Bram Stoker's Dracula is not just letters but journal entries (some written in shorthand), a Captain's log, phonograph recordings and newspaper articles. Stoker wanted to highlight the newest technology available at the time, so Mina uses a typewriter, Seward the phonograph, and Harker shorthand (among other things)
Yes! Same here. I still have some fond memories from some of those books that I had read a long time ago when I was a kid. I don't know if they are still around; probably not - and that's a pity.
That John Finnemore is THE John Finnemore, by the way. The wonderful comedian and comedy writer admired and adored by many. He wrote his own sequel to that puzzle, which was published this year.
Great list! Other suggestions: Jason Shiga's "Meanwhile", a time-travel choose your own adventure comic book. Stanislaw Lem's "Imaginary Magnitude", a collection of prefaces to imaginary books from the future.
I'm curious if Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer would classify as ergodic. It doesn't have the structural shenanigans of pages being out of order or the story being split into mirroring sections. But it is written with such an abstract and meta approach to the language that it turns into a wonderful puzzle of words the deeper into the story you get. It reminded me so much of when I used to read e.e.cummings poetry when i was young and loving how the way words were arranged on the page would affect the meaning. I could see why a lot of people, who thought Dead Astronauts was just a standard story, would be super frustrated with it. But once I realized what i was in for with it, I found it to be so masterful and fascinating. It feels so singular in my mind, with nothing else like it (outside of poetry).
Love Vandermeer's approach to a tale! Have you started Absolution? Part 1 is a POV character reviewing documents and tapes and surveillance footage. Wonderfully metatextual!
About 100 years ago (actually only 50 but it feels longer) one of the reasons I fell in love with SF was the “work” involved in understanding a new world created by the authors, where the rules, the technology, the mores were radically different in myriad ways from the quotidian working class world I grew up in. The gradual understanding of how things worked in Frank Herbert’s Dune or Larry Niven’s Known Space, was a source of joy, along with the proverbial “Sense of Wonder”. Wish I could recreate that feeling now, but I can’t. Oh well.
Agreed. If ergodic means having to put in more effort to read and understand the work, then definitely. Infinite Jest and Ulysses should be right up there,
Pale Fire by Nabokov. The experience is a little like the Fighting Fantasy page-turning; I needed three bookmarks at all times. Beautiful, hilarious, and haunting.
When I heard the intro I was thinking, "I bet House of Leaves is going to be way down this list". I was pleasantly surprized that there are multiple books on the list even MORE ergodic! 😱 Between the origins of the root parts of the word in ancient Greece, and the late 20th century invention of the term "ergodic literature" I don't know if the word has had any other lives, but there is a very significant branch of 20th centure mathematics starting in the 20s or 30s and continuing until the present day know as "Ergodic Theory" dealing with the statistical properties of deterministic dynamical systems - basically anticipating and becoming the formal mathematics wing of what later became know as Chaos Theory. It deals with such questions as can it be proved that a trajectory of a certain dynamical system will eventually come arbitrarily close to a given point in phase space if given enough time. The Poincare Recurence Theorem, a result from ergodic theory, has to do with proving such a system will inevitably come back to its starting point after enough time. This idea, or some variation of it, seems to have filled certain hypersensitive artistic types with existential dread, as in "can life have any meaning if someday everything, including oneself, is going to happen again and again - and presumably be just as stupid every time?" Anyway, this idea has even worked its way into some Scifi at this point, including a throwaway reference in this video. So I guess full circle?
The epistolary novel is almost the Ur-form of the novel, and was quite common in the 18t century: Richardson's _Clarissa_ (not to be confused with the witch), and Tobias Smollett's _Humphry Clinker_ are both epistolary and early novels. And the tricks in _House of Leaves_ go back to the first English novel, _Tristam Shandy_ from 1750!
Lipogramatic means writing that lacks a certain letter. It's an interesting way of toning your style muscles because it forces you to choose words much more carefully than you would normally have to. There is a famous French novel called Gadsby, which does not contain the letter e.
I'm still digesting 'House of Leaves' months after reading it. A few of your other suggestions are on my TBR list. Ergodic literature is, indeed, the labyrinth inside a house bigger on the inside.
_Cloud Atlas_ and _Piranesi_ are some of the best books I have read. I remember seeing a duology where the texts in both volumes were exactly the same, excluding six pages. They were women's edition and men's edition. I saw their Finnish translation in a bookshop many years ago, but I do not remember what was the title or who was the author.
