Book Description
Sam:
They were with us before Romeo & Juliet. And long after too. Because they’re forever around. Or so both claim, carolling gleefully:
We’re allways sixteen.
Sam & Hailey, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars, from Model T to Lincoln Continental, career from the Civil War to the Cold War, barrelling down through the Appalachians, up the Mississippi River, across the Badlands, finally cutting a nation in half as they try to outrace History itself.
By turns beguiling and gripping, finally worldwrecking, Only Revolutions is unlike anything ever published before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other.
Hailey:
They were with us before Tristan & Isolde. And long after too. Because they’re forever around. Or so both claim, gleefully carolling:
We’re allways sixteen.
Hailey & Sam, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars, from Shelby Mustang to Sumover Linx, careen from the Civil Rights Movement to the Iraq War, tearing down to New Orleans, up the Mississippi River, across Montana, finally cutting a nation in half as they try to outrace History itself.
By turns enticing and exhilarating, finally breathtaking, Only Revolutions is unlike anything ever conceived before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other.
Customer Reviews:
here's one for the middle of the road, for a book that by no means is ordinary........2007-10-10
i have no doubt that ever device/structure etc... is there for a reason. i believe the author to be a very intelligent human. i, however, do not feel that as my guide through this book he provided me with the sense/knowhow grounding/point of view to make it through. i can appreciate that everyone will undergo a singular experience--which perhaps speaks to how information/element packed the novel must be... but i cannot appreciate the fact that i must put so much trust into the author as to slog through x amount of pages before i suffer some sort of epiphany and decide that i have finally gotten it. i'm sure that moment-the click in the brain--the payoff, whathaveyou must be worth it... but... i keep reading eight pages faster and faster just so i can flip. the flip, and ribbon switch-up by far has been the most exciting part of this reading experience. i also listened to audio clips.. and felt sorely disappointed. the voices deadened the text, instead of breathing new life into two voices that on the page are starting to blend. it felt like lifeless spoken word set to trendy danny elfman music. i also suggested to someone, who seemed to suffer similar impedements as i am, that the novel should come in eight novellas... thereby making the flips and pieces easier to digest.
i don't know. it's ambitious. i wonder what comes next.
Only Revolutions.......2007-10-07
Wow. Mark Z Danielewski is a little over my head with this one. I read House of Leaves and loved it, but I just can't seem to get too far into OR. This book is like reading poetry.
Around and around in circles: a sorry follow up to House of Leaves.......2007-09-22
I loved "House of Leaves," I think it's really a masterpiece of experimental fiction, so I was excited when I heard that Danielewski had come out with a new novel. Likewise I wasn't put off by the experimental elements of the book: the duelling narratives written in either direction on each page, the list of historical tidbits from a given date.
But when you get past all these schticky elements there's not much to "Only Revolutions." Whereas "House of Leaves" had a fascinating story at its core and explored interesting themes, when you strip away all the gimicks "Only Revolutions" seems to be a prose poem about a love affair between two egomaniacal teenagers who drift apart and then find each other again and again (and who claim to have superhuman powers although I haven't found any evidence that this is actually the case) and which is set in no clear time or place.
I've tried a couple of times, but I couldn't for the life of me get into this story. I also found the stream-of-consciousness list of historical data on each page (+50% of which is stuff that I've never heard of before, and I was a history major) to be really annoying because I felt obligated to read through it even though it was really dry. In the end, I've just about written off this novel as unreadable.
way too many people are trashing this..........2007-09-05
look, if you are giving up at the sign of a similarity between the experimental style of this novel/piece, and his earlier work (House of Leaves); you are an idiot. why the hell should you be asked to look between the eyes of poorly spelled words and immature poetry, but beautifully written at the same time? because it is a setting. Danielewski took the concept of setting away from you to prove it! If you hate the book, shut up and read it again, this time pretend it isn't a Dean Koontz novel.
Magnificent.......2007-08-19
Disregard the other bad reviews about this novel/epic poem.
Yes at first the language and format is difficult, but who cares? Moby Dick is a hard read at first, but no-one denies its raw power and genius. And yes I use Moby Dick in the same paragraph as Only Revolutions because they are both among the greatest American novels ever.
The format is genius. The language is breathtaking and spellbinding. The truth and metaphors found therein are cutting. The style is quantum. And to top it off its simply fun to read once you allow the language pour into you. I recommend reading it aloud or at least quietly pronouning the words. It makes the narrative flow much better.
Amazon.com
Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.
Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record,
For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.
We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life.
Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi
Book Description
Years ago, when
House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.
The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is 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 their dreams.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Customer Reviews:
House of Leaves.......2007-10-07
Even if it takes you a season or a year to finish this book, you will be completely in awe (if not a little insane) by the end. Do it. It will enhance your perspective of writers.
