you've never seen books like these before! (9 ergodic literature books)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 มิ.ย. 2024
- These are books that defy literary conventions and shatter your expectations of what a book can be. Ergodic literature requires a little extra effort from the viewer, but it's worth it. It gives you an experience rather than just reading a book from front to back. It's a strange genre, but a fascinating one. Sometimes I'm just amazed by the creativity of authors.
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BOOKS MENTIONED/USED:
(These are Amazon Affiliate links, If you buy anything through these it will support the channel):
📚 Horrorstör - Grady Hendrix
amzn.to/3U9VL7x
📚 Tree of Codes - Jonathan Safran Foer
amzn.to/4aqd1uC
📚 The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz
amzn.to/3U7MNY6
📚 Hopscotch - Julio Cortázar
amzn.to/4cPKMHk
📚 Multiple Choice - Alejandro Zambra (trans. Megan McDowell)
amzn.to/3U9sGsE
📚 House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
amzn.to/3PVbc0N
📚 S - J.J. Abrams, Doug Dorst
amzn.to/3vLkYf6
📚 Unflattening - Nick Sousanis
amzn.to/3xAgAzP
📚 Cain's Jawbone - Torquemada (Edward Powys Mathers
amzn.to/49vQStA
📚 Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
amzn.to/3TSPpbd
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CHAPTERS
00:00 authors are so creative!
00:31 ikea, but scarier
01:02 it's cut-out
01:57 as important as ulysses?!
03:08 an exam
03:44 what is ergodic lit, anyways?
03:54 everyone's favorite ergodic lit
04:37 a book with lots of stuff in it
05:12 a puzzle
06:13 a creative dissertation
07:15 a lipogram
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Music from Epidemic Sound
Stock Footage from Envato, Pexels
In 1969 English novelist B. S. Johnson wrote a book entitled "The Unfortunates" the chapters of which were contained in a box with no binding. Apart from 2 chapters headed "First" and "Last" it was up to the reader to literally shuffle the pages and read them in any preferred random order!
And librarians typically stapled the pages in an order they thought correct.
There was a radio documentary about it on the BBC recently, with the segments in random order in tribute
Librarians were probably like Bullshit is right
@@paulnicol3826Dammit I missed that! Will try to track it down on iplayer. Many thanks.
I wondered if anyone was going to mention B.S.Johnson..good call.Also Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban should also be on this list..
That sounds so interesting!
So the author of house of leaves has a sister who is a musician. Her second album was created to go with her brother’s book, house of leaves. Her name is Poe. The album is really good and is supposed to be a great companion while reading the book.
Good shout. I wasn't aware of this, and I love House of Leaves for its beautiful writing.
Sure does! And it’s super eerie!!!
Absolutely was note aware of this-- Thank you!
If you can find them, there are several audio samples/clips of Mark reading passages of the book over Poe's music. More than is found on the album. They are worth tracing down if you're a big fan.
House of Leaves is probably my favorite literary experience. I hesitate to call it a book, because it defies that construct so much. Small tip; don't skip the title pages and such. Everything between the covers is part of the experience.
The way I like to conceptualize House of Leaves is as a movie that is confined to being a book. In fact, it's three (maybe more) movies mashed into one terrible, long manuscript. You could even see that as something conceptual, seeing as Zampano is blind. idk. It's very lynchian for something not made by the GOAT Lynch.
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall is good. The protagonist is pursued by a conceptual shark that swims through the pages as different shaped lines of text
Wonderful book, that!
I just read it recently. Can't believe it not on the list
I read this book over 10 years ago while on a project in Australia and have never heard ANYONE else even mention it. I actually started to wonder if I'd just imagined it. Funnily enough, I think I only just realized that the title was a play on words.
Such an amazing book!
I have this book on my bookshelf, I love it!
