Who else has read the entire thing and what are your thoughts on it?

Who else has read the entire thing and what are your thoughts on it?

Bad and boring

I flipped through it once and saw super cool wacky formating like upside down sentences on every other page and thought 'oh jesus the entire book is going to revolve around this stupid gimmick isn't it'

currently 150 pages into this and it's feeling like a massive waste of time

The layout gimmicks are too much. Unfortunate, because the story is pretty great, especially the Navidson parts

I did get the feeling for the dark never ending stairwell and the guy who found it going around the bend.

I don't think I have completely finished it after trying it two or three times though because I got sick of the whole format.

Any one know of any books sort of like it in terms of making you feel like you are in that creepy environment

like you
it's the other way around, the entire gimmick revolves around one concept explored in the plot
keep reading, you're effectively 1/2 there
How are the gimmicks "too much"?
It takes like a week at the absolute maximum to get through it. Most actually Veeky Forums people could get through it in a day, without too much of a hassle.

I liked it. It wasn't a hard read and the formatting works really well for the whole book I think. Sometimes the gimmick does get old and the johnny sections are distracting most of the time even though it is supposed to add to the theme, a lot of the Johnny sections feel heavy handed with what they were trying to do. The actually house scenes were very good with imagery and I did get that weird sense of empty unending space that was really uncomfortable.

>"too much"
Can this really be reduced further?

Should I pick it up this spooktober?

>read it and really like it
>"oh cool I'll check out his other works"
>fifty year sword is pretentious wank
>only revolutions is the most pretentious wank I've ever encountered
>the familiar series is too boring to even be considered pretentious wank (though it is)
>look up interviews of him
>he's a Yale scumbag who wears fedoras and is obsessed with cats
utterly ruined it for me desu

I think if someone isolated The Navidson Record and normalized the format, it would be spookino.

I read it a while back in community college and marked it up with really terrible attempts at incorporating my own spooky fictional narrative about my experience reading the book. Even going so far as to remove passages containing certain words. I gave up about 70 or 80 pages in. All the blank pages have an X that gains another line for each blank page until eventually the blank pages are entirely blacked out. When I went to lend the book to a friend I even added in a "Hi Daniel" spooky line a couple hundred pages into it, but I think he gave up before getting that far because I basically straight up ruined the text and made much of it unreadable. It was pretty cringy and actually contributed to my current dislike of the book since I could not replicate its success at being spooky.

If you guys read it don't make my mistake.

Here's your reason what Derrida has been popping up all over lit lately. october and this book

absolute filth

Thank you for the (you) me

No problem

I tried reading it before becoming self aware of the fact that I am a brainlet. I will probably give it another shot after I improve my reading skills. Until then, I am reserving judgement

Gimmick sucked, story sucked.

The favorite book of non-readers everywhere

I liked the exploration bits, but the rest was dumb. Stupid fucking hipsters thinking drugs and mental breakdowns are "deep"

Finished it over the course of the week between Christmas and New Year last year, got sick with tonsilitis and had to be admitted to hospital the day before NYE, finished it there, was a pretty good environment to finish it in, IV antibiotics are man's greatest invention. Thought it was pretty good, wonderfully imaginative and pretty formally innovative in a way that makes sense, form matching content and all that...
I don't think the book is a game changer in terms of the canon, but it's certainly a good story with some amount of thought put into it.
Fuck the rest of Danielewsky's books though, utter trash.

>How are the gimmicks "too much"?
Put it this way- if you kept the general conceit, themes and story, and removed shit like pages that included literally one or two words, the literary world would treat it much more fondly. The typography tricks make it hard to cast a fair aesthetic judgement on it.

Gonna disagree with Veeky Forums and say I actually enjoyed the gimmicky typography. In fact I'm reading The Familiar right now, it's also gimmicky but not nearly as well executed as HoL