What are some books that make the best use of the physical nature of the textual medium? Phrased differently: What are some books that are better read as a physical copy rather than an ebook or an audiobook, and why exactly? What is it that they do differently that sets them apart in this discussion?
Looking for some creative works. All suggestions are welcome, but I'd appreciate if you elaborate a bit on why you recommended something 🙂
by nouveaux_sands_13
12 Comments
All books are best as physical paper books.
*S.* by Dorst and Abrams – it is a book with comments scribbled in the margins, and newspaper clippings and other items stuck between the pages by “previous readers”. The physical book itself feels part of the story.
The Illuminae Files by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff is a sci-fi trilogy written as a series of collected documents with excessive visual flourishes including photographs, artwork, bloodstains, chat logs and more that all sell the idea of these as documents that were physically collected and bundled together for you to read, and also tell the story or heighten the tension with these visual aspects.
Babel by RF Kuang. It has a lot of footnotes and annotations that are actually super interesting, relevant to the plot and therefore worth reading, but they are clunky on audio and hard to navigate back and forth to on Kindle.
I red almost exclusively on Kindle (though shifting to Kobo), but I find it best to read novellas in paper form so can appreciate the jewel box nature of something like Foster by Claire Keegan.
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. Half of it is annotations.
The never ending story, as long as no as it has letter art at the beginning of each chapter. I’ve never seen a version without it in some way, but I’ve only seen a couple of versions
The Thursday Next series. Thursday is a LitDick, a literary detective. She can enter books and interact with characters. Sometimes characters escape and create havoc and she needs to get them back (we’re looking at you, Mrs. Havisham). Her father is stuck randomly traveling through time.
And there are viruses and other things affecting books, like the font changing randomly, and other problems that have to be seen.
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. The book is split between a narrative and a book of poetry.
Security by Wolfsdorff. It’s a thriller, about a murderer loose in a hotel, but the narrator is watching everything that’s happening on security cameras, and when multiple events happen at once in multiple parts of the building the text shows it by breaking up on the page, sometimes into columns, sometimes in quarters. It’s very cool way to structure a thriller, plus you’re constantly wondering who the narrator is and why they aren’t intervening until the big reveal of that…
Alnilam by James Dickey is far more literary but uses a similar device. The main character is losing his sight and there are sections of the book that are told in columns on the page, on one side you have his perspective of the scene without sighy, through his other senses, and on the other side you with the perspective of a sighted character. Such a cool book! (There is an incredibly memorable sex scene written that way…)
House of Leaves by Danielewaki. Parts of the story are conveyed via unconventional page and ergodic text
There’re a lot of maps and diagrams in [The Selected Works of T S Spivet](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6065179-the-selected-works-of-t-s-spivet?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=tbE6Ghae4h&rank=1)
Egan’s *A Visit form the Goon Squad* has a section laid out like presentation software
[Special Topics in Calamity](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3483.Special_Topics_in_Calamity_Physics?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_9) *Physics* has a lot of footnotes
I recommend all three