Er (meh) gerd oc … nicely done. Loved Piranesi and Cloud Atlas, as well as Flowers for Algernon which made me cry. Dracula is the best, the audio version narrated by Mike Bennet is amazing. Iain M Baks Feersum Endjinn might count? Trying to read the text message style prose was hard work. That bonkers movie on Netflix Bandersnatch with alt endings.
The list does go on and on and on but HONORABLE MENTIONS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, both written by Mark Frost and they’re written as case files that reference time and puzzles and other stuff. Way more ‘linear’ than a lot of these books but still worth mentioning imo!
One of of my lockdown projects was an end-to-end rewatch of TP and reading the two Frost books you mention. Brilliant... and the 4 and a half hour UA-cam video "Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really)" by Twin Perfect was the icing on the cake. All well worth the time.
I think I would consider Steven Erikson's work ergodic. Not so much in the structure of the narrative (no bouncing timelines or unreliable narrators) but more around the fact that it requires real effort to read them. He created an entire fantasy world but writes his stories within that world with zero exposition, and most plot points (even major ones) are often revealed through context clues rather than directly spelled out on the page. His books often require multiple readings to fully understand what is going on, and many people will rely on online chapter summaries to pick up on stuff that they may have missed.
Great example. Gardens of the Moon was one of the most challenging reads I’ve ever experienced, but by the end I felt like I had earned my place in that world, it was immensely rewarding.
Can’t believe you didn’t include Use of Weapons here in the shallow end of the pool - three timelines running concurrently and meeting at the end of the book in a colossal twist ( as all long-term cultists know). More new great recommendations here. Ongoing thanks, Moid.
Seeing three books on this list that have a high place on my shelf made me realize that I apparently have a favorite genre I never knew had a name. Also, you an add Lanark to this list.
Where do pop up books sit on your list? There's a lot of work in those tabs and flaps... Then there's those 'Archives' books, like The Alien Archive with pull out plans and recreated paper props...
Your reading of Warlock was hilarious. I loved that book when I was a kid! Strangely I was never able to finish it. I think I never made it past that junction.
I recently learned about The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall. It sounds like what's in the book was already a beast to read, but also an equal number of chapters were secretly scattered around the world (including online). Not all the pieces were ever found and I imagine some no longer exist
My entrance into genre fiction was Lrod of the Rings, and also Doctor WHo novelisations from target Books, but Fighting Fantasy was up there too. It wasn't the first "interactive" series of books I discovered: the first was a series called Wizards, Warriors and You, but Fighting Fantasy was more complex and involved actual dice rolling. I have about five of them on my shelves here, and you could find some of them at my elementary school library. I had a friend who collected almost all of them before the age of twelve.
Before "ergodic" became a trend, way before, even in the 17th century, we had the "antinovela", or "anti-novel" or "anti-roman" (Le Berger extravagant). I also wrote an "antinovela" in 2006, published in 2014 (in Spanish), but it was quickly called an ergodic novel, because it requires some work, they say. I think it's very easy to read, I just ommitted separating narration from dialogue with quotations because the nature of the novel made irrelevant who was talking at any moment, only what was said was relevant. If you think one character was speaking but it was another, I won't cause any confusion or misunderstanding, because any character could have said the thing. That Ella Minnow Pea book sounds like Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, or at least the starting chapter, where the narration is told using pseudo-caveman vocabulary that struggles to communicate an overwhelming emotion or realization, for which there are no words yet.
As soon as I saw the video title (and without noticing Ella Minnow Pea in the thumbnail) I was thinking about Mark Dunn's Ibid: A Life, which purports to be the extensive endnotes to a biography whose main text was destroyed in a bath. I don't know that I'd call it ergodic-it wasn't really important or interesting to think about what must be in the missing text, but it was a fun read
Well timed. Just got my copy of "Dictionary of the Khazars". Not sure how much effort it really will be to read, but porting it to ebook would be a pain. Nice appearance by doggo. Couldn't tell if offering personal support or asking to be fed / let out.
