I didn’t love the writing style at first (actually still isn’t something I would say I personally like) but I also can’t look away from it. It feels like someone’s holding my hand and forcing me to witness something and the feeling of the book persists even as I’m going throughout my day.

Do love when it feels like an author has written a book for themselves.

Reading through this and I feel like this quote from Edward Said's Orientalism is always relevant:

"The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. An Orientalist is but the particular specialist in knowledge for which Europe at large is responsible, in the way that an audience is historically and culturally responsible for (and responsive to) dramas technically put together by the dramatist. In the depths of this Oriental stage stands a prodigious cultural repertoire whose individual items evoke a fabulously rich world: the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, Astarte, Isis and Osiris, Sheba, Babylon, the Genii, the Magi, Nineveh, Prester John, Mahomet, and dozens more; settings, in some cases names only, half-imagined, half-known; monsters, devils, heroes; terrors, pleasures, desires. The European imagination was nourished extensively from this repertoire: between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century such major authors as Ariosto, Milton, Marlowe... drew on the Orient's riches for their productions, in ways that sharpened the outlines of imagery, ideas, and figures populating it."

1.440-590 and 1.780-781 in particular from Book 1.