I watched this video because I saw you holding House of Leaves in the thumbnail. What an incredible, mind-bending book! I've read it twice now, but I didn't think about notating it until the second time through; I'm the kind of person who winces even if she cracks the spine of a book! Thank goodness I did, because a) It made it much easier for me to go back and check things I thought I remembered, and b) it helped me find a lot of subtle running threads that I'd have otherwise missed. The next time I read it - and I'm sure I will - I should be able to dive in even deeper.
To anyone who hasn't read House of Leaves but is curious about it now: read it! You won't be sorry.
It's definitely my favorite reading experience ever. I have probably gifted it to at least 15 people.
I clicked on the video for the same reason. One of the very few books that crept into my brain and caused extraordinary nightmares. And that was due I think to the way it's written. I've only read it once, on your recommendation I'll read it again. With a pen in hand.
@@MikeFowlerguitars Glad to help! And I'll tell you one other thing: include the page numbers of important scenes so you won't have to search for them each time you want to refer back to them. ;)
Same here 🙌
@MikeFowlerguitars me too! This book haunted me like no other. I think something about the monotony of the sections that were just listing things lulled me into complacency, and I was thoroughly unprepared for the eeriness and discomfort that just crept in. I wish I still had my copy, but I was so creeped out after finishing it that I couldn't bear to have it on the shelf 😭
I'm not sure if it fits this category exactly, but 'The Sentence' by Alistair Fruish is a novel that contains only one sentence (also a wordplay, in that it's a condensed-time inner monologue of a prisoner sentenced to a bizarre futuristic execution), and also, more importantly, it's written entirely monosyllabically, meaning that less than half of the words I've used in this comment could be possibly used in the book, therefore it uses other ways of expression via those monosyllabic words. The book opens with these words: "quick quick as is now the law a pure sharp pin stabs my steel bound wrists to drill down hard to plug me straight in as swift as can be done and as soon as the jab goes in it adds more ice to these old veins my hands in odd cuffs twitch and writhe and grab at the bright white chair and I snap right up and then slip flop back down and tight sit damp with fret in these stark bars where I will be held quite still while the death drug does its long long thing for those who show this all is now the new crown mob that gang of chiefs of clan whose mean rule had me put in hard binds and taut straps ".
That sounds so interesting, I haven't heard of this one before!
Amazing
There's a french book from Georges Perec called "la disparition", which tells its story without ever using any word featuring the letter E, which is the most common letter in the french language. It got translated in English three different times.
And at least one of the English translations has the title "A Void", which is simply brilliant.
Great book - also see "La Vie mode d'emploi" (Life, a User's Manual) by Perec, which also belongs on the list. Perec describes what's going on at a particular moment in time in every room of an apartment building in Paris, using a complex set of constraints to determine the ordering and what each room might have in it. There are a whole bunch of stories interwoven together, with the "big story" being that of a lifetime's artistic achievement which doesn't quite make it. It's glorious.
'La disparition' started as something of a parlour game amongst Perec's friends and other members of the OULIPO, it wasn't until sometime later that Perec discovered the meaning of the missing letter. His Mother in 1943 was sent to Auschwitz, where she is estimated to have died around 1943, which quite apart from its obvious immorality was also strange, because she was French, and French citizens didn't end up in concentration camps, presumably because the Vichy government did a deal. However her French passport marked her out as a foreigner or in French 'Estrange' , this was clearly marked on her passport with a large E.
@@nevilleattkins586 never knew that - adds a huge layer of poignancy to the work.
@@JimFinnis Also the fact that the book was published and Perec intended that nothing should draw attention to the constraint and that the elision(?) should 'ideally' pass unnoticed. He must have experience a unique form for multi dimensional ambivalence when the initial reviews totally missed the whole point of the novel. He was by that time quite well known and his somewhat lefty novel 'Chose' was I think already a set text in french schools. The whole thing speaks volumes (to me at least) about Perec as an author and his commitment to Literature. As he said in a pun that works in English , regarding his ambition 'a lot is at steak , it is Chateaubriand or nothing.'
Famed French film auteur Jean-Luc Godard once said..."of course a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end...but not necessarily in that order!" The same could be said for Ergodic literature!