Thanks, awesome selection! With a stretch I would add Infinite Jest to the list. It has a very extensive footnote section that even contains entire plot lines. So it forces the reader to flip the book back and forth. Also, at the opener of the book is kinda the ending of the story. And later the plot shows what preceded it. So, at the end the reader should be kinda curious to come back to the beginning to have a complete 'cycle'. With even more of a stretch I would add JR by William Gaddis. The entire book is presented as a dialogue without any introduction of the characters speaking. The reader should guess who is talking by the themes, language style, and idiosyncrasies of each character. A hell of a read😅
The first time i heard about ergodic literature, it sent me into an excessive buying-spree that ended up costing me like 150 bucks... but i have no regrets. I loved Ella Minnow Pea for its meta-levels. I mean it's a novel in LETTERS get it? Because its about the letters of the alphabet but it tells the story in letters. Like mail. Absolutely genius. I can also recommend the people of paper by salvador plascencia
I wouldn't consider Cloud Atlas or Piranesi Ergodic because you don't have to interact with either of them in a way other than the usual back to front to read then. Ergodic lit should have you jumping backwards and forwards, reading things out of standard order if you want.
Had Ship of Theseus on my shelf since it was released, never got around to it. I found the constant handwritten comments next to the text really destroy the reading flow. Has anyone read it and knows if it is good besides the gimmick?
Yep , and ending up finding the conversation between the 2 readers by handwritten notes the more interesting story. The main story is a bit of a mystery adventure story 🤗
“The Missing Piece” by Antonie Bellow. There’s nothing extraordinary about its structure but it’s set in a world just slightly askew of ours. I can’t explain it, except to say that there is a feeling (I think of it as a flavour) the book generates that will stay with you. I read it years ago and can’t still remember the strange slightly unsettling feeling the book evoked. If it helps, there is a serial killer at the centre of the plot and the book is set in a world where competitive jigsaw puzzle solving is treated with the reverence that chess is in this world. Strange but quite readable.
EVERY Book is ergodic literature: when you read it in a language you are not comfortable with. Every scene is more intense when you struggle deciphering it. Try "Exercises in Style" by Raymond Queneau. Best in french. An experience in itself. Two simple scenes in the public, told in 99 different literary styles.
Moid is soooo close to discovering the fantastic breadth and depth of Warhammer Fantasy and grimdark gloriousness of WH40k literature from both the vaults of the fabled Black Library, and the respective in-universe background books…so close…
I felt sure BS Johnson would figure in here somewhere but no. XX, LMNOP & 'S', AKA Ship of Theseus all look worth seeking out. Thanks for this video. Cheers👍🏼
I haven’t read all the comments, so forgive me if this has been suggested, but “Hopscotch” by Argentinian, Julio Cortazar. Like Ulysses there is a lot of stream of consciousness which presents a challenge in itself, but the book can also be read out-of-order, and the author provides an alternative page sequence that you must reference as you read. I haven’t gotten round to this one yet. I bought a small haul of so-called ergodic literature about a year ago, and this was in the bunch, along with: Horror Stor (not good, not ergodic), House of Leaves, weird formatting, lots of fake references to scholastic works… ultimately quite boring. Pale Fire by Nabokov (quite brilliant), and I was going to get S, but decide on a beautifully illustrated edition of Ulysses, which I’m planning to read along with the RTE podcast production, and a huge hardback copy of Infinite Jest. Not sure about this one. Time will tell.
Ella Minnow Pea calls to mind James Thurber's book "The Wonderful O" (sometimes paired with the completely marvellous "The 13 Clocks") where pirates ban the letter O from all words when they fail to find treasure on the island of Ooroo.e
"LMNOP" reminds me of French author Georges Perec's "A Void" which is entirely without any "e"s, both in the French original and amazingly also in its English translation. Also a bizarre and challenging read.
Have you read the Griffin and Sabine trilogy? The story is told through letters and postcards and the actual letters are enclosed in envelopes for you to open and read. It's quite charming.
omg I had forgotten all about these books! I distinctly remember sitting in bed with a dice in one hand and the book and another. At the time it felt so damn exciting like I was participating in some sort of fantastical alternate reality.
What about freaking James Joyce? I still cant believe the librarian said NOTHING when i borrowed Ulysses. I was 13. In same group of books i borrowed that day was Bored of the Rings.
Carrie has a significant amount of newspaper reports, journal articles, etc, but it's definitely not the majority. I haven't counted up the pages but I'd be surprised if it made up more than 25%.
