Category Archives: Literature

“It was August, and the weather was sometimes stormy and sometimes nice... no matter what happened, it was only time on top of time, since everything is vanity and a chasing after the wind.” – Tove Jansson, ‘The Summer Book’

Even as I slowed my reading down to a few delicious pages a day, the ending of ‘The Summer Book’ came too fast, and now that I’m finished, I feel the sadness that sometimes accompanies the end of an enjoyable read, especially one that dovetails so perfectly and meaningfully with the current season at hand. I wasn’t ready for book, or summer, to finish, but one already has, and one is well on the way.

“Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.” – Tove Jansson, ‘The Summer Book’

“Wise as she was, she realized that people can postpone their rebellious phases until they’re eighty-five years old, and she decided to keep an eye on herself.” – Tove Jansson, ‘The Summer Book’

Marking a whiplash-inducing 180-degree turnabout from that beast known as ‘House of Leaves‘, this is my current reading material, ‘The Summer Book’ by Tove Jansson. It takes place on an island, which may have been more at home last summer when we were all about the island business. Summer being timeless, it works just as well this year – and in fact may be the respite we need right about now.

“Sometimes people never saw things clearly until it was too late and they no longer had the strength to start again. Or else they forgot their idea along the way and didn’t even realize that they had forgotten.” – Tove Jansson, ‘The Summer Book’

Having just taken the first turn of the season one month into its glory, it seems like a good place to reset and recalibrate as we eagerly anticipate the close of this Mercury in retrograde motion moment – it’s been a doozy, and there’s still a shadow period to overcome. We are never quite as out of the woods as we like to think we are, but we’re getting there.

“It’s funny about love,” Sophia said. “The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.”
“That’s very true,'” Grandmother observed. “And so what do you do?”
“You go on loving,” said Sophia threateningly. “You love harder and harder.” – Tove Jansson, ‘The Summer Book’

This poem is an excerpt from ‘House of Leaves’ by Mark Z. Danielewski, which has a haunted/haunting quality which is exemplified in this selection. It seems initially like a summer poem, albeit one with a dark side, but it turns into something much more sinister, the way summer sometimes reveals its hideous underbelly. Summer’s flowers only bloom when their roots have access to the dirt and muck and minerals. You can’t have one without the other – summer knows that better than anyone. The poem, then, to haunt your day… and night.

That Place

Summer broke on the backs of children

even though swings performed miracles

and breezes sang psalms.

For that summer, from the outskirts

of some far off even whimsical place

came the low resolute moo of a dragon.

A child, of course, could not recognize that fabled moo

or the serpentine tail close to her feet

wound up among the thistle and milkweed

like a hose.

Nor for that matter could she recognize

the starry white bone left upright in the sandbox

like some remarkable claw

or shovel.

Not when the sun was out and games continued.

Certainly not when there was summer love

and rootbeer.

But at dusk when the fog crept in,

thick and sweating

suggesting some kind of burning far off,

down over there,

(where someone once saw two eyes

– pale as October moons –

blink)

a child could know the meaning

of fall.

And that August, two weeks before school began,

some children went down to that place

and they never came back.

This book was recommended to me by someone whose taste I admire and respect, so I eagerly dove into it only to be driven back by daunting footnotes, multiple narratives, and an impenetrable darkness that was as intriguing as it was terrifying when I let my mind follow its dangerous course of descent. That made for one of the most challenging reads I’ve had in many years, one that haunted me at times in the best of ways, and one that I’m sure only gleaned a small percentage of what was intended.

‘House of Leaves’ was written by Mark Z. Danielewski with painstaking detail and wonderfully-intricate complexity, offering a multi-media maze of descriptive and sometimes meandering prose that fully engulfs the reader in a world of claustrophobic yet endless tunnels of possibility, darkness, terror and loss. It tells the tale of a house that contains a door leading to an endless space of darkness and seemingly-impossible expansive dimension, the family that has moved in and is experiencing this space, along with narratives of a documentary on the experience and those who have analyzed and been touched by the dangerous story in their own way. It’s a reminder of the lethal power of an idea when it gets seeded in the brain and begins to grow.

