Some thoughts I had about House of Leaves
I've been reading House of Leaves recently. So far, I'm only about 50 pages in. Compared to my usual reading speed, that's a pretty glacial pace. Mostly, that's due to the writing - It's not rare to see words such as "amaurotic" show up when the author could have just as well written "blind". There's huge run-on sentences that end up with you forgetting how they started when you reach then end, and things are often expressed in the most flowery, purple-prose manner physically possible. The book having three seperate layers of narrative haphazardly interrupting each other doesnt help. Oh, and there's a ton of "would of's", which is by far the most infuriating misspelling possible in the english language, at least in my opinion.
You might think this is me critiquing the book. But honestly, no, this is exactly why I've been sticking around. Because having to read a page three times over in order to understand what the heck is written there, having to actively write things down to understand the plot - It's fun. I haven't really engaged this way with a book before. And it makes sense. The book is supposed to be this weird tome made by a guy slowly descending into madness created using a manuscript written by another guy slowly descending into madness written about a movie about a family slowly descending into madness. It being really hard to understand makes sense on a narrative level.
I've also never really had that experience of having to ocassionally refer to a dictionary to read something in english - It might be my second language, but i sort of just accidentally became really good at it by watching a ton of english youtube when i was bored. I never really had that language learning experience with english. So it's nice to sort of get to experience that now.