Why are you wearing a shoulder rig? Also: the GOAT ergodic text is Tristram Shandy. “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next seven years (vols. 3 and 4, 1761; vols. 5 and 6, 1762; vols. 7 and 8, 1765; vol. 9, 1767.” - Wikipedia. Death is addressed as a single black page, for example. The book itself is a demonstration of the impossibility of writing as a means of apprehending reality.
I had a load of the FF books in the early eighties but when I got to high school I thought they were uncool and I threw them away. Still regret that to this day. Edit: I’ve owned House of Leaves for over twenty years and I’ve tried to read it about 4 times. Maybe one day I’ll get through it.
6 weeks?! It was immediately clear to me.. in fact i got it even before I had heard of this book, and it was so obvious to me I assumed it would be rightly understood by most english speakers.. am I alone?
The Historical Illuminatus series by Robert Anton Willson is actually a science fiction series. It just has footnotes that eventually take over and infect the story . . .
theres a book about the potato famine, award-winning and heart-breaking, as character dies of starvation, slowly at first, becoming maniac & tense, then theres a page (well, 2) its just completely black. But scrawled black. Not a neat, stark black, a much more frightening vision. As i imagined a coffin lid, and scratchmarks frenzied, desperate , made by someone buried alive ... thats how starving to death felt - thats my interpretation, anyways. No, its not sci-fi, but the potato fanine in the reason i live in canada (technically, its why i live at all)
Loved those Fighting Fantasy books as a kid. Don't get the gun holster, but could just be me... More suggestions in this 'genre': BS Johnson's The Unfortunates and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch
Another layer in Horrorstor. Maybe not wildly important, but I was vastly amused by it. Not all of the product names are made up. And the actual products can be ... pretty wild.
ergodic? no I've got an normal one like everyone else
😂😂
@@bathbadgerking therefore, penis
Bram Stoker's Dracula is not just letters but journal entries (some written in shorthand), a Captain's log, phonograph recordings and newspaper articles. Stoker wanted to highlight the newest technology available at the time, so Mina uses a typewriter, Seward the phonograph, and Harker shorthand (among other things)
Thanks for clearing that up, i was about half right
@@MediaDeathCult no worries. I just read that book when I was way too young and now I know too much about it.
I loved Fighting Fantasy books as a kid. That series was definitely the start of my love for fantasy and sci-fi literature.
Yes! Same here. I still have some fond memories from some of those books that I had read a long time ago when I was a kid. I don't know if they are still around; probably not - and that's a pity.
XX barely gets any attention on UA-cam. One of the finest First Contact books I’ve ever read.
Colonel Mustard is in every work of fiction. Some authors just decide not to focus on him.
I knew it
House of leaves has a fairly short page count but somehow it feels like a 1500 page book. Somehow it makes sense.
Nothing will ever pull me in like House of Leaves did, ever again. It is the most immersive story ever written
That John Finnemore is THE John Finnemore, by the way. The wonderful comedian and comedy writer admired and adored by many. He wrote his own sequel to that puzzle, which was published this year.
Very cool, thanks for the info
Great list! Other suggestions: Jason Shiga's "Meanwhile", a time-travel choose your own adventure comic book. Stanislaw Lem's "Imaginary Magnitude", a collection of prefaces to imaginary books from the future.
Meanwhile is fantastic - especially recommended to any Futurama fans (and not just for the previous final ep title)
I'm curious if Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer would classify as ergodic. It doesn't have the structural shenanigans of pages being out of order or the story being split into mirroring sections. But it is written with such an abstract and meta approach to the language that it turns into a wonderful puzzle of words the deeper into the story you get. It reminded me so much of when I used to read e.e.cummings poetry when i was young and loving how the way words were arranged on the page would affect the meaning.
I could see why a lot of people, who thought Dead Astronauts was just a standard story, would be super frustrated with it. But once I realized what i was in for with it, I found it to be so masterful and fascinating. It feels so singular in my mind, with nothing else like it (outside of poetry).
I see what you mean, ergodic adjacent at least
Love Vandermeer's approach to a tale! Have you started Absolution? Part 1 is a POV character reviewing documents and tapes and surveillance footage. Wonderfully metatextual!
1:41 I did not need to be called out so early in the day.
About 100 years ago (actually only 50 but it feels longer) one of the reasons I fell in love with SF was the “work” involved in understanding a new world created by the authors, where the rules, the technology, the mores were radically different in myriad ways from the quotidian working class world I grew up in. The gradual understanding of how things worked in Frank Herbert’s Dune or Larry Niven’s Known Space, was a source of joy, along with the proverbial “Sense of Wonder”. Wish I could recreate that feeling now, but I can’t. Oh well.
