I bought a new book last night: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. And by “new”, I mean new to me, not new as in it just came out. It apparently was published in 2000 but I just now heard about it (on Reddit, actually) and got intrigued so I bought it. Folks on Amazon were saying it’s the scariest book they’ve ever read, et cetera, and folks on Reddit said it’d be impossible to make into a movie. It’s supposed to be some crazy postmodern book and I didn’t even know what that meant; I now think I have an inkling just by flipping through the book when I picked it up at the store. There are pages with only a line of text, pages with square cut-outs missing from the paragraph, narrow columns written backward, chunks in German and Italian but the majority is in English, and so on. Apparently the book is supposed to be self-aware and it’s about a self-aware house. So, postmodern = freaky layout and ideas? Anywho, I’m enjoying it so far, though I like Zampanò’s book about the Navidson family more than Johnny’s three-page footnotes. So far, Johnny is a pretty boring character to me, telling lies to girls in bars and rambling about his water heater. I’m more interested in the Navidson family because of their freaky house; I like haunted-house books, especially The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and The Shining by Stephen King.

The name of the book, “House of Leaves,” seemed familiar to me but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Then I noticed on the back the word “Poe” and it looked like the same logo the singer Poe uses but I thought it was a coincidence. Then I noticed the word “Haunted” in quotes above the logo, and that’s a song by Poe that I love (and to which I am currently listening) and thought “okay, there’s got to be a connection here.” Then when I started reading the book and saw the phrase “five and a half minute hallway” I just had to check into it. I’d never heard that phrase before except on Poe’s album “Haunted”: there’s a song titled 5 ½ Minute Hallway. Turns out the author, Mark Danielewski, is Poe’s brother and her album “Haunted” is meant to parallel the book House of Leaves. Neato.

Now I had the album “Haunted” back in high school and loved it but, like a dork, gave it away to a friend and all I have left are crappy MP3 rips. Even worse, several of the tracks on the album are dialogue and I didn’t care about them at the time so I didn’t rip them from the CD. Well, I’m thinking those tracks might be interesting now that I’m reading the book, and I wanted better quality audio than 128K, so I re-bought the album on Amazon MP3 just now. It’s nice to be rehearing it. As usual, I debated between getting it off iTunes or Amazon MP3. Both had the 18-track album with the extra Hey Pretty remix, but Amazon offered it for $8.99 while iTunes had it for $9.99. I’ve written about this before, but iTunes often loses out to Amazon for me when it comes to buying MP3s, all due to price.

I got P.S. I Love You in on Netflix yesterday and, for the life of me, I don’t know why. I mean, I intentionally put it on my Netflix queue, but I dunno why. I don’t normally go for romance movies and now poor old Jon’s going to sit through it with me, haha. Speaking of movies he’ll have to sit through, I’ve already told him that he may have avoided seeing New Moon in theaters with me, but he won’t get out of watching it when it comes out on DVD. It’s already in my Netflix queue, in fact. Listen at me, saying I don’t go for romance movies and then saying I’ll inflict New Moon upon my boyfriend! Let me clarify: I enjoy the Twilight movie series because I like the book series, even though the movies are really pretty terrible. Anyway, I’ll now discontinue this line of discussion since your opinion of my Twilight-liking intellect has sunk through the floor… In other news, the next movie on my Netflix queue is The Machinist!