I've often wondered what a truly Ergodic film would be like, and aside from experimentalists doing stuff like projecting non-narrative Avant Garde work onto the walls of various rooms that you can choose to walk through as you wish, it's hard to imagine. Possibly the closest example I can think of is the movie Clue, which originally released to theaters with different cuts that displayed alternate endings
Nice
There's a crazy book by the German author Arno Schmidt titled "Bottom's Dream" (relating to the Shakespeare character), it's a 1300-page book in folio or tabloid-size paper that weighs about 6kg/13lbs, and it is stylistically mad...
On the page, it's written in shifting columns that tell different stories of their own, sometimes the pages are split diagonally, there are notes, diagrams, calculations and collages, and it sometimes switches to typewritten pages, and then in the margins there are characters who are discussing Edgar Allen Poe's works, it's a trip. It seems to be like Finnegans Wake on steroids, and as somebody who read and loved Finnegans Wake, I can definitively say that I'll never even attempt to read this book, it's so daunting that I don't think I'll ever be ready for it.
I own the English translation, haven't dared to try properly reading it yet, but the print seems to be quite rare already, sells now for over 700$ even though it's only 8 years old.
I love how you have to specify that it related to a Shakespeare character.
Fascinating video. I have „House of Leaves“ and „As a Machine and Parts“ by Caleb J. Ross. The second book starts handwritten & transforms into a more typed and complex book, the more the main character turns into a machine.
Kids' books do this a lot more often. Things like Press Here or That's Not My Dinosaur or the entire Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre are pretty common. Thanks for sharing these larger books and the word for the genre!
House of Leaves has a sister album by Marks Sister Poe called Haunted. I would highly recommend it. It's extremely beautiful, haunting and scary at the same time. The album also has a lot of layers - you can hear some of the characters crying and the walls moving.
A sister album of music I presume.
@@Liusila It's actually quite pop/rock inspired but is so catchy - especially Hey Pretty where Mark reads some of the book in the track. It did well but I think the overproduction meant it was before its time.
Wow! First time finding this channel, and what a great video to start with.
I also suggest "Pale Fire" by V. Nabokov and "XX" by Rian Hughes as excellent books like the one featured.
As someone has already mentioned Riddley Walker I'd like to add The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman. This book has blank pages, black pages, a whole episode written in Latin and very little about Tristam Shandy or his opinions. It's long winded and gets nowhere but is also incredibly funny and incredibly frustrating. If you put the effort in it is an amazing book and coming out in 1759 got to stream of conciousness hundreds of years before the 20th century though they invented that idea.
You took the words out of my mouth. I read Tristram Shandy for the first time over forty years ago. I bought in a secondhand bookshop just out of curiosity because I'd heard of it vaguely, knowing absolutely nothing about what was inside it. I loved it then and I still love it now.
Honorable mention: Only Revolutions (also from M.Z.D.)
I really appreciate the inclusion of books not originally written in English!
"S" reminds me of The Griffin and Sabine Saga. I had the first book, "Griffin and Sabine," and thought it was so creative!
Love the "Griffin and Sabine" 📚!
Same author did another one later called "Dubious Documents" with similar style. The entire book is envelopes with pages inside.
@@willk7184 Ooh! Thanks for this information!
To those who haven't read 'The House of Leaves", I have some guidance.
First, *check your edition.* The most common is the Full Color Edition, which will give you the experience. But earlier editions have significant differences, especially in the footnotes. There are editions on this book with braille hiding out there, so check used copies carefully. Incomplete Editions are all but impossible to find, as are Black & Whites. 2 Colors are a little easier, but check to see which variation you have (there are at least two). If you find yourself with multiple copies (like me) have some fun comparing them. I have a full color and a 2C Blue, and there are differences throughout.
Second, do not be discouraged if it takes you a long time to read through it. I am a blisteringly fast reader, and it took me 6 months.
Third, have some scratch paper at hand. Portions of the book are written in code. Deciphering is a chore, but well worth the effort.