Coincidentally, I’m reading “The House of Leaves“ right now. What are the odds? Wait, wait… is Google spying on me again?
Me 2 lol
Not sure if it counts but this makes me think of Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić, such a weird wonderful labyrinth of a book
This was the first book that leapt into my mind as well.
Yes it does. I have a copy but haven't read it yet myself.
I'd put Infinite Jest in here somewhere. No sideways pages or pictures, but you have to flip all over the place to get through it.
Agreed.
If ergodic means having to put in more effort to read and understand the work, then definitely. Infinite Jest and Ulysses should be right up there,
Can't believe IJ wasn't mentioned tbh!
Pale Fire by Nabokov. The experience is a little like the Fighting Fantasy page-turning; I needed three bookmarks at all times. Beautiful, hilarious, and haunting.
When I heard the intro I was thinking, "I bet House of Leaves is going to be way down this list". I was pleasantly surprized that there are multiple books on the list even MORE ergodic! 😱
Between the origins of the root parts of the word in ancient Greece, and the late 20th century invention of the term "ergodic literature" I don't know if the word has had any other lives, but there is a very significant branch of 20th centure mathematics starting in the 20s or 30s and continuing until the present day know as "Ergodic Theory" dealing with the statistical properties of deterministic dynamical systems - basically anticipating and becoming the formal mathematics wing of what later became know as Chaos Theory. It deals with such questions as can it be proved that a trajectory of a certain dynamical system will eventually come arbitrarily close to a given point in phase space if given enough time. The Poincare Recurence Theorem, a result from ergodic theory, has to do with proving such a system will inevitably come back to its starting point after enough time. This idea, or some variation of it, seems to have filled certain hypersensitive artistic types with existential dread, as in "can life have any meaning if someday everything, including oneself, is going to happen again and again - and presumably be just as stupid every time?" Anyway, this idea has even worked its way into some Scifi at this point, including a throwaway reference in this video. So I guess full circle?
The epistolary novel is almost the Ur-form of the novel, and was quite common in the 18t century: Richardson's _Clarissa_ (not to be confused with the witch), and Tobias Smollett's _Humphry Clinker_ are both epistolary and early novels. And the tricks in _House of Leaves_ go back to the first English novel, _Tristam Shandy_ from 1750!
Great stuff, thank you
Lipogramatic means writing that lacks a certain letter. It's an interesting way of toning your style muscles because it forces you to choose words much more carefully than you would normally have to. There is a famous French novel called Gadsby, which does not contain the letter e.
I'm still digesting 'House of Leaves' months after reading it. A few of your other suggestions are on my TBR list. Ergodic literature is, indeed, the labyrinth inside a house bigger on the inside.
Thanks
Thank you
I now know that Ive read Cloud Atlas in completely the wrong way. I feel very silly.
Great video Moid. Thank you and have a nice Christmas.
Thank You Mark, you too
_Cloud Atlas_ and _Piranesi_ are some of the best books I have read.
I remember seeing a duology where the texts in both volumes were exactly the same, excluding six pages. They were women's edition and men's edition. I saw their Finnish translation in a bookshop many years ago, but I do not remember what was the title or who was the author.
Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String isn't labeled as ergodic, but I'd argue it does a lot of what this genre does even better.
Er (meh) gerd oc … nicely done.
Loved Piranesi and Cloud Atlas, as well as Flowers for Algernon which made me cry. Dracula is the best, the audio version narrated by Mike Bennet is amazing.
Iain M Baks Feersum Endjinn might count? Trying to read the text message style prose was hard work.
That bonkers movie on Netflix Bandersnatch with alt endings.
Hopscotch by Cortazar. Mulligan Stew by Sorrentino. Chimera by Barths. Avignon Quintet by Durrell.
Two more ergodic novels to try are Dictionary of the Khazars and Landscape Painted with Tea - both by Milorad Pavić.
This is blimmin fascinating. Thanks Moid!
Thanks Sarah
Choose your own adventure books are RPGs for nerds without nerd friends
The list does go on and on and on but HONORABLE MENTIONS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, both written by Mark Frost and they’re written as case files that reference time and puzzles and other stuff. Way more ‘linear’ than a lot of these books but still worth mentioning imo!
