House of Leaves, on and off for the last year. The book is infuriating and stupid, but it's one of those things that I committed to and I have to see it through to the end.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, the book is several different narratives layered on top of each other; it's a book about a guy who wrote a story about a movie about a haunted house. The haunted house parts are entertaining and well-written, though all the fake footnotes are more annoying than clever, and I learned after the first two chapters to just skip them.
The fictional character who is transcribing this story about the haunted house is named Johnny, and his story is a secondary narrative detailing how his transcription is turning his life upside down. These are the parts of the book that induce severe bouts of eye-rolling and page skimming, because they're written in a way that borders on blunt sexual escapism. I'll read three pages about this haunted house full of tenebrific, non-euclidian hallways containing untold horrors, then a jarring tonal shift as I'm treated to yet another chapter about what bar skank Johnny last boinked in explicit detail. I'm supposed to believe that every girl this guy meets, no matter who they are, wants to fuck him; a complete stranger? Then it's paragraph after paragraph of just pure porn.
It's dumb, and the writer better be going somewhere with it, because I'm getting sick of reading five pages of totally unnecessary wankery just to find that one little hidden detail that actually pertains to the main story. It's like eating an entire box of cereal in one sitting just to get the shitty little plastic prize at the bottom. Over and over again.
Last edited by Sekto Springs; 01-14-2013 at 04:11 PM..
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