Like its labyrinthine subject matter, the book is a veritable deep-dive into multiple tunnels and narratives, each winding along a sketchy edge where what is real or possible pushes against what we thought we understood to be impossible. At times, I found it difficult to follow, but rather than give up, I pushed through, taking the words and the footnotes as they came, being sure to read everything, even when it didn’t seem to make sense, and even by the end I’m not entirely sure if I got anywhere near to everything that was expressed. That seems to be part of the point too, and perhaps if I’d come closer to truly understanding it I’d be a little closer to a darkness my heart might not find comfortable or enjoyable. There’s enough darkness in the real world to more than adequately deliver such dangers. This book is an entertaining glimpse into the mysteries of the mind, and all that they might unleash if you’re not careful.

Narcissus: “May I die before I give you power over me.”

Echo: “I give you power over me.”

A recent reading recommendation, ‘House of Leaves’ by Mark E. Danielewski, is proving to be both a challenge and an unexpected pleasure. It’s always a crap shoot when someone who knows me makes any sort of suggestion on a book or movie or show – especially if they boast that they think I will love it. Perhaps it is my contradictory nature that immediately sets up an internal bias against what people assume. Perhaps I’m just a dick who thrives on not being known or understood, a hardcore asshole whose nature has embraced its antagonistic fury.

A kinder reading of myself indicates I might simply be unpredictable, and very specific in what I like – it’s why I’ve never gotten into the ‘recommended listening’ predictions in places like Spotify – just because I love Madonna’s ‘Express Yourself’ does not necessarily mean I like Paula Abdul‘s ‘Straight Up’. In most ways, I prefer to be unknown. Despite all the supposedly-revealing things I’ve put on full-frontal display here over the decades, I’ve kept a surprisingly vast part of my life private and unseen. If you think you know, you probably don’t.

“… I’ve come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.” – Mark E. Danielewski, ‘House of Leaves’

Once in a while, though, someone makes a suggestion for something that totally hits my sweet spot, which is the case with ‘House of Leaves’. It checks off most of my preferred boxes: challenging, ambiguous, infuriating, thrilling, mysterious, gritty, and disturbing.

The storytelling here is steeped in enough convincingly-academic structure to effectively immerse the reader in the impossible possibility that it might be real. More insidious is the way it might wreak havoc with the reader’s head, and once certain rooms in the mind are cracked open, you can never completely close them again – they remain there, holes of darkness, who knows how deep they go, and in the infinite capacity for black emptiness lies the seed of self-destruction just perilously within and without of reach.

“We all create stories to protect ourselves.” – Mark E. Danielewski, ‘House of Leaves’

Each chapter begins with the narrator rising very early in the morning and lighting a fire to start his day. ‘A Box of Matches’ by Nicholson Baker is my current book, and I’ve been taking my time getting through it because it’s that leisurely and enjoyable. Baker is the author of one of my favorite teen-reads, ‘Vox’, which is actually quite a sexually-adventuresome adult novel, but I’ve always been more mature than one would believe. In high school, I’d stay up late at night, a single reading lamp lighting the book and surrounding bed on which I laid, and I’d imagine the world of words, late-night conversations, and adult maneuvering as I fitfully twisted and turned beneath the covers.

‘A Box of Matches’ is a far-cry from the erotic fiction of ‘Vox’ and much more resonant with a fifty-year-old making his way in the winter of 2026. It’s not without underlying tension, the way most of life after the midway point comes with the possibility of peril and loss around every corner. It’s a comfort as well, which is the point of any good winter read.

“I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of a man I had hoped I might be.”
~ Nicholson Baker, ‘The Mezzanine‘

By William Shakespeare

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

“Out of our need we patronize our artists, we flirt with our poets, we petition our architects: Give us your lusty colorful world. Signal to us a state of being more richly steeped in purpose and satisfaction than our own. Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impasti of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can’t create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don’t in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.” – Gregory Maguire, ‘Mirror Mirror’

“The human mind – we have come to observe – tricks out distinctions in principles of opposition. A man more foul will likely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow’s mite. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.

Perhaps that is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a mirror, humans see that the other one is also them: the two are the same, one one. The menace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits  with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves! And so we had made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned.” ~ Gregory Maguire, ‘Mirror Mirror’

“Yet the world was a spectacle, its own old argument for itself. Endlessly expounded with every new articulation of leaf and limb, laugh and lamb, loaf and loam. Surely there was something in the world lovely enough to counter the dread of being alone, a solitary figure untroubled by ambition, unfettered by talent, uncertain of a damn thing?…

The colossal might of wickedness, he thought: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.” ~ Gregory Maguire, ‘Son of a Witch’