Interesting read, but somewhat overhyped.......2007-10-06
I got pointed to this book because of its formatting (I'm a sucker for "different" books as well as interesting covers) and a friend said it's a great book.
The book has been discussed a gazillion times, so I won't repeat the story. I'll just tell you what I found strong and weak. A strength for me is the fact that there are quite a few sections that were pageturners for me. I also loved the section with the letters from J.T.'s mom, so I'll pick up the seperate book about them too. Very strong.
Weaknesses, to me, are by far and foremost the top one: The ending. Tension, excitement, it all builds up, and then doesn't explode into a big wow'ing thing, no, here it just escaped in one of those particularly foul smelling farts. Not a lot of noise, rather unimpressive and it doesn't smell too pretty either. ;) I know that more good writers suffer from not being able to end their stories, but this was rather disappointing to me. Another weakness, in my view, is the amount of material that's useless and can be skipped without getting you into trouble of missing anything. Like watching a soap opera once every 3 weeks, it's enough to know everything.
I like the formatting, although I can see that many find it overdone, especially when measured against the text being delivered. Other books with some non-standard formatting (the raw shark texts, microserfs) had a better content-to-format ratio. Don't get me wrong, this is not a bad book. I've read many many books that are worse. Unfortunately the ambitious presentation of the material leaves a little disappointed feeling with me after reading it.
Don't get drawn in by the hyped up reviews.......2007-09-29
I really wanted to like this novel. I paid about $20 for it. To the author's credit, it's certainly an ambitious novel, perhaps the most ambitious novel I've read for this decade. Perhaps part of the problem comes from Danielewski trying way too hard to come up with something creative and unique.
However, footnotes and the unusual way the words are actually arranged on the paper hardly make it beautifully written or even literary (it just wastes about a hundred pages of paper per printed copy, and that means that ultimately you're not paying an extra five dollars for more words, just black spaces). The fact that it is incoherent doesn't make it artistic.
While the story begins with an interesting concept, the storytelling (and I use that term somewhat loosely) is so detached that I don't really care who lives or dies. In fact, about halfway through the book I'm actually hoping that Danielewski will finish some of the characters off, just to get them out of the way (and maybe cut the book down some 200 pages). The entire book is very dreary without being intellectual, which leaves one feeling depressed but not frightened, and the book's portrayal of a spiral into madness isn't believable or engrossing.
The awed reviews this novel reeled in did not prepare me for 700 pages of wasted ink and paper. Maybe at the hands of a different writer this book might have something else. As it is, this might just be the most awful book I've ever read.
My favorite book!.......2007-09-23
Eeek! I love this book soooo much! It's splendidly artistic...literarially and visually. It is a labyrinth of a read, but it is so worth it. I feel like this is a great book for avid readers, but also for people who don't read as well. By that, I mean that I think it is good for people who like crazy movies like Vanilla Sky or any David Fincher films....if you read it, you'll know what I mean.
I love this book.......2007-09-10
Really, I love this book. It is not the scariest book I've ever read because I was broken as a child of the habit of being scared by movies and books and such. I watched and read too much so I can't judge the scariness. All I know is that I love this book. No monsters, ghosts, ghouls, murderers, none of that, just a house. Thats all. For those of you who do scare I imagine that what is contained in this book might scare you. This is an innovative horror tale. I love it.
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- Mergerstat Review Price to Earnings Ratios 2002 (Valusource Accounting Software Products)
- Metodos y Modelos Basicos de Planeacion Financiera
- Miller Gaas Guide 1995: A Comprehensive Restatement of Generally Accepted Auditing Standards (Miller Gaas Guide, 1995)
- Miller Gaas Guide 2003: A Comprehensive Restatement of Standards for Auditing, Attestation, Compilation, and Review (Miller Gaas Guide)
- Money Meter: Small Business Accounting with QuickBooks
- Original Pronouncements 1997/98: Accounting Standards As of June 1, 1997 : Aicpa Pronouncements, Fasb Interpretations, Fasb Concepts Statements, Fasb Technical ... Standards Original Pronouncements Volume 2)
- Payroll Records and Procedures
- Policies and Procedures Manual for Accounting and Financial Control
- Powernotes: Getting a Clear View of the Big Picture : Chapters 1-16 " A Teaching and Learning System for Use With Accounting 19 Edition
- Presenting Accounting Information to Management
Books Index
Books Home
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General
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Real Numbers: Management Accounting in a Lean Organization
Practical Lean Accounting: A Proven System for Measuring and Managing the Lean Enterprise
Performance Measurement for World Class Manufacturing: A Model for American Companies (Corporate Leadership)
Lean Thinking : Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated
Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos (2nd Edition)
Disappointing.......2004-08-20