One of of my lockdown projects was an end-to-end rewatch of TP and reading the two Frost books you mention. Brilliant... and the 4 and a half hour UA-cam video "Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really)" by Twin Perfect was the icing on the cake. All well worth the time.
I think I would consider Steven Erikson's work ergodic. Not so much in the structure of the narrative (no bouncing timelines or unreliable narrators) but more around the fact that it requires real effort to read them. He created an entire fantasy world but writes his stories within that world with zero exposition, and most plot points (even major ones) are often revealed through context clues rather than directly spelled out on the page. His books often require multiple readings to fully understand what is going on, and many people will rely on online chapter summaries to pick up on stuff that they may have missed.
Great example. Gardens of the Moon was one of the most challenging reads I’ve ever experienced, but by the end I felt like I had earned my place in that world, it was immensely rewarding.
Can’t believe you didn’t include Use of Weapons here in the shallow end of the pool - three timelines running concurrently and meeting at the end of the book in a colossal twist ( as all long-term cultists know).
More new great recommendations here. Ongoing thanks, Moid.
@@markknowles1998 shout there.
Currently reading The Player of Games. Use of Weapons (reread) is next. I read it so long ago I forgot about it.
Seeing three books on this list that have a high place on my shelf made me realize that I apparently have a favorite genre I never knew had a name. Also, you an add Lanark to this list.
Loved "Piranesi". Can also recommend the phonetic 1st person book "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M Banks, for this list.
Pale Fire. Maybe it's on the 'mild' end, but still worth considering, and definitely worth reading
“He should be stripped of his Oscar’s for that performance”
True True
Thank you for presenting interesting reading projects. Also, I think we can add Julio Cortázar's 'Hopscotch' in there somewhere
.
Yeah, Hopscotch is a must
[Deep sniff] "Aaaah. Napkins."
Where do pop up books sit on your list? There's a lot of work in those tabs and flaps... Then there's those 'Archives' books, like The Alien Archive with pull out plans and recreated paper props...
I would say they are very ergodic, very ergodic indeed
I really liked Lincoln in the Bardo. It's a ghost story told in, what feels like, hundreds of footnotes. Does that count?
Sure, why not, we're talking ergodic adjacent most of the time, anyway.
Your reading of Warlock was hilarious. I loved that book when I was a kid! Strangely I was never able to finish it. I think I never made it past that junction.
Love the way your brain works brother. More power to your elbow.
Another honorable mention I think would be The Book of Dave by Will Self, where many chapters have dialogue written in phonetic cockney.
I recently learned about The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall. It sounds like what's in the book was already a beast to read, but also an equal number of chapters were secretly scattered around the world (including online). Not all the pieces were ever found and I imagine some no longer exist
Fighting Fantasy was a good portion of my childhood
My entrance into genre fiction was Lrod of the Rings, and also Doctor WHo novelisations from target Books, but Fighting Fantasy was up there too. It wasn't the first "interactive" series of books I discovered: the first was a series called Wizards, Warriors and You, but Fighting Fantasy was more complex and involved actual dice rolling. I have about five of them on my shelves here, and you could find some of them at my elementary school library. I had a friend who collected almost all of them before the age of twelve.
Before "ergodic" became a trend, way before, even in the 17th century, we had the "antinovela", or "anti-novel" or "anti-roman" (Le Berger extravagant).
I also wrote an "antinovela" in 2006, published in 2014 (in Spanish), but it was quickly called an ergodic novel, because it requires some work, they say. I think it's very easy to read, I just ommitted separating narration from dialogue with quotations because the nature of the novel made irrelevant who was talking at any moment, only what was said was relevant. If you think one character was speaking but it was another, I won't cause any confusion or misunderstanding, because any character could have said the thing.
That Ella Minnow Pea book sounds like Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, or at least the starting chapter, where the narration is told using pseudo-caveman vocabulary that struggles to communicate an overwhelming emotion or realization, for which there are no words yet.
Wow. What a great damn video dude.
Thank you
As soon as I saw the video title (and without noticing Ella Minnow Pea in the thumbnail) I was thinking about Mark Dunn's Ibid: A Life, which purports to be the extensive endnotes to a biography whose main text was destroyed in a bath. I don't know that I'd call it ergodic-it wasn't really important or interesting to think about what must be in the missing text, but it was a fun read
I've only read one of these, but all of them sound fantastic! Great videos, as always!
