The Challenge of Reading "House of Leaves"

My daughter-in-residence gave me a copy of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski today. I was on Amazon.com earlier and consider ordering a copy off of my wish list, so her purchase (in a used bookstore) was fortuitous. The book appears just as daunting as it did the first time I borrowed a copy but never read it. I did what I usually do when facing something that stymies me. I went to Wikipedia. Here's the first thing I read.

Ergodic literature is a term coined by Espen J. Aarseth in his book Cybertext—Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, and is derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning "work", and hodos, meaning "path". Aarseth's book contains the most commonly cited definition:

In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.

I happen to be a big fan of having no extranoematic responsiblities while reading. I excel at the trivial effort of eye movement while reading, and do a great job of the periodic and arbitrary turning of pages while reading. ( I'm not used to bragging so I'm blushing.)

I hope an occasion arises, sometime soon, for me to throw around the term "Ergodic literature" at my writing group. They'll think I'm just making shit up.

Barr Lake, Colorado