. He had built the Blue Mansion where he and his wife resided, as well as the Decagon House, a ten-sided annex building that was primarily designed for amusement. 

 

Several months previous, a multiple homicide occurred on the island, with the Blue Mansion completely destroyed by fire.  The bodies of Seiji Nakamura, his wife (missing a hand!), their housekeepers, and the gardener’s wife were identified, but the gardener had apparently disappeared without a trace.  The case remains unsolved by police.  The uncle of a member of the Mystery Fiction Club had recently bought Tsunojima Island, so this gave the other members an “in” to visit the site and investigate the mystery of those recent events. 

 

The seven students use the still standing Decagon House as their home base.  The idea of a group of characters staying in a ten-sided house on a tiny island is genius, providing a cool location in which to set a locked room mystery. An illustration of the interior early on in the book's pages shows how the layout is designed:  a decagon within a larger decagon.  There are ten rooms that comprise the outer decagon: 7 guest rooms with the remaining 3 rooms as the entrance hall, kitchen and bathroom.  The main hall takes up the inner decagon and in the middle of the decagonal hall is a decagonal table with ten chairs.  There are even ten-sided plates and cups!  Also included in the book is an illustrated map of Tsunojima Island showing the location of the Blue Mansion ruins and The Decagon House. 

 

I love the concept of a Decagon House, and there are a number of artistic envisionings of Nakamura's decagonal curiosity in mangas and various book covers (shown above and below).

 

And I really enjoyed reading the novel, though I wasn’t able to figure out who the murderer was until the end.  As with most mysteries, it was slow going at first, as characters got introduced and the set up was established.  The narrative alternated between the students trapped on the island and the few characters on the mainland, three of whom received a mysterious letter, apparently from the ghost of Seiji Nakamura. 

 

 

 

I haven’t read very many of the classic mysteries, including And Then There Were None, from which The Decagon House was heavily influenced by, having only read one Agatha Christie book, Murder On the Orient Express.  As I had already noted:

 

“I always thought that part of the fun of reading murder mysteries is to guess who the culprit is based on what the investigator discovers and observes, but I find this limiting as you can only deduce based on what the author chooses to reveal in the narrative.  Thus, the reader always has an unfair advantage, especially if you’re dealing with an implausible story.”

 

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

 

 

 

This same limited omniscience also applied to The Decagon House Murders.  The plot was not as implausible as Murder On the Orient Express, but it did involve love triangles, secret affairs, illegitimate children, and of course, multiple murders. The author was very careful to mask the murderer (for both the backstory AND the present timeline) for the reader until he was ready to spring the surprise. It was very nicely done.  In hindsight, all the clues were there, though doled out very strategically, and I think if one took the time to analyze all the characters and the carefully revealed info, it’s possible to deduce who the mastermind was.  I only took a few moments to think about who the murderer could be, and my best guess was it could’ve been the First Victim, Orczy (only one of two females, the other being Agatha).  Orczy had a motive as she was good friends with Chiori (later revealed to be Seiji’s daughter) and was devastated by her death. If she were to take revenge, Orczy would’ve feigned her death and be in cahoots with Poe, the medical student who confirmed her death to the others (plus the monologue at the beginning was male).  No one else really looked at her body, so it was easy to keep herself confined to her room, yet she can go out the window to commit her nefarious deed.  Of course, when Poe died, I knew I was wrong, because author Yukito Ayatsuji was very careful to set things up to have the reader rule out the actual suspect.

 

First, you never knew the real names of the Mystery Club members, as they went by their famous author nicknames from the very beginning.  When it was revealed that six bodies were found, you then realized that it could be either Van or Ellery, but then Ellery’s body was identified.  So who was Van (Dine)?  And then shortly after, it was revealed to be the armchair detective, Kyoichi Morisu, who had a secret romance with Chiori. Then it launched into his POV, ie. his motives, him making sure to tell certain people he had opted out of going to Tsunojima Island, and then took great pains to hide the fact that he had been traveling back and forth between the island and the mainland to make it seem that he was always at each respective location to whomever he was interacting with.  As Van, he had to convince the other club members, who were sharp and observant mystery fans, that he was sick with a fever so that he could retire early to rest in his room. 

 

The one factor that the novel hinged on was that, even though it had occurred to the students that it was necessary to search each other’s rooms, to see if they were hiding anything, this never happened for whatever reason I couldn’t remember.  But this should’ve been a priority, especially after two of their members had died by strangulation and poison!  It seemed a little hard to believe that no one looked inside Van’s room this entire time.  One of them even remarked how odd it was that he locked his door when he gone to bed early that first night!