Finally, be fully prepared. This book messes with you perception of reality. The primary plot is from the perspective of someone suffering from psychosis, and you are put firmly in his head. I know people who were really messed up while reading this.
I also want to add, don't expect other Ergodic literature to be like it because while it's Ergodic literature, it's also Weird Fiction and it mixes the two so naturally and seamlessly that it's unclear where one genre's influence stops and the other begins, making it stand out as fairly unique from either genre
I gave up on it. Shame because the start was so gripping.
I'm about to start chapter nine. Pray for me. 🤭
recently discovered this channel and have really enjoyed it.
Love the mix of enthusiasm for books, bits of history and deep dives into literature.
Stuff that could be very dry and lecture-ish keeps your attention because of the obvious love of books and writing going on here.
Thank you so much!
@@DrawntoBooks No problem. With so many channels being about how 'this thing sucks', it's a pleasant surprise to find one that's positive and enthusiastic.
That was fascinating! Thank you very much for bringing these books to us. I'll need to check some of these out, especially House of Leaves. I like footnotes.
Excellent video topic!! I'm very excited to read most of these. Thanks for the list. 😊
As I age and the effects of my visual impairment become harder and harder to accommodate, I find myself reading fewer and fewer printed books. Nevertheless, I find you and your channel delightful! Books are wonderful, in many ways and for many reasons-it’s great to see someone building a channel celebrating them.
Go books and go you! 🙂
Thank you so much!
Another great video. As an argentinean, I was so glad to see Cortázar's novel on the list, thank you for including our literature in your video! 😄
Same. I had to read it in highschool. At the time the story felt boring, but I'm going to give it another chance.
Great vid! I remember reading Pale Fire and The Princess Bride for a class and having my eyes opened to how narrative structure can be played with.
I have watched all of your non shorts videos now and look forward to watching more!! Your point of view and writing style is one that I feel very comfortable with. I am a new subscriber.
Thank you so much!! 🫶
I've always been somewhat interested in books that experimented with formats (the choose your own adventure books when I was a kid, the TTYL series, P.S, Longer Letter Later) and I love horror, but I don't always love to really work when I'm trying to sit down and just read. However, when you showed Horrorstor and said "ikea catalog" my childhood in the Chicago suburbs called and I added the book straight to my Amazon cart. The formatting in that thing is just so darn creative, and I cannot wait to read! 💙💛
First example I encountered was Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel by Milorad Pavić in the late 80s. Structured as a compilation of three historical encyclopedia, written from three perspectives (Christian, Islamic, and Jewish), and then in two volume - the 'Male' and 'Female' - about the fall of the Khazar Empire. The reader is free to make their way through the book in any way they like, following whatever thread intrigues them.
Incredibly good book. Pavić played a lot with innovative structures, but this one is probably his finest work.
I never made it through this, although it's not really something to be read "through". But enjoyed the bits.
I had no idea most of these existed, thanks for the recommendations! I wish more authors would do cool stuff with their books like this and push the boundaries of what a book could be.
I absolutely love this stuff, and I was so happy to come across this video both for new books to add to my shelf and just to enjoy your enthusiasm for playful reinventions of the medium.
Thank you!
Honorable mention;
"Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban, a dystopian apocalyptic novel written in a devolved form of English...
Hoban was an incredible author. Tuttle Diary and The Mouse and His Child are stunning
I haven't heard of this one, but I love a good dystopian novel, it looks interesting.
House of Leaves is a classic! I remember finding it in the book store as a teenager. I had never seen a book like that and it completely blew my mind and expanded my sense of possibility writing and art making.
This was a fantastic video! I really enjoyed it and I'm gonna come baack to this when I want to buy my next book :) Thank you!!!
Fantastic list. Adding a few of these to my library holds!
I think I've watched all of your videos now. Just wanted to say you have a really great channel, and I hope you keep making these.
Thank you so much! I plan to :)
I love these kinds of books. Didn't know about Hopscotch, will add it to my TBR immediately. Great video.
