Dear Read Hard!, Sorry again for the delay, but...

Dear Read Hard!,

Sorry again for the delay, but as you know, we have wrapped up Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin,” and are moving on to our next book. If you have any other thoughts or reviews you wish to put up, feel free to do so during the next few days. As for the next book, as something of a late reaction to Halloween, we have chosen to read Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves.”

It’s a work notorious for genre-bending, experimental formatting, and exercising effective scare-tactics for those who dare read it, but also pulls them in so that they cannot put it down. A mouthful, yeah, but I think it’s a well-deserved reputation. I think the history behind the novel’s really interesting as well, but I’ll save that for another post.

A summary from the novel’s jacket:

“The story [… focuses] on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all of their dreams.”

Are you intrigued yet?

Because “House of Leaves” is pretty hefty, we’ve chosen to block off the entire month of November for it, with a possibility of extending it, in case the need arises. To also address the wonky schedule, we might also take on a short work before the year ends, then go on hiatus until the beginning of January 2011. If you have any ideas or suggestions for the next book, please feel free to shoot us a line. Ideal titles are those that generate actual discussion and (preferably) are easier to find.

I’ve taken photos of my copy in case you want to see just how insane the format of this work is. It’s probably pretty easy to find online (since it circulated around the Internet for a while) but I have a feeling you’re going to want to have a copy of this book. A laptop is going to be difficult to snuggle with under the covers, I think.