 

The Decagon House Murders has recently been adapted for a 2024 Japanese mini-series, and has received some decent reviews.  I may have to check this out now that I’ve read the book.  Olman also has no plans of keeping the book, so I'm holding onto it for now!

 

Some interesting info:

The Decagon House Murders is the debut novel of Yukito Ayatsuji, and the first volume of the House Series. A draft of the novel was originally submitted to the twenty-ninth Ranpo Edogawa Prize in 1983 under the title Island of Remembrance, but ultimately fell short. It was later published by Kodansha Novels with its updated title in 1987.

Although Souji Shimada's 1981 debut with The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is oftentimes credited as the first true shinhonkaku detective novel, The Decagon House Murders is widely given credit for launching the boom in shinhonkaku-style novels that came to dominate the 1990s. Many of the trademarks of the movement can first be seen in this particular title, such as metatextual references to classical detective fiction, as well as subtle nods to more contemporaneous writers.

8. My Side of the Mountain

By Jean Craighead George

I was in Grade 6 when I was first introduced to My Side of the Mountain while attending Kerrisdale Elementary.  I, along with my two friends Ellen and Etta, was a bit of a teacher’s pet.  Mr Hoffman often gave us lunch money to buy him a sandwich at the nearby convenience store on 41^st Ave.  Looking back, it seems a little cringey now, but Mr Hoffman did provide some great reading material.  He was the sort of teacher who wore a suit to school every day, so not sure how much input he had in choosing the books for the curriculum, as the theme seemed to be surviving alone in the wild.  The three books I recall were Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain. 

Over the years, I’ve acquired copies of Island of the Blue Dolphins and My Side of the Mountain (my faves of the three books), including a copy of Frightful’s Mountain.  I recently found a copy of On the Far Side of the Mountain so felt I could jump into MSofM as I want to revisit the theme of wilderness survival for a short story I’m working on and maybe follow it up with the sequel.

 

These three books, MSotM esp, inspired my brief obsession with running away and living off the forest during my adolescence.  I had spotted a wilderness survival book at the Kerrisdale Public Library and promptly borrowed it.  I remember filling up my Steno spiral pad (the ones using green paper - Gregg ruled with a centre margin line – good for supply lists and shorthand notation) with drawings and copious notes. 

 

During this phase, I’d often fantasize about running away from home and living off the land somewhere in remote BC.  Sam Gribley had the advantage of having legacy family-owned property to use as a home base - his great-grandfather’s abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains.  His motives were also different from mine – he had a true desire to live off the land, while I dreamed of getting away from my strict, oppressive parents.  I wasn’t happy growing up at home, so studying up on wilderness survival provided an outlet for my nerdy creativity and gave me something to distract myself from my depressingly cloistered situation.

 

Even at 12 years old, I knew the potential risks of a young girl traveling alone to a remote area of BC.  As an adult in the year 2025, My Side of the Mountain seems such an incredibly innocent and romanticized story of a 12 year old boy living like Davy Crockett in the Catskill Mountains.  It isn’t about whether Sam is capable of surviving on his own, or evading wild predators. Or how relatively easy it seemed to capture and train his falcon, Frightful, to hunt food for him.  Human predators also pose a potential threat. 

 

When Sam returns to his hollowed out hemlock tree, he finds a man there.  Hearing sirens earlier, he thought the man might be an escaped bandit, so he calls him “Bando”.  He turns out to be an English prof who got lost while hiking and decided to take a nap.  Sam and Bando become fast friends with Bando spending ten days with Sam helping him build a raft, make jam from the blueberries growing at the farm and carve whistles out of willow branches.  It goes to show how much innocence has been lost when someone like myself is surprised Bando didn’t take advantage of Sam in any way in the secluded forest.

 

Sam also steals deer carcasses from human hunters who have lost track of their prey.  I imagine a few of them would be mighty pissed and figure out that the rumours of a wild boy in the Catskills might be true, and start hunting for the kid.  But this never happens.

 

Then there’s the romanticisation of living off the land.  Not a word was used to describe how Sam deals with his own waste.  Does he dig a hole?  What does he use for toilet paper? Does he find a way to compost?  How does he keep his teeth clean?  He only got sick a couple times:  once almost succumbing to CO2 poisoning while sleeping in his tree from an unvented fire and another time from scurvy symptoms due to a lack of fresh greens in the late winter (quickly remedied with a hunger for rabbit liver).  He also never seems to injure himself, a miracle for a young boy living in the wild.

