10 books with unique concepts (that will blow your mind)
Summary
TLDRThis video script explores ten unique and mind-blowing books that break traditional literary conventions. It delves into works like 'House of Leaves' with its ergodic literature, 'Gadsby' which omits the letter 'e', and 'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov, a complex narrative within a poem. Other titles include '253', a snapshot of London life through 253-word portraits of Tube passengers, and 'Hopscotch', offering multiple reading paths. The script also covers 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler', a metafictional frame story, and 'Cain’s Jawbone', a challenging word puzzle. It concludes with 'Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age', a single-sentence narrative, and 'Gödel, Escher, Bach', a dense exploration of recursion and consciousness, alongside 'S', a mysterious, layered narrative by JJ Abrams.
Takeaways
- 📚 The video discusses 10 unique and mind-blowing books with innovative concepts and twists.
- 🏠 'House of Leaves' is an ergodic literature that requires the reader's effort to traverse the text, with unconventional page layouts and multiple layers of narration.
- 🚫 'Gadsby' is a 50,000-word novel without the letter 'e', an example of a lipogram, showcasing the author's constraint on language to tell a coherent story.
- 🎨 'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov is a complex work with a 999-line poem and commentary that reveals the character of the commentator, Charles Kinbote.
- 🚇 '253' is an internet-originated novel that portrays a fictional London Tube ride, giving each of the 253 passengers a 253-word literary portrait.
- 🎲 'Hopscotch' offers a non-linear reading experience with 155 chapters, allowing readers to choose between a chronological or a 'hopscotch' reading order.
- 📖 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' is a meta postmodernist narrative that plays with the reader's expectations, featuring a frame story with 10 different novels.
- 🔍 'Cain’s Jawbone' is a challenging murder mystery puzzle with only four known solutions, requiring the reader to reorder pages and solve riddles.
- 🎭 'Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age' is a short book written in one long sentence, reflecting the author's unique 'palavering' style.
- 🔗 'Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid' explores the concept of 'strange loops' across various disciplines, linking mathematical theory with art and music.
- 🎭 'S' is a collaborative work by Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams, featuring a fictional narrative within a novel, complete with interactive elements like postcards and marginalia.
Q & A
What is the unique feature of 'House of Leaves' that made it famous?
-'House of Leaves' is famous for being the first commercially successful example of ergodic literature, which requires a non-trivial effort from the reader to traverse the text, including unique text presentation, order, and design.
How does the book 'Gadsby' challenge the use of the English language?
-'Gadsby' is a 50,000-word novel that excludes the most commonly used letter in the English language, 'e'. The author avoided not only the letter 'e' but also all words containing 'e', making it a significant lipogram.
What is the core element of 'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov?
-'Pale Fire' is centered around a 999-line poem of the same name written by a fictional poet, John Shade, with the book including a foreword, index, and commentary by another fictional character, Charles Kinbote.
How does the novel '253' represent its story?
-'253' tells the story of a fictional Tube ride in London, with each of the 253 passengers on the train receiving a literary portrait consisting of exactly 253 words, encapsulating life in the mid-90s.
What makes 'Hopscotch' by Julio Cortázar a unique reading experience?
-'Hopscotch' offers two ways to read the book: chronologically from chapter 1 to 56, or as a second book starting at chapter 73, which involves jumping around chapters and revisiting parts of the 'first book' in an extended context.
What is the narrative structure of 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'?
-The book is a frame story with ten chapters, each divided into two sections. The first part is written in second person, addressing the reader's actions, while the second part presents a different novel in each chapter.
What is the puzzle in 'Cain’s Jawbone' and how many people have solved it?
-'Cain’s Jawbone' is a murder mystery where the pages are in the wrong order, and the reader must determine the correct sequence and predict the names of murderers and victims using clues within the text. Only four people have solved it.
How is 'Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age' distinct in its writing style?
-'Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age' is written in one long sentence, showcasing the author's unique method of 'palavering', where characters ramble on in monologues for hours.
What are the three main subjects of 'Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'?
-The book focuses on mathematician Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, exploring the concept of 'strange loops' in relation to consciousness and free will.
How is the book 'S' by Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams designed to enhance the reading experience?
-Designed to look like an old copy of a fictional novel 'Ship of Theseus', 'S' includes worn pages, library stamps, stains, and supplementary material like maps and postcards that create a 'real' feel, despite being entirely fictional.