I read Hopscotch a few years ago - intriguing, but also lots of fun. House of Leaves has been sitting on the shelf of my used bookstore for ages, and I've yet to pick it up to take a look. Of course, Sterne was playing with the text a couple hundred years ago, and Robbe-Grillet always makes for a challenging read. Thanks for the listing!
House of Leaves is my favorite reading experience of all time. If you are interested at all, it's at least worth an attempt.
Very good video! Thank you for making it. Keep up the good work 😊
Have never heard of ergodic literature before! This was very informative and I’m intrigued to try reading one
I read house of leaves years ago. I bought it out of the 25 cent bin somewhere. I tried to get anyone i knew to read it because i really needed someone to talk to about what i read. It's such a subtle horror. I normally read books that size in a couole days, but this one took me a couple months because i kept having to sit with my thoughts after reading. And how i felt when I finished...
In the last couple years, I've seen 2 or 3 youtube videos discussing it. I'm so glad people are talking about it now. No one I knew had ever heard of it then.
Great video. I think I'm going to check out the one you mentioned after house of leaves
What a fantastic list of recommendations, thank you! House of Leaves is one of my favourites, I found it really mentally unsettling - and now I have other avenues to explore, thank you! :-)
Loved this video! I have read several of the books you recommend in it. Keep up the good work.
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing!
I re-read House of Leaves about every 2-3 years. It's always at the top of my recommendations list. I'm definitely going to check out a few of the books on this list, too. Thanks for a great video!
Fascinating video! Keep it up. You're channel is going to go far!
I’ll recommend the Dictionary of the Khazars. It is a novel in lexicon form, with three different dictionaries covering an event from three different perspectives, and the narratives arising out of the definitions. It can be read traditionally cover to cover, or the reader can skip around, looking up new terms, events and characters as they are encountered, creating their own cross references through the texts. My interest in that book, in particular, is probably why you ended up in my algorithm.
AND.....there are 2 versions; Male and Female.
Great video, lots of fun and interesting. House of Leaves was my introduction to ergodic literature. Not only was it a fascinatingly inventive story, but the form was so creatively inspiring it had my mind reeling with the possibilities for literature. Burroughs and Gysin employed the cut up technique specifically because they felt that literature was decades behind painting in creating new forms and techniques. It would seem these ergodic authors took that to a whole other level.
Oh yes, I actually stumbled on the cut-up technique of Burroughs/Gysin while writing this video. I love to find artists trying to innovate in that way, I find it so fun!
Super interesting stuff. Splendid job :D
absolutely loved the video... came to know about something i wasn't even aware of.. Your presentation and script are on dot, and (even though you didn't ask for it) i just subscribed.. Keep on creating.
This video is really wonderful. I've written a book that does some weird stuff stylistically and I want to do more weird stylistic stuff in the future with other books and I felt sort of worried about it because I didn't know about a lot of books that do weird stuff stylistically but knowing there's actually a whole category of books that do that really helps. Thank you!
how that sounds interesting! whats the name of your book?
I remember reading House of Leaves years ago and had to introduce my daughter to it. I didn't realize this was a recognized type of literature. I have since bought "S" and cannot wait to dive into it.
Really interesting, thanks!
Great video. Keep up the great work.
My goodness how incredibly interesting. Never heard of this type of book before.
Great video! Many of my favorite books are in this list, such as Hopscotch and House of Leaves. Currently giving Cain's Jawbone a try. I'd also add Nabokov's Pale Fire to this category. So I will definitely add many of the ones you mentioned to my tbr.
Would you say Ada by Nabokov also counts?
@@hughcaldwell1034 gosh, I don't know because it's still on my TBR 🥲
@@nattmazzoni Ah. I've read it but only in audio form. I plan to go through it again with the aid of Ada Online, but based on Abigail Thorn's description, I think it counts.
I just discovered this channel, and count me as a fan! I thought at first the term “ergodic” was related to physics/maths, but I see now that it’s related to the effort needed to read the text (“ergon” = work).
If you’re taking suggestions, I’d like to see you talk about the Latin American Boom.