Thank you
Well timed. Just got my copy of "Dictionary of the Khazars". Not sure how much effort it really will be to read, but porting it to ebook would be a pain. Nice appearance by doggo. Couldn't tell if offering personal support or asking to be fed / let out.
I wonder if you are familiar with Italo Calvino's work. Would have loved to see him included here!
Yes, i read Cosmicomics last year
Zero interest in reading ergodic literature. Infinite interest in hearing you talk about it. Another super video.
Thank You
You should also consider Kim Newman's literary choose-your-own-adventure _Life's Lottery._ Never has the eleven plus exam seemed so fateful.
Thanks, awesome selection! With a stretch I would add Infinite Jest to the list. It has a very extensive footnote section that even contains entire plot lines. So it forces the reader to flip the book back and forth. Also, at the opener of the book is kinda the ending of the story. And later the plot shows what preceded it. So, at the end the reader should be kinda curious to come back to the beginning to have a complete 'cycle'.
With even more of a stretch I would add JR by William Gaddis. The entire book is presented as a dialogue without any introduction of the characters speaking. The reader should guess who is talking by the themes, language style, and idiosyncrasies of each character. A hell of a read😅
“The Screwtape Letters”by CS Lewis should get an honorable mention at least.
thanks for this! Very well done. The whole Siri bit had me busting a gut.
Bit? I don't know what you mean, thanks
The first time i heard about ergodic literature, it sent me into an excessive buying-spree that ended up costing me like 150 bucks... but i have no regrets.
I loved Ella Minnow Pea for its meta-levels. I mean it's a novel in LETTERS get it? Because its about the letters of the alphabet but it tells the story in letters. Like mail. Absolutely genius.
I can also recommend the people of paper by salvador plascencia
I wouldn't consider Cloud Atlas or Piranesi Ergodic because you don't have to interact with either of them in a way other than the usual back to front to read then. Ergodic lit should have you jumping backwards and forwards, reading things out of standard order if you want.
Had Ship of Theseus on my shelf since it was released, never got around to it. I found the constant handwritten comments next to the text really destroy the reading flow. Has anyone read it and knows if it is good besides the gimmick?
Yep , and ending up finding the conversation between the 2 readers by handwritten notes the more interesting story. The main story is a bit of a mystery adventure story 🤗
“The Missing Piece” by Antonie Bellow. There’s nothing extraordinary about its structure but it’s set in a world just slightly askew of ours. I can’t explain it, except to say that there is a feeling (I think of it as a flavour) the book generates that will stay with you. I read it years ago and can’t still remember the strange slightly unsettling feeling the book evoked. If it helps, there is a serial killer at the centre of the plot and the book is set in a world where competitive jigsaw puzzle solving is treated with the reverence that chess is in this world. Strange but quite readable.
EVERY Book is ergodic literature: when you read it in a language you are not comfortable with. Every scene is more intense when you struggle deciphering it. Try "Exercises in Style" by Raymond Queneau. Best in french. An experience in itself. Two simple scenes in the public, told in 99 different literary styles.
Moid is soooo close to discovering the fantastic breadth and depth of Warhammer Fantasy and grimdark gloriousness of WH40k literature from both the vaults of the fabled Black Library, and the respective in-universe background books…so close…
Shhh 🤫 The gates to this kingdom are high and well kept. Are we sure he is ready?
For the Moid, ahem, I mean the Emperor!
I felt sure BS Johnson would figure in here somewhere but no. XX, LMNOP & 'S', AKA Ship of Theseus all look worth seeking out. Thanks for this video. Cheers👍🏼
The state of those bananas.
I haven’t read all the comments, so forgive me if this has been suggested, but “Hopscotch” by Argentinian, Julio Cortazar. Like Ulysses there is a lot of stream of consciousness which presents a challenge in itself, but the book can also be read out-of-order, and the author provides an alternative page sequence that you must reference as you read.
I haven’t gotten round to this one yet. I bought a small haul of so-called ergodic literature about a year ago, and this was in the bunch, along with: Horror Stor (not good, not ergodic), House of Leaves, weird formatting, lots of fake references to scholastic works… ultimately quite boring. Pale Fire by Nabokov (quite brilliant), and I was going to get S, but decide on a beautifully illustrated edition of Ulysses, which I’m planning to read along with the RTE podcast production, and a huge hardback copy of Infinite Jest. Not sure about this one. Time will tell.