Outlines
📚 Interactive and Conceptual Literature
This paragraph introduces a video showcasing ten books with unique concepts and twists. It highlights 'House of Leaves' as an example of ergodic literature, requiring effort from the reader to navigate its unconventional text presentation. The book features multiple layers of narration and an interactive reading experience. It also mentions 'Gadsby', a lipogram novel that excludes the letter 'e', and 'Pale Fire', a novel by Vladimir Nabokov that presents a poem with commentary revealing hidden character studies.
🚇 Literary Portraits and Non-Linear Narratives
The second paragraph discusses '253', a novel that provides literary portraits of 253 passengers on a London Tube, capturing life in the mid-90s. It then describes 'Hopscotch', a book with a non-linear structure that allows for multiple reading paths, exploring themes of love, liberty, and life. 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' is introduced as a postmodernist frame story with chapters divided into two sections, one addressing the reader's experience and the other presenting a different novel each time.
🕵️♂️ Puzzle Mysteries and Unusual Storytelling
This paragraph covers 'Cain’s Jawbone', a murder mystery puzzle that has only been solved by four people, requiring the reader to reorder pages and solve clues within the text. 'Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age' is highlighted for its unique single-sentence structure, telling the life story of an elderly man. The paragraph concludes with a mention of 'Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid', a complex book exploring the concept of 'strange loops' in various fields, and 'S', a layered narrative by Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams, involving a fictional novel and annotations by two students.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Ergodic literature
💡Fourth wall
💡Lipogram
💡Pale Fire
💡253
💡Hopscotch
💡If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
💡Cain’s Jawbone
💡Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
💡Gödel, Escher, Bach
💡S
Highlights
House of Leaves is an ergodic literature that requires active reader participation through its unique text presentation and design.
The book features multiple layers of narration, including Johnny Truant's story, the Navidson Record, and a documentary within the manuscript.
Gadsby is a 50,000-word novel that omits the letter 'e', an example of a lipogram.
Pale Fire is a novel that presents a 999-line poem by a fictional poet, with commentary by another fictional character, Charles Kinbote.
253 is a novel that provides a 253-word literary portrait for each of the 253 characters on a London Tube ride.
Hopscotch offers two reading paths: a chronological read and a non-linear 'hopscotch' through chapters.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a postmodernist frame story with chapters divided into second-person narrative and a varied 'book within a book'.
Cain’s Jawbone is a murder mystery presented as a jigsaw puzzle with pages in the wrong order.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is a short book written in a single, long sentence, reflecting the author's 'palavering' style.
Gödel, Escher, Bach explores the concept of 'strange loops' through the works of the titular individuals and its implications on consciousness and free will.
S is a novel with a complex narrative structure, including annotations in the margins by two fictional students and supplementary materials.
House of Leaves has gained a cult following for its interactive and deeply layered reading experience.
The author of Gadsby avoided the 'ed' suffix and used constructions with 'do' and 'did' to convey past tense actions.
Pale Fire can be read in various ways, allowing readers to engage with the poem and Kinbote's commentary in a non-linear fashion.
253 captures the essence of life in mid-90s London through brief yet insightful portraits of Tube passengers.
Hopscotch's unique structure invites readers to explore different paths of the narrative, enhancing its philosophical themes.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler plays with reader expectations and the concept of reading itself through its meta-narrative structure.
Cain’s Jawbone challenges readers with a puzzle that requires determining the correct page order and solving a murder mystery.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age provides a humorous, breathless narrative that reflects on love, time, and societal changes.
Gödel, Escher, Bach is a dense, interdisciplinary exploration of recursion and its relevance to various fields, including artificial intelligence.
S combines a mysterious narrative with interactive elements, offering a rich, immersive reading experience for fans of intricate storytelling.
Transcripts
Whether it's video games, movies or books.
I personally love when the media I'm consuming thinks
outside of the box, when it tries to break the so-called fourth wall or has a unique spin to it.
In this video I want to show you 10 of these books with unique concepts and twists that
will blow your mind.
House of Leaves.
Probably the most well-known book on this list
House of Leaves became famous for being the first commercially successful example of so-called
ergodic literature, describing a form of text which requires a non-trivial effort of the reader to
traverse it. In the case of House of Leaves, the text presentation, order and design become part
of the author's vision and expression.