Thank you! Actually, I have Latin American Boom on my list, I might move it up now 😃
You must be very intelligent to have read and analyzed these books! God bless you girl! ❤🙏✨
I could not sleep after I devoured House of leaves (and it devoured me!) in two days. Not because it was scary (though it was), but also because I was thinking about what everything could mean. it is such a good book.
This was such a cool video. 😀 thank you!
I collected a bunch of Oulipo novels as well as many of these here - I will have to look up the ones I don't have. I love this stuff and don't get too worked up about trying to actually read it.
Good stuff. Thanks, sister!
Cool list! A couple of other fun examples of writing constraints:
- Let Me Tell you - a novella told from the perspetive of Ophelia, only using words that Ophelia uses from the play Hamlet. It has some creative solutions to not being able to use certain common words.
- Alphabetical Africa is another example of lipogram with the starting letters. Chapter 1 allows words that start with "A", and each subsequent chapter adds another alphebet and so on.
Curious to know if the "Griffin and Sabine" series by Nick Bantock is considered ergodic literature. It's certainly one of the most satisfying forms of epistolary literature I've come across.
I love this set of books. Not only are they wonderful to read, but they are also beautiful art!
I would consider it ergodic!
thanks for the videos, i love when ppl think outside the box
TIL about ergodic literature and I have to admit...I'm mighty curious about reading and maybe one day writing books like those!
Also, subcribed!
3:05 I wasn't expecting the nostalgic punch of Lambchop.
Great list! I loved 'S', House of Leaves and I am especially impressed that you included Hopscotch by one of my favorite novelists Julio Cortazar!! I am glad others suggested Griffon and Sabine. I would suggest City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer, the stories are woven throughout Travel brochures, marine biology studies and other strange sources....
I was hoping to find City of Saints and Madmen in the comments!
Love your videos… I would love to see your version of dangerous, banned and scary books!
This is a good idea! 😁
I was lucky able to get a copy of Tree of Codes from a bookstore that did not know its value. It was such a touching and beautiful read. Reading it was tricky, but I found a way to manage with the cut pages. Out of curiousity I read Crocodiles, too. I was so blown away by this project. It was such a wonderful literary ride.
Very cool video. I’m subbed and you have my vote. Well done.
Wonderful Job!!! Thoroughly Delightful! 💖💖💖
Thank you so much!
Wow! Great list. I want to check these titles out!
As always, sooooooooooooo good! Thanks for the effort you always put into your videos 😀
Thank you so much!
Awesome deep cut Lambchop at 3:01
I was just talking about Ella Minnow Pea the other day! I love its concept, glad to see it on a list like this.
Thanks for the discussion. I was not aware of any of these. My library has three, two are on loan but just read Ella Minnow Pea. Fun reading! Will try some of the others as they become available. Cheers from Newfoundland!
Very cool, glad you enjoyed it 😁
@@DrawntoBooks House of Leaves is out, but my library has all five volumes of The Familiar, followup work by Mark Danielewski. Just took out the first one.
Great video!
That book was a real phenomenon when first published. I only thought of it recently. I should revisit it.
What an interesting video this is!!!!! I subscribed to your channel.
Thank you!
Thank you for this very interesting video. :)
You have to admire their creativity.
"S" is actually a very good book once you decide how to proceed, I read the Theseus Ship book first, then the notes, the only annoying part is the encrypted parts that you have to decipher using a wheel of letters, but it was a fun ride reading that book.
I have House of Leaves on the bookshelf, a book that led me to it is "XX" by Rian Hughes. It is written in this ergodic format which makes the beginning hard to follow but the book overall was good.
Very cool list. I've never heard of any of these except House of Leaves. I want to get Cain's Jawbone. It looks annoyingly fun. Another ergodic book I read is Shadows in the Asylum. The book is designed to look like a case file of patient at an mental institution and the patient's story is told through letters, newspaper clippings, diary entries, therapy session transcripts, etc. It's really well done and only a couple hundred pages, so a pretty quick read
"Vitruvia 144" should be on this list. It's so elaborate in it's architecture, it practically transcends reality.
