Check out House of Leaves. Some sections have text in every orientation possible. A engrossing and difficult, but rewarding, read. I now want to read it again.

Re House of Leaves, I don't recall it being most pages. There was a flurry of those at the end, but I found it was an effective machination that heightened the drama rather than distracted.

Interesting example, because House of Leaves was the book that finally convinced me to start dropping books after 100 pages or so if I wasn't enjoying them.

I'd love to see House of Leaves as an ebook. Even a PDF has limits, as do e reader screen sizes. If anyone makes that book work as well as paper, I'll consider ereaders a solved problem.

Yep, read about this and thought of House of Leaves. It's not quite as elaborate (no additional objects) but the intent is similar, I think.

I'm surprised House of Leaves isn't mentioned, a terrific book about a house bigger on the inside full of labyrinths.

There are many people these days that use formatting to further their writing, but a particular example that I enjoyed immensely was Danielewski's House of Leaves.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves

On the other hand, DFW was against the cute, post-modernist self-references in things like Danielewski's "House Of Leaves".

Infinite Jest was acclaimed academically because it was a fresh return to un-ironic content and narrative.

I think IJ is more layers than recursive loops.

I have nothing interesting to add, except that I literally just stood up from reading House of Leaves in bed before sleep.

Is "S" the JJ Abrams book adventure? I haven't finished it yet, but was enjoying it when life got complicated and I had to put it down.

House of Leaves is also similar in a way that the book is more than a book, but I can never make it very far.

Finished 'House of Leaves' 2 months ago (Danielewski), a fantasy/terror thing, and he is in the same league with Lovecraft. The postmodern apparatus is more nice than silly.

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. Not sure that I can recommend it, but it's very different from anything else I've read.

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

Very similar style to Infinite Jest, but the story seems much more sinister.

Hah, I just finished House of Leaves based on a recommendation from a friend, and I totally understand. I didn't really enjoy the book, but it was so pervasively creepy I had a hard time reading it, and often felt extremely uncomfortable at home alone after a reading session.

In case you’re curious as to why I read it, a good friend of mine gave me a copy after he read House of Leaves upon my recommendation a few years ago because it provided further insight into the book.

Not heavy, exactly, though I guess it can get slightly repetitive after a while (or maybe "loopy" is a more fitting word :]). It's actually quite entertaining.

If you want heavy-but-popular, try Foucault's Pendulum or House of Leaves …

Go read House of Leaves and then see if you still have the same opinion. That is a story that can only be told in the form of a book.

+1 for House of Leaves! Didn't expect to see that here. Bizarre and mind-bending. Awesome experimental fiction. Really have to go back and read it again sometime soon.

(And no, there's no eBook - that I know of. You'll err... understand why when you see the physical copy.)

For footnotes, have to mention House of Leaves (Danielewski) as well, although this definitely falls more into the gimmicky "hold the book up to the mirror" camp than the eloquence of IJ.

I'm not OP, but I finished House of Leaves a year back and you definitely want to read the footnotes and everything else that Danielewski (or Zampano, if you like) has put on there.

It really is a terrific book.

Has the book House of Leaves been recommended to you countless times already?

Related: if you like meta-narratives, I would highly recommend House of Leaves.

House of Leaves blew me away when I read it after it came out. I agree that is a fresh take on narrative form, and I personally found the process of reading it quite fun.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski has been compared to Pale Fire. I've read House of Leaves, and though it's textbook-sized (about as large as GED), when I got into it I finished it within the week. Definitely find one in print, it's just absolutely engaging.

House of Leaves is a great book. ANd in places really creepy and claustraphobic.

I read it on the bus when I used to have to commute for 4 hours a day. Must have looked weird reading this giant book, and at some points reading it upside down, or on its side, or flicking through pages pretty fast (some pages only have 1 or 2 words on them).

On a related note, one of the main characters in House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is based heavily on Kevin Carter, in case you wanted to read a fictional, psychological-horror take on some of these issues.

Thanks for this quote (and the translation) -- this is great.

Thought I was reading House of Leaves there for a second.

Two additions:

* Another comment mentioned fiction and historical books that contain maps not having good-enough resolution.

* There're some books out there that straight up can't be rendered on e-readers, such as House of Leaves.

House of Leaves is a great novel. Will feel like a completely fresh take on narrative form.

Infinite Jest is also great, if you haven't read it. It gets a lot of bad press mostly due to being fetishized by a particular type of insufferable person. The book has its flaws, but is a great piece of writing and (depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc) may offer a different lens. Also, the writing is excellent.

House of Leaves. I read it in college and thought it was okay, but I had some ideas about the world I think I was trying to project on it, and I didn't really "get it." Some stuff happened in my life recently, and for some reason I remembered it and felt compelled to re-read. I'm glad I did. I felt like I understood and identified with it a great deal more.

House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski

The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall

Ah nice, I need to do the same with House of Leaves, I'm a big fan of stories with unconventional structuring. Sometimes a Great Notion by Kesey is my favorite; it's told from multiple first-person perspectives that shift pretty rapidly, where the shifts are indicated by having a particular speakers' text italicized, in parenthesis, with no formatting applied, etc. It's pretty neat.

'Unlike any other' might be a stretch. Writers have been playing these sorts of meta-narrative games for decades now.
Nabokov's Pale Fire comes to mind. House of Leaves is another example.

Some books are not meant to have any changes to fonts, size or reflow. "House of Leaves" is one example of a book formatted specifically for printed books which does not translate well to ePub. (source: I read this book in epub)

When it comes to preserving the intended layout, PDF simply translates better.

That is a pretty magical piece of writing right there. I have nothing to do with the law profession but I can appreciate a printed document, especially when it bears a certain heft. The paper has a certain feel, the cover feels a certain way. The last time I remember feeling like there was something special about the book itself -- not the words therein -- was the first printing of Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves". It was, and maybe still is, unique to my experience with books.

