IT'S FUCKING HEREEEEEEEEEEE (HOUSE OF LEAVES )

[_ghost_]

Why does everyone keep coloring the word house blue?

It's a reference to the book! House of Leaves is about playing with the format of a novel. It's questioning what a novel even is, and it came out in 2000, so it's a response to the rise of the internet. You could think of it as a print equivalent to hypertext fiction; sections of a normal book flow completely sequentially, but House of Leaves often presents multiple timelines at once and each passage is connected to the rest of its story line by font. Sometimes text is rotated on a page, or footnotes will reference other footnotes that reference other footnotes that reference the first footnote, creating a closed loop that has you jumping back and forth between several pages. And then there's the use of color. The word house always appears in blue, and the word "Minotaur" as well as anything related to it is in red and struck-through. This is used to emphasize themes; the blue draws your attention to the word "house" every time it appears, and the red, struck-through passages make the Minotaur's presence clear even when he isn't mentioned by name. Sometimes it seems truly unrelated, but you know the author wants you to think about that passage in conversation with the other Minotaur sections because otherwise it wouldn't be marked this way.

There are different editions of House of Leaves; some only contain the blue (and all text that would be in red is instead in gray and also struck-through), some only contain the red (and the text that would be in blue is in gray), and some include purple in addition to the blue and red. I recommend the full-color edition.

It's definitely a book that sort of makes anyone trying to explain it sound kind of pretentious. But I promise it's genuinely very good. You will either love it or hate it, but either way the actual experience is interesting enough on its own.