Great info thanks
One of my all-time favourite books is also by Jonathan Safran Foer, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and it plays around a bit with unique printing techniques too. There’s one part in it where the spacing between the lines and words becomes smaller and smaller until it’s just a black page.
Oh yes, that's a great one. I totally forgot about the spacing though, thanks for reminding me!
very nice.inspired me to another idea.
I'm seeing a lot of comments, here, all suggesting a wide array of books in this niche, surprisingly many of which I was not aware of, despite having spent a while trying to get a better grasp of this genre. However, something I see often whenever this genre is brought up - occasionally in the comments, but also in the video, in the face of Ella Minnow Pea and Unflattening (and possibly Horrorstör?), is a certain equation between "experimental" and "ergodic"; and I get the desire to use the fancier term when you learn it, but I still think this is mistaken and not particularly productive - I wouldn't mind in most cases, language is fluid and evolving, but terms are typically a lot more rigidly set because they're supposed to perform this highly narrow communicative function, to get this one very specific idea across.
Though Aarspeth recognises that there isn't a neat way to define a "genre" (though the usage of the word genre is called into question) and only gives some basic guiding points as to what constitutes ergodic literature, it is important to also remember that this term is situated in close proximity to both game studies and the studies of digital literature (cybertext/hypertext). Ergodic literature blurs the position of the consumer of the media, placing them somewhere between "reader" and "player," by, as the video points out, requiring "non-trivial effort" to traverse the text, be that clicking on hyperlinks or flipping through and rotating the book, or reading it non-linearly. Although ergodic literature is closely related to the multimodal, the two are not equated and multimodal literature is not inherently ergodic - I think would more neatly fit under the broader umbrella of "experimental" literature: one that shakes up your ideas of certain conventions of books and reading, and one that, most importantly, has a much wider array of tools at its disposal to do that. Oulipoean literature (for anyone who liked the concept of Ella Minnow Pea you should absolutely go check out Oulipo) is certainly experimental and has some of the most fun writing experiments I've had the pleasure of reading, but it is absolutely not ergodic.
With that, some examples of non-experimental print literature you might flag under the term ergodic might be:
• Dorothy Kunhardt's "Pat The Bunny" - a book which offers textile sensations integrated into the narrative and encourages the reader (or rather, readee, because the target audience of this book most likely cannot read at that point) to fiddle around and feel the pages (Now YOU feel Daddy's scratchy face!)
• Ryan North's "To Be or Not To Be" - a multimodal reimagining of Shakespeare's Hamlet, which requires the reader to flip non-linearly through the 740-page book as they repeatedly make choices which directly affect the development of the tragedy (it's an illustrated gamebook/Choose Your Own Adventure)
And some examples developed for purely digital environments:
• Geoff Ryman's 253: A Tube Theatre - a highly networked digital text, impossible to print without heavy adaptation (though it has been printed - in that version it loses a lot of its original charm). Each page laid out horizontally, most often either 3:4 or 16:9, it includes information about one passenger of the train at a time, with certain words highlighted on the page, which connect to other passengers. It can either be read "linearly," starting with the frontmost passenger and only ever clicking the "Next Passenger" option at the bottom, or in a networked manner, by clicking on the various connections between passengers highlighted in the text itself. The entire novel is available for free on www.253novel.com/
• Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure - a 1976 Interactive Fiction text developed specifically and exclusively for a computer. It functions not unlike a gamebook/Choose Your Own Adventure novel in that it branches out and connects back up in various ways, but differs in that it requires not simply the flipping through pages of a novel but actively typing out descriptions of what the reader/player avatar is to do. (It's one of those very very old school text games where you go >Light Torch and the PC prints back a certain blurb of text in response)
I hope the order of these texts, going from "linear but with pauses to experience the book in interesting ways" to "okay this is just a really old game what was this commenter thinking" also demonstrates this shaking up of the reader/player's position in interacting with the text. At the end, past that final example, I'm not even fully sure if you should approach this more as Game Studies or Literary Studies, which goes to show that things are never neatly separated - something I personally find beautiful
Nonetheless, despite this perceived flaw of the video, I'm really happy to see this topic discussed. As my comment probably shows, it's something I am greatly passionate about, and so it is a great joy to see it shared with the world and spur such discussion and interest among people! I am absolutely looking forward to seeing/hearing more of what others have to say and share
Just an edit: Remembered this is the internet and I should be extra cautious; the Pat The Bunny example is moreso multimodal, rather than ergodic and was included there primarily as a joke, to lighten the mood in the middle of an otherwise very long comment!