Also Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, which can be read in any order. Serious omission ;)
*old man voice* "I remember books!" xD
Great vid Moid, thank you
You're welcome
Ella Minnow Pea calls to mind James Thurber's book "The Wonderful O" (sometimes paired with the completely marvellous "The 13 Clocks") where pirates ban the letter O from all words when they fail to find treasure on the island of Ooroo.e
BTW your dog looks very hungry and ignored :) ...You're my favorite book-tuber. Bloody interesting stuff. Ordered one of those books. ...
Thank you
"LMNOP" reminds me of French author Georges Perec's "A Void" which is entirely without any "e"s, both in the French original and amazingly also in its English translation. Also a bizarre and challenging read.
Have you read the Griffin and Sabine trilogy? The story is told through letters and postcards and the actual letters are enclosed in envelopes for you to open and read. It's quite charming.
I haven't but i'll keep an eye out
omg I had forgotten all about these books! I distinctly remember sitting in bed with a dice in one hand and the book and another. At the time it felt so damn exciting like I was participating in some sort of fantastical alternate reality.
Have a look at Bottom's Dream by Arno Schmidt.
What about freaking James Joyce? I still cant believe the librarian said NOTHING when i borrowed Ulysses. I was 13.
In same group of books i borrowed that day was Bored of the Rings.
The Cloud Atlas concept feels a lot like The Use of Weapons, by Iain M Banks.
Such interesting books- thanks!
You're welcome
Carrie has a significant amount of newspaper reports, journal articles, etc, but it's definitely not the majority. I haven't counted up the pages but I'd be surprised if it made up more than 25%.
Love the ergodic Siri conversation
Thanks
lol Many kindergarten children come in to class thinking that LMNOP is all one letter when singing the alphabet, so the title made me giggle.
Why are you wearing a shoulder rig? Also: the GOAT ergodic text is Tristram Shandy. “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next seven years (vols. 3 and 4, 1761; vols. 5 and 6, 1762; vols. 7 and 8, 1765; vol. 9, 1767.” - Wikipedia. Death is addressed as a single black page, for example. The book itself is a demonstration of the impossibility of writing as a means of apprehending reality.
I had a load of the FF books in the early eighties but when I got to high school I thought they were uncool and I threw them away. Still regret that to this day.
Edit: I’ve owned House of Leaves for over twenty years and I’ve tried to read it about 4 times. Maybe one day I’ll get through it.
Deathtrap Dungeon was my favourite adventure.
ah yes, Branderson Sanderson. Renown author of The Way of Rings and Pissedborn.
🤣
I can't believe you left out Pale Fire by Nabokov!
You need to look into the work of the Oulipo, particularly the books by Georges Perec. Don't forget the comics version, the Oubapo.
Piranesi is such a good book. I LOVED it.
Agree about Horror Stor. Crap short horror novel with ikea style formatting.
Disappointing, but thankfully, very short.
6 weeks?! It was immediately clear to me.. in fact i got it even before I had heard of this book, and it was so obvious to me I assumed it would be rightly understood by most english speakers.. am I alone?
Would you count invisible monsters by Chuck palahniuk as an ergodic book? Especially the remixed version?
Loved The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Actually, pretty hard to get thru, too
The Historical Illuminatus series by Robert Anton Willson is actually a science fiction series. It just has footnotes that eventually take over and infect the story . . .
My favorite episode so far
Thank you
I adore the humor in this🤣
theres a book about the potato famine, award-winning and heart-breaking, as character dies of starvation, slowly at first, becoming maniac & tense, then theres a page (well, 2) its just completely black. But scrawled black. Not a neat, stark black, a much more frightening vision. As i imagined a coffin lid, and scratchmarks frenzied, desperate , made by someone buried alive ... thats how starving to death felt - thats my interpretation, anyways.
No, its not sci-fi, but the potato fanine in the reason i live in canada (technically, its why i live at all)
Hilarious. Subbed!
Loved those Fighting Fantasy books as a kid. Don't get the gun holster, but could just be me... More suggestions in this 'genre': BS Johnson's The Unfortunates and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch
oh, and Tom Phillips A Humument
Another layer in Horrorstor. Maybe not wildly important, but I was vastly amused by it. Not all of the product names are made up. And the actual products can be ... pretty wild.