I found myself at a powerless Half Price Books in North Olmsted today. Apparently, a nearby car accident had taken out a section of the town’s electrical grid, but the employees were toughing it out as long as daylight remained.

I spotted a used copy of House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski among the dimly lit shelves and picked it up for a mere $9. Last week I was reading a copy while waiting for my girlfriend to finish up at Anthropologie, and even though I only finished the introduction, the memory of the book had been haunting me since.

There are some books that stick with you no matter how long it’s been since you’ve read them. Others are worthy of a simple: “Oh yeah, I read that” when asked and a small number need a few moments of mental ransacking to determine if you’ve even heard of them.

As my friend Adam describes, it’s easier to remember the feeling a book imposes than it is to actually recall specific details about the characters or plot. While reading, a particular book might feel like the greatest of all novels—never to be forgotten and recommended to everyone—until months later when you can barely remember the name of the protagonist. Regardless, there is something pushing you to talk about it fondly, even if the specifics are foggy. Conversely, details about your life at the time seem to have more clarity. As if reading this particular book caused life itself to become amplified and memories burned deeper and more permanent as a result. These are the books that never leave you. And you never want them to.

One such book is House of Leaves. I originally picked it up in 2000 during a period where I was hoovering books off the local Barnes and Noble’s shelves as long as they seemed slightly interesting or were well designed. House of Leaves fit both those criteria. It was an unconventional shape with every iteration of the word house in blue amongst chapter-spanning footnotes and pages with single words printed on them. In other words, a bibliophile’s dream.

For some mysterious reason, I didn’t get around to reading it right away. Which is strange considering how many books I devoured each patrol aboard the USS Alabama. I typically took a well thought out selection of around twenty titles to read over the sixty-odd days at sea and ended up trading other guys when I exhausted those. But not House of Leaves. It remained on the shelf and survived moves from Washington State to Upstate New York to Connecticut before I was talked into picking it up. Some remember the night they saw their favorite band play or shook the hand of their favorite athlete—the events that profoundly changed their lives. Me? I remember House of Leaves.

I won’t even attempt to explain the intricately beautiful entanglement of a plot. Instead, the way I usually pitch the book to potential readers is: “a story about a guy who finds a story about a fictional documentary about a filmmaker’s house that has slightly larger inner dimensions than outer and by the end of the book you have no idea what is truthful or if it’s all one story to begin with anyway”. In fact, I got so caught up in tying to unravel the mystery on my first read, I kept copious notes in a Debbie Gibson record-cum-notebook that started to resemble the frantic scribblings of main character Johnny Truant by the time I was done. I had become part of the circuitous narrative—an observer and a participant entrapped within Danielewski’s masterpiece.

Seriously, my own words will never do it justice. How could they? It’s a book like no other. Just go and read it for yourself. And when I say read I really mean experience because if there ever was a book that consumes you, it’s House of Leaves.

One word of caution. Be prepared to have everything else become tedious and mediocre by comparison in the wake of finishing it.