Great video.
Great video! I'm assuming Tree of Codes is not available as an e-book. Most of these are better read as physical media, even if available in digital form. That's a good thing, in my opinion.
A brilliant one that I just read last year was Subcutanean by Aaron A. Reed, a book about two roommates who explore a series of seemingly endless hallways and rooms under their rental home. It's pretty much The Backrooms: The Book EXCEPT every copy of the book is different. Each copy changes scenes, character traits and even single words so the story and themes plays out completely differently.
Also Nabokov's Pale Fire, which contains a poem by a dead poet and commentary by his "best friend," is such a wonderful read because as you read the poem you're also dissecting the mystery of this commentator who has his own secret agenda.
WHAT=?????????????
I have never heard or seen this before...I am thoroughly mind blown.
Got new fav youtuber and books to dent my bank
Thank you!
Great video. I liked and followed. I had a copy of the first edition of Kenneth Patchen's Sleepers Awake, which is ergodic, but I loaned it to a friend who disappeared. It would be worth over a grand. I am also a word on Shelley Jackson's INERADICABLE STAIN, which is published exclusively, one word at a time, as tattoos on people. I love this sort of thing.
Cool - what is your word - do you share that?
My word is "to." Kinda boring but still better than a weird one with eight letters. @@ravent3016
Wow, that is so cool! What an interesting project.
@@ravent3016 My word is just "to." Sadly boring but the deal was the word was assigned randomly and I had to accept or pass with no second chance. They had thousands of folks who wanted who tried to get a word after the book was "published."
wow! what a great video. seriously. you got an instant sub from me
Thank you so much!
I read a series as a kid (the first book was called Cathy's Book, followed by Cathy's Key, and Cathy's Ring)that certainly worked outside the box. It contained a little pocket in each with photographs, and other ephemera that were supposed to be the things she came across in trying to unravel the mystery of this immortal family. Had a few more plugs for makeup brands than I would have liked, but an amazing experience for me as a child
And this jumped to cinema recently: it is called the cinema of the device. Example: Holy Motors, by Leos Carax. Few of these books are truly meaningful though. Some don't go beyond repeating old ideas, like the recent Mexican book "Permanente obra negra". The best of all is probably "Life: a User's Manual", a puzzle novel by the great Georges Perec.
I want to read them ALL
I didn't know that these were called ergodic books! Now I know what I'm looking for 👀
There’s another book that follows similar to Abrams’ S, and it’s a tie-in to a TV series. I’m sure you’ve probably have heard of Mr. Robot (2015-2019). The series’ creator, Sam Esmail co-authored a book with Courtney Looney called “Mr. Robot: Red Wheelbarrow.” The novel is presented as the composition book that Elliot, the series’ protagonist, is seen writing in and burning in Season 2 of the series (it also has inserts similar to S, and has bits of conversations between Elliot and Mr. Robot, as well as Carla, a pyromaniac that turns up in the start of Season 2 and lends her matches to Elliot to burn the composition book (all also written in the margins). So, if you happen to have enjoyed Mr. Robot, you can probably check out the book,
That sounds so cool! I love Mr. Robot
@@DrawntoBooks I hope it's worth the read for you. :D
Talking of Lipograms - have you heard of "A Void" by George Perec? It's a novel written entierly without using the letter 'E'!
Shame about his name