Some pages contain just a single word, at times the reader has
to turn the book on its head to continue reading.
Sometimes we're switching between different
narrators or layers, sometimes we're reading Footnotes of Footnotes of Footnotes.
House of Leaves is one of the most interactive books out there
in that it requires of the reader a certain amount of attention and willingness to
become part of its interactive reading experience.
The story itself also contains multiple layers of narration.
The top layer follows the first person narrative of young
tattoo-artist Johnny Truant who's in search for a new apartment to live in.
He gets wind of a vacant apartment,
formerly lived in by a recently deceased blind, elderly man called Zampanò.
In his apartment,
Johnny finds a mysterious manuscript, the so-called Navidson Record which acts as a book's second layer.
At some point the, manuscript describes a film documentary about the Navidson family, who
used to live on Ash Tree Lane.
This documentary then described in manuscript acts as the book's third layer.
Over the years, House of Leaves gained a cult following, as it's an interactive and deeply
layered reading experience and it also invites the reader to start the experience over and over again
in search for new clues and breadcrumbs you might have missed out, on preceding read-throughs.
Gadsby
This book does not contain the letter 'e'.
Yes, you've heard that right.
Gadsby is a 50 000 word
long novel which leaves out the most commonly used letter in the English alphabet.
Not in the sense that he just prints words without the letter 'e'-
rather: the author avoided all words that contains this letter altogether.
Works of fiction with this concept are called lipograms and Gadsby is one of
the longest and earliest lipograms out there.
The book was written in the mid-1930s and to achieve
this goal, the author had to tie down the 'e' key on his typewriter to avoid slip-ups.
According to him,
the most difficult task was to avoid the 'ed' suffix of past tense verbs, like in 'I walked'.
He would try to circumvent these instances by using a lot of constructions with 'do' and 'did', like 'I did walk',
for example. He surprisingly still managed to describe difficult sceneries and objects despite
this obstacle, for example a detailed description of a horse-drawn fighter engine is made without
using the words horse, fire or engine.
As you can see, the author went to great lengths to still tell
a coherent story. In it we are following 50 year old John Gadsby, who is alarmed by the decline of
his hometown Branton Hills and therefore rallies the city's youth to build civic spirit and improve
the living standards of his community.
The book starts around 1906 and continues throughout The
First World War, the prohibition era and Warren G. Hardings administration as President
of the United States.
As author Ernest Wright had been so very imaginative with the English language
and grammar, the book therefore reads a bit messy at times and the language is a bit forced.
Still Gadsby is a literary unicorn.
It was unique for its time and is still one of very
few lipograms of this size and ambition out there.
Pale Fire
this book is written by the same author
as the famous novel Lolita, Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. I'm a little bit resistant to call this a
book in a common sense, because Pale Fire is in its core a poem of the same name, 999 lines long,
written by a fictional poet called John Shade. Pale Fire the book then, as many others, has a foreword,
index and commentary attached to it, written by yet another fictional character, called Charles Kinbote,
who used to be John Shades colleague, editor and neighbour. Kinbote is a scholar and known on campus
is a bit of a shady figure, but how far would he go, what secret is he hiding?
It is only throughout this commentary and importation of John Shade's poem
that Kinbote reveals perps more than he should be.
Pale Fire is seen by many as a masterpiece as it's essentially a character study hidden within
the often times most boring parts of many other books, the foreword, the footnotes and the commentary.
The book can be read in many different ways, either in a linear or a non-linear fashion.
You can read a poem line by line and put Kinbotes commentary next to it,
or read it like a normal book, maybe only occasionally jumping back to the lines he's referring to.
Pale Fire is a deeply layered work of art,
as the poem itself changes meaning and a reader's perception of it throughout the book
and Kinbotes commentary reveals layer by layer more of his intentions and character.
It's an interesting concept, one that I've never seen done or explored before
and one that Nabokov is really capable of delivering on him.
253
This novel has been on the internet since 1996.
For years it was only to be found on the author's website though,
but after getting picked up by internet hype,
it found its way into this print version.
The book essentially tells the story of a fictional Tube ride
happening in 1995, going three stops from Embankment station up to Elephant & Castle,
right in the heart of London.
