(with @endlessforms, who read the book with me)
{spiders} ppl think that House of Leaves is this super difficult to understand, experimental confusing book, but actually, the story of House of Leaves is very accessible and pretty easy to follow. johnny's stuff is the worst and most confusing, but the navidson record itself is just a straightforward story with a unconventional presentation
{endless} Dead Astronauts actually is what people think House of leaves is like. It is experimental, and confusing, and weird, and typographically strange. I think the synopsis for the book presented on the cover, on goodreads, etc, does the work a disservice, by making it sound like a marketable, conventional novel. This is not a conventional, or marketable work of art. The book often feels actively difficult to read or understand, on both a linguistic level and also on a storytelling level. not because of authorial incompetence, but as an authorial decision.
{spiders} i feel like i just read a book that is WAY above my reading level. but most of the time when i do that, it's because the english in the book is super old. this time it's because the english feels like it's from the fucking future. teacher, i deserve a pizza for finishing this book!!!
{endless} The prose is poetic and playful and experimental. It is also replete with sentences which just feel deliberatley concocted to be Wrong. Unusual words neither of us had heard of before reading this were common throughout the book. Like deliberate garden path sentences, hundreds of them. Strange and often arbitrary-feeling motifs run through the text. It can be hard to know how to interpret them. The overall feeling is that the textual terrain of the book mirrors the terrain of the ruined City. It is desolate and hostile and confusing and difficult to navigate.
{spiders} this is the pathologic of books!!!
{spiders} anyways. we both felt pretty challenged reading this book. it was like, a lot of active mental energy to read it in a way that i definitely don't have for every book, if i read too many books like this i would probably burn out hard on reading. but we are really fucking glad we read dead astronauts. we will be thinking about it for a while.
{endless} I fucking adore reading Jeff Vandermeer's writing. The Southern Reach trilogy had such a big impact on me (and spiders) and my dabbling in writing. It always gets the creative inspiration flowing for my own writing, it fills me with interesting ideas and words and ways of using language I had never thought of before.
{spiders} when i first sat down and started reading it i was in the mindset of it being a book where everything would make easy logical sense. but after a few pages i realized this was not the right headspace to approach this book. you kind of need to approach it with a acceptance of just being along for the ride, taking it in moment by moment and letting the recurring motifs mingle in your brain. you are having a dream by way of a book.
{endless} This book has departed from objectivity; it lives in the realm of myth and poetry and dream. I do not think there is some secret truth to decode here; if someone created a video that was like "Dead Astronauts: Explained" where they tried to uncover the secrets of the version numbers, the 10, the 7, the 3, the 0, or how the salamander language works, I would be highly skeptical of it. This is not a highly literal book. And yet, it is simultaneously a very literal book. It is a book about a strange fox and a queer found family and a homeless woman and a duck and a fish and climate change and trauma and numbers and capitalism. but these things are soaked in metaphor, in dream logic, in poetry.
{endless} You will achieve no great singular understanding by the end of the book, you won't reach the end of the book and suddenly everything makes sense. This is not a book that provides easy answers. It is also a very nonlinear story. Almost more like a series of very long short stories where they are all deeply connected to each other. I definitely liked some stories a lot more than others.
{spiders} anyways. dead astronauts is a really good book! i definitely recommend it with the caveat that it's a hard book to read, and if you're not having fun, you should take a break from it. also i really recommend getting it from the library if you can as a print book, because of the typographical stuff. i don't know if it would translate well to a ebook.