 

The book spends a fair amount of time describing the food Sam prepares and eats. He picks blueberries and strawberries that grow wild on his great-grandfather’s old farm.  He gathers wild onion and fragrant plants to add flavor to his meals, nuts and cattail tubers to supplement protein and carbs.  Learns how to make acorn flour, smoke fish and venison, and acquire salt from hickory sticks (when boiled dry they leave a salty residue).

 

Some of his meals include acorn pancakes topped with Bando’s blueberry jam.  Turtle soup.  Rabbit stew.  Pheasant pot pie.  Fish wrapped in leaves and baked in hot coals with wild rice. Boiled freshwater mussels with salt.  Then “take out meat. Eat by dipping in acorn paste flavored with a smudge of garlic, and green apples.”

 

For his first guest Bando, he prepares a feast:

 

“Brown puffballs in deer fat with a little wild garlic, fill pot with water, put venison in, boil. Wrap tubers in leaves and tick in coals. Cut up apples and boil in can with dogtooth violet bulbs. Raspberries to finish meal.”

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I enjoyed the food parts.  But the attention to detail could’ve also been paid to other important things.  For example, when Sam first set off for the mountains, he only had a penknife, a ball of cord, an ax, some flint and steel, and $40.  There was no mention of him acquiring more tools, but what did he use to cut up the deer into venison steaks to freeze for the winter?  Surely he didn’t rely on just his penknife and ax?

 

Sam’s parents are also praised for their unconventionality by allowing Sam such autonomy (though the mom does have concerns about being judged by normal society and by the novel’s end, the entire family leaves NYC to join Sam a la American Family Gribley). 

 

That being said, I can see why I loved My Side of the Mountain so much as a kid.  Despite the lack of useful info on how to survive four seasons in the Catskill Mountains and any sense of real risk, it was still a wonderfully written adventure story.  A true classic.  My daughter also read the book about a year ago, but as expected, it did not inspire the same sense of wonder and desire from her as it did me.  It was just lovely to revisit this book again after all these decades. 

7. Animal Farm

By George Orwell

 

6. Rebecca

By Daphne Du Maurier

 

 

5. House of Leaves

By Mark Z. Danielewski

I requested Hubs to get me House of Leaves last Xmas and got the Remastered Full Color Edition (2000).  Apparently, the Remastered edition gives a “fuller” experience and adds another layer of meaning.   

 

In Remastered Full Color Edition edition:

• Any iteration of the word "house" appears in blue, even in the blurbs section and the publication page where it mentions “Random House, Inc."
• The word "minotaur" and all crossed-out passages appear in red.
• There is one line written in purple, which is important because of what the color implies for the story.
• The pictures in the appendices are full color.
• There's a bit in the book written in braille with a translation in the footnotes.

 

In the two-color edition (with the doorknob cover):

• EITHER "house" appears in blue OR "minotaur"/crossed out passages appear in red. One or the other, not both. It's a gamble which you'll get.
• The line that is purple in the full color is not written in purple.
• The braille bit doesn't appear.
• The pictures in the appendices might be color or they might be black and white. Again, it's a gamble.

 

I’ve been curious about House of Leaves for some years, but its ambitious density and heft had seemed somewhat daunting.  As I delved more into horror fiction over the past few years, it was becoming apparent that House of Leaves was required reading if I was to be a true fan of the genre.  It’s got a bit of everything:  a 'haunted' house, super-natural horror, mystery, psychological thriller, unreliable narrator(s)… there’s even a love story.

 

If you get past the multi-layered experimental meta-fiction and epistolary complexity, there’s a very simple story at heart.  Johnny Truant, a disaffected 25 yr old in LA, discovers a chest full of scribbled notes and an unfinished manuscript left by his friend’s blind and elderly neighbour, Zampanò, who died of mysterious circumstances.  The manuscript focuses on "The Navidson Record", a documentary film directed by acclaimed photojournalist, Will Navidson.

 

"The Navidson Record" documents how Navidson and his family move into their new home in the Virginia suburbs.  They soon discover that their house is not normal, at least physically.  It started off as a puzzle - why was there a discrepancy of 3/4 of an inch between the inside and outside measurements of the house?  This seemingly small difference triggers Navidson's obsessive tendencies to find an explanation for these spatial discrepancies and sets in motion a series of increasingly unsettling events. The house then exhibits further anomalies, like a closet appearing where there was previously a blank wall.  A door appears in the living room revealing a dark and vast liminal space that is not physically possible if you stand outside the house.  When the house reveals itself to contain a seemingly endless labyrinth, Navidson contacts his estranged brother Tom and an old friend Reson to mount an exploration of its hidden dimensions. Navidson's obsession with the labyrinth leads him and his family into increasingly terrifying situations.