A Tube train usually consists of seven cars and each of these cars has 36 seats.
This means that an ideally filled tube train in which each passenger has a seat and no one needs
to stand carries 252 passengers, adding the driver to it we're counting 253.
In this book by the same name,
every passenger on this tube right gets a little literary portrait consisting of exactly 253 words.
You find out about the passengers outward appearances, what they are thinking and doing
as well as inside information about them. This way, the author is taking us back and showing us
within seven and a half minute long tube ride what life in the mid-90s in London was like,
all portrayed in 253 words for 253 passengers.
The book is not really following an overarchic story,
but it's perfect for those of you who love sitting in a cafe or park to watch other people and wonder
about their lives, where they came from and where they go to, what their relationships between each
other might be. It's ideal to be consumed in small chunks, which makes it a great book for the bedside
table, or let's face it. Next to the toilet. And I mean that in best way possible.
Hopscotch
This book tells the story of Horacio Oliviera, an Argentinian rider living in Paris with his mistress La Maga.
They surround themselves with the sophisticated Bohéme of the city, an intricate and tightly knit
circle which called itself ‘The Club’. After an incident happened to La Maga, Oliviera is forced
to move back to Buenos Aires and the book follows him on this adventure back to his roots.
So far so good, the story already sounds fairly enticing,
but what makes this book so unique and special is the way it's constructed.
In its very own and unique way, Hopscotch can be interpreted and read as many
books at once, but two books above all.
It consists of 155 chapters in total and the reader is then
invited to choose between two possibilities of reading it: it can be read chronologically
from chapter 1 to 56, at which point the story officially ends.
Chapters 57-155 are seen as the second book,
which officially starts at chapter 73 and then asks the reader to jump around, or
hopscotch, between the chapters, even going through parts from the "first book" again, giving them a new
meaning in the story's now extended context.
As you can see here, directly after chapter 73 you are
asked to read the first two chapters of the book again and then it's all over the place from there.
Despite its conceptual structure, the book carries a multi-layered meaning and message within.
It's deeply philosophical, it explores and questions themes of love, liberty and life. It also carries
heavy illusions to jazz and political interests. It's a really fascinating work of penmanship and
one that you should definitely check out.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
This is a book about you trying to read a book called ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’,
but thereby getting distracted by a white assortment of other novels.
Released in 1979, this postmodernist narrative is a so-called frame story.
Each of its ten chapters is divided into two sections, the first part of each chapter
is written in second person, meaning it's speaking for you as the reader, addressing what you did or
are doing, and it describes the process you will go through in the attempt to read the forthcoming
second half. This second half then, is usually a book within the book. It consists of 10 different
novels from all sorts of genres, writing styles or subject matters.
The mentioned first half of each chapter written in second person, still tells the coherent story,
the varying different novels you subsequently go through
that make for a ‘playful, modernist puzzle’ as The Telegraph once put it.
‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler’ is very meta, it plays with the expectations of how books
should work and it puts a creative spin on the whole medium of books as well as the process
of reading in and of itself.
Cain’s Jawbone
This is a murder mystery the likes of which you have never read before and has been described as
‘one of the hardest and most beguiling word puzzles ever published’.
So far, only four people have ever solved this puzzle; twice in 1935, shortly after the book's
original release, and then twice more in recent years.
It was first published in 1934 as part of The Torquemada Puzzle Book,
a miscellaneous collection of all sorts of different puzzles and riddles,
15 pounds at the time were offered the first person able to solve Cain’s Jawbone, which
would be equivalent to about 1200 pounds today.
Unfortunately, shortly after its publication, the book was lost for many decades,
but resurfaced in 2018 got a subsequent re-release with a new prize money of a thousand pounds.
Comedian John Finnemore eventually solved the book
over a four-month period during the first Covid lockdown,
its solution though has never been made public.
Cain’s Jawbone is essentially a hundred page book, but the pages are in the wrong order.
To solve the puzzle, the reader must determine the correct order of the pages first and also
correctly predict the names of the murderers and victims within the story.
To do this there are all sorts of clues hidden within a text,
namely a large number of quotations, cryptic references,
puns and other word games to lead a reader on the right or the wrong path.
There is a special edition of the book that therefore comes in a bit of an unusual format
as it's printed on cards to make figuring out the correct order easier.