 

Navidson, Tom and Reston soon realize they are way in over their heads when the walls of the labyrinth start to shift and they barely find their way back “home” inside the “normal” confines of the house.  They hire a professional explorer, Holloway Roberts, and his two assistants, Kirby “Wax” Hook and Jed Leeder to mount a proper expedition armed with gear and camera equipment.  Needless to say, the expedition goes awry as the men get lost and Holloway goes crazy, a la Jack Torrance and goes on a bit of a rampage. 

 

House of Leaves is a bit of a sausage fest, but there are some sections devoted to Navidson’s long-time partner Karen and their strained relationship.

 

Zampanò's claims that "The Navidson Record" :

became an American cultural phenomenon upon its theatrical release in 1993, generating volumes of multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture. In support, Zampanò cites or quotes articles, journals, symposia, books, magazines, TV programs, and interviews, many supposedly dedicated to this film. Zampanò discusses not only Navidson's filmmaking techniques, but also segues into topics such as photography, architecture, Biblical studies, and radiometric dating, often interspersing overwhelmingly esoteric tangents, several of which devolve into nonsensical, page-long lists of only superficially relevant items. Though many of the academic works Zampanò cites appear to analyze The Navidson Record purely as a work of found-footage horror fiction, Zampanò's writing remains adamant as to its authenticity.

(from Wikipedia)

It should be noted that in the flyleaf, House of Leaves is authored by Zampanò with the Introduction and Notes by Johnny Truant.  There’s a contrast in mood and style between the Navidson and Johnny Truant sections.  There are the obvious tonal differences between the strained domesticity inside the house on Ash Tree Lane Virginia (portrayed via various media) versus Zampanò's dry academic writing style versus the slacker lifestyle of an assistant tattooist in an urban metropolis. 

 

Johnny Truant reminded me of the protagonist in The Cipher.  Within Nicholas, there already existed an existential emptiness when he came upon The Funhole in the dingey basement of his apartment building.  Nicholas hopelessly pined after the cold-hearted Nakota while Truant kept hooking up with Zampanò’s former readers and they all happen to be physically attractive.  Johnny became obsessed with Zampanò’s manuscript soon after he discovered the box full of his notebooks.  As he immersed himself in Zampanò’s world, it was akin to going down a rabbit hole, or the Funhole for Nicholas.  Both characters began to change (for the worse) as their obsession started taking over their lives, exerting a destructive toll on their mental and physically health.  

 

The book interweaves the text written by Zampanò and Truant.  There's also a third party, the “Editors”.  Visually and structurally, there's intertextual playfulness and cleverness aplenty.  It also plays heavily with footnotes.  Sometimes the footnotes take over the pages and there are even footnotes for the footnotes.

 

With an ever-present tension between what was supposed to real or fabricated, it seemed a given that the author must create a book where the text reflected this interplay, as well as the impossibility of the house on Ash Tree Lane.  At certain points, the text became moving pieces.  Some pages had only a few sentences while a page was completely blank except for one innocuous word.  When the labyrinth suddenly expanded, the text expanded with it, or contracted, etc.  At another point, you had to read the text backwards.  It was pretty neat.

In terms of conventional genres, there were elements of horror, mystery, and psychological thriller.  Most of that narrative was found in "The Navidson Record" (the text by Zampanò).  For me, those sections about the house on Ash Tree Lane were the most riveting parts from House of Leaves.  

 

I don’t think I’m alone in that the Truant sections were the least-liked in House of Leaves.  In one forum, a reader asked if they could skip over some of the more indulgent passages and someone else said that you should really try to stick through it and read everything. 

 

The narrative that was woven through "The Navidson Record" was a mixed bag.  The horror wasn’t really all that scary, though there were sections that were definitely peculiar or uncanny.  The love story was meh.  Some say, at its heart, House of Leaves was a love story.  But narrative mostly portrayed the strained relationship between Will and Karen, the typical famous artist/intrepid adventurer who cannot stay within the confines of domesticity for stretches of time. I really thought Navidson was going to fulfill his death-wish and be lost inside the house forever, but Karen finds Navidson in the end, his body weak and broken.  It made me think of Rochester in Jane Eyre.  The only way Karen & Navidson could be together was if Navidson was so crippled, he could not on any more adventures.

 

The mystery was the most gripping part for me, at least in the beginning, as I was wondered what the fuck was up with that house?  But I quickly realized the mystery of the house was the mystery of human nature externalized as a familiar structure.  And how the author was toying with his reader right from the start.

About a quarter into the book (not counting the appendices and index which also takes up a quarter of the book’s thickness), Navidson mentioned someone in his past named Delial.  The reader soon learns that Navidson became famous for a photo he took called “The Vulture and the Little Girl”.
Serendipitously, a couple of days before, I had learned about this very photo in my FB feed, a “real” photo taken by real-life photojournalist, Kevin Carter.  I even googled him so his story was fresh on my mind.
 
So right away I knew Navidson was based on Kevin Carter who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his a photo of a skeletal child stopping to rest while a vulture watched nearby, taken while he was documenting the 1993 famine in Sudan.  Even though the photo was known as “TheVulture and the Little Girl”, the child was later revealed to be a boy. In House of Leaves, the child was always a girl.
 
Four months after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, Carter died by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1994 at age 33.  Apparently, Carter received a lot of criticism about that award-winning photograph, but it seemed like PTSD, poverty and despair were also contributing factors to his suicide. His suicide note read:

I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken (a deceased colleague) if I am that lucky.

Although the text reveals that Navidson was based on a real-life person (another “proof” that Zampano had fabricated "The Navidson Record"), I found the Kevin Carter reference to be rather heavy-handed and almost in poor taste, as it exploited someone’s real-life tragedy.  There was a letter that Navidson wrote to Karen in Chapter XVII that made reference to Delial and tried to capture the deep pain he must have felt being complacent in the face of human suffering.  It echoed Carter's suicide note, felt phony and was the only big misstep (though I was only half-way through) in my immersion into House of Leaves.

 

Apparently, it took Danielewski a good ten years to write House of Leaves, and it shows in the denseness and complexity of the text.  But with such an ambitious scope, it was also uneven and unwieldy in parts.  

 

When I was close to finishing H of L, I was also looking at the colour printed end paper of the book and read the note apparently written by Zampano:

Appendix C:

Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children. Murder is a better word. Chad is scrambling to escape, almost making it to the front door where Karen waits, until a barrier in the foyer suddenly leaps forward and hews the boy in half. At the same time Navidson, by the kitchen reaches for Daisy only to arrive a fraction of a second too late, his fingers finding air, his eyes scratching after Daisy as she falls to her death. Let both parents experience. Let their narcissism find a new object to wither by. Douse them in infanticide. Drown them in blood.

Apparently, this is another clue that "The Navidson Record" was fabricated by Zampano/Danielewski.

Another head-slapping moment for me was on p.465 when Navidson was on his last Exploration #5.  His batteries and flares were dwindling and he had only one book with him to pass the time.  Guess which book it was. Fucking House of Leaves!  OMG.  When Navidson had no more light source, he started lighting matches so he could keep reading.  Before his last match burned out, he lit the pages from the book he had just finished reading...  You can’t get any more meta than this.  It's beyond meta - it’s the snake eating itself.  And it confirmed for me that House of Leaves was not only an elaborate exercise in meta-ness, but also an elaborate gimmick.

 

Overall, HoL was still a wonderfully layered and immersive book. It was clever, even brilliant in its playfulness and experimentation.  Without a doubt, it pushed the boundaries of print, text, structure, time, space, and fictional meta-ness.  The book itself was about the nature of our perceptions.  What was also brilliant was that House of Leaves itself, like "The Navidson Record", had generated its own amount of “multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture.”

 

There’s a reddit forum for House of Leaves fans.  One person has even compiled a list of all work, real and fake, referenced in House of Leaves.

 

My only disappointment was at some of the content, which was not as original as its format and execution.  Using Kevin Carter’s story and his photograph kind of cheapened the experience for me.  Johnny Truant reminded me too much of Nicholas in The Cipher. Kathe Koja's novel was published in 1991, so it's very possible that Danielewski would’ve been inspired by it when he was working on House of Leaves.

 

I even asked Google: Did The Cipher influence House of Leaves?

AI Overview:  The Cipher by Kathe Koja and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski share thematic similarities, particularly in their exploration of "malicious non-space". Both novels feature uncanny spaces that are not easily explained by traditional horror tropes of violation or wrongdoing. House of Leaves incorporates ciphers and codes, both within the text and in in the physical layout, mirroring the coded messages in Koja's The Cipher. 

 

Although I wouldn’t call myself a fan, I was without a doubt glad I got to experience House of Leaves.  It only took me two months and one week to finish it.