This, more classical version right here, is in a typical book format
but you're incentivised to cut out the pages and start playing around with them.
So, if you're the type of person who loves solving puzzles,
this might actually be a really cool thing to check out.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
This is a book about a rambling, old, drunk man speaking to a group of sunbathing women.
The young ladies remind him a bit too much of lover's past, so the elderly man begins telling the woman his life story.
We learn of his amorous adventures, of scandals,
military adventures and domestic feuds, of life back in the day and what has become of society ever since.
It's not the story itself though that gives this book a spot on this list of conceptual books,
but rather that even though it's relatively short affair as you can see here, is written in one long sentence.
Its author, Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal developed a unique method which he termed
‘palavering’ whereby his characters ramble on in monologues for hours on end. Published in 1964,
‘Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age’ has since been described by critics as a ‘humorous and
breathless affair’, it's partially a ‘drunken boast’, a ‘soul-rendering confession’ and a ‘metaphysical
poem on the nature of love and time’.
Given that you can finish it in an afternoon it's probably worth checking out.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
An eternal golden braid.
This is an intimidatingly thick and dense book,
very hard to summarise and therefore definitely one of a kind.
The title refers to our three protagonists: mathematician Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Escher
and classical musical composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
The subtitle of this book, ‘The Eternal Golden Braid’, refers to the notion of
strange loops, as the author calls them, which is his explanation for consciousness and free will.
Strange Loops are an interaction between levels which the top level reaches back down towards the
bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level.
Sounds complicated? Well, you've definitely seen loops like this before, for example in optical
illusions like this one, or MC Eschers works of art.
The book describes and defines this concept of recursion,
and discusses its application in computer science, art, music, biology and other fields like artificial intelligence.
The author thereby dives deep into Gödels ‘incompleteness theorem’, Escher’s endless loops and optical illusions,
and Bach’s canons and fugues, as they help to various degrees to illustrate the characteristics of consciousness.
The book then alternates between chapters of scientific theory and fictional dialogues
between characters such as Achilles and a tortoise.
This might be one of the most dense and mind-bending books you will ever read in your life.
You don't need to be a mathematician to understand it,
but you need to be open to dig through about 100 pages of number theory.
It's crazy to think that just one person alone wrote this,
as every page creates another link, another reference, another loop inside a book, thereby creating one big
reference to the overarching theme of 'strange loops'. I think I'm in a strange loop myself.
S
This book is written and conceived by Doug Dorst and conceived by THE JJ Abrams, creator of TV-series like
Lost and Fringe, as well as director films like Super 8 or two Star Wars movies.
As with a few other books on this list it tells yet another deeply layered and conceptual story within a story.
The book is designed in its visual appearance to look like an old copy of a fictional novel called
‘Ship of Theseus’, written by fictional author V.M. Straka, published in 1949.
The pages are designed to look worn in yellow with library stamps and stains on them.
This ‘Ship of Theseus’ then is the
book's first layer, it can be read in and of itself like any normal book, and tells the story of an
amnesiac on a journey to discover his true self.
The aforementioned fictional author of this book, V.M. Straka is a man of mystery though.
‘Ship of Theseus’ marks his last novel before his mysterious death
and his enigmatic life is considered one of the literary world's greatest mysteries,
enshrouded by conspiracy theories and strange rumors.
A second layer and storyline that takes place in books margins.
Here, we can find a dialogue of Eric and Jen, two students of Laguna Verde High School
who borrowed the Ship of Theseus from their school's library and want to find clues
of V.M. Straka's his life and death hidden deep within the text of his last book.
In the physical version you can also find maps, hidden postcards and other supplementary material
tucked between his pages that give the whole book a very lively and 'real' feel to it, even though everything is fictional.
If you're a fan of JJ Abrams more mysterious works, like the TV-show Lost, you will absolutely love
this book, as it has the same ring of mystery and story-building to it.
Many reviewers also described it as the most intricate novel they had ever read and truly worth of the hype.
As with all the books on this list, I've put a link to it in description below.
I would really love to welcome you back on my channel in the future, so thank you for subscribing.
And if you're now in the mood for more strangeness and weirdness,
why not check out one of my other videos,
like this one where I talk about my 32 biggest life-lessons from 32 years of weird life.
Thank you and see you next time,
Ciao
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