Very similar, though I would say House of Leaves is a vastly better book.

S. is a fun conversation piece, but… it's not a great book. The "base" book is amusing enough, mostly as an exercise in the sort of adventure novel that peaked with Heart of Darkness and mid-century magical realism vis a vis Borges. The metafictional in-the-margins story is just a mess.

I've read both of these, and don't recommend them.

House of Leaves has a very uninteresting plot, and raises more questions than it answers. It's physically painful to read, because most pages, you have to rotate the entire book every which way since the words go in spirals.

Infinite Jest is good, but way too long. A good 70% of the book could have been cut out or condensed. The writing is also intentionally bad, which makes it harder to read. There are definitely good lines, but it's kind of like DFW used a random sentence generator and some of the lines just happened to be amazing, but 90% of it is garbage.

I believe Infinite Jest uses "endnotes" as opposed to footnotes. One interesting example of footnotes is Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves where different narrators make extensive use of footnotes to add additional details to the story. On many occasions, the "base" story is only a single paragraph and the footnotes will run on for dozens of pages.

Lots of comments here to the effect of "novelists don't need full-featured rich styling*, it's all just plain text!" It's true for _many_ novels.

But it's not true for _all_ novels! House of Leaves (Danielewski) and S. (Abrams/Dorst) are full-fledged multimedia novels. Many fantasy novels use maps; Crying of Lot 49 uses at least 1 image, in situ. And I would love to see an edition of Pale Fire (Nabokov) that interposes annotations between the "original formatting" of the poem!

"The novel" isn't really a well-defined concept...there are many interpretations of the basic concept! The high % of novels that are "just text" is descriptive, not prescriptive.

* Use whatever definition of "rich text" you like, I don't care

We'll know the solution is near at hand when there's a satisfying way to represent a book like "House of Leaves" (colored words, intentionally blank/sideways/mirrored pages, backwards text, and other typographic mischief) or "Gödel Escher Bach" (diagrams, puzzles embedded in formatting, messages riffing self-referentially on the medium in which they're represented). This is apparently a long way off, given that after all these years, the Kindle hasn't even evolved to the point where it can render a page without what is often sparse and uncomely full justification (to the best of my knowledge).

By "the shrinking tunnel" do you mean the section where fewer & fewer words appear on each page (and the rest of page is blank)?

If so, that's funny - that's one of my favorite parts of the book, and something I refer to often when talking about the book. The reason I like it so much is that it's at a very tense/dangerous moment, and normally in those situations it's impossible to actually read the content in exactly the order written - instead, my eyes will saccade forward and give my little subconscious "hints" at how the tension is resolved.

By placing only a few words per page (by the end, just one word per page), House of Leaves kept me in a state of fairly breathless anticipation for the whole time I was reading that part. Danielewski managed to get a film-like control over the pacing, which I thought was brilliant.

I'm curious now, because this is very close to how I see pomo and I always find myself in distress trying to express this to hardcore STEM-my people (I was one myself, but nowadays thoughts are much too layered for just that.)

Anyway, the thing I'm curious about, have you read House of Leaves? I always explain the book to people as something that exploded my senses of (traditional) scientific certainty and then I went on a huge voyage of pomo, Wittgenstein etc. It also showed me in an intensely terrifying way how fluid in concept my mind could be, something like 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me (Pascal)'.

Sure, if it's not a huge digression. Gravity's Rainbow and In Remembrance Of Things Past, which I haven't read yet and are long enough to justify print reading. House of Leaves, a favorite book of mind which has a very unusual typographic layout. A Best of The Onion encyclopedia, for reading when I have to kill a little time. The last book is called Syrup, by Maxx Barry, and is maybe the best light reading I've ever come across. It's not at all deep, but it's three hundred fast-paced pages and I've read it more than anything else I can think of, because I've never been in a mood where I've picked up the book and it hasn't been appealing.

Then on the Kindle I have all the Asimov, medium-length novels, nonfiction, kid's books, essays, etc. It's a dream set-up and it all fits in a backpack.

I second Euler's equation.

Also, two books that really rocked my world (though I guess it's not really an answer to the question) were Dune and House of Leaves.

Before I scan the thread for inspiration, these are mine:

1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; I have no words for this except that it was profound and I was ready for it.

2. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team; a classic where history knows better than we do.

3. Special Topics in Calamity Physics; a fictional tale that shows you how damn easy it is to get lost in conspiracy and speculation.

4. House of Leaves; you can't beat a mind-bending horror like that. I live for this stuff.

5. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse;
It's 50 pages long, just read it.

6. Tantra Illuminated;
A well researched and academic study into the history and the beliefs of Tantra

7. The King in Yellow and its derivatives; The Hanged King lore in the SCP universe is obsessively fascinating to me.

> That comment is in no way 6th grade level writing.

No, but the first couple of paragraphs of my most recent blog post[1] are.

> I think calling clear and understandable writing for "anti-intellectual" is the stupidest thing I have heard in a long time.

Yeah, that would be pretty stupid. Good thing I didn't do that, I guess.

> I agree with your sentiment that writings rich in vocabulary can be a "fun obstacle course" but if you have an actual message you want to convey, it is usually not a good idea to hide it behind an obstacle course.

Sure, but I think you're hinting that the "but if" part is a given in all writing. I mostly do technical writing where my aim is to inform. I also try to entertain since it helps people stick around long enough to be informed.

But that's a pretty narrow slice of the kinds of things people can express in language. Think about poetry, satire, koans, philosophy, and metafiction. Imagine what little would be left of House of Leaves after a technical book editor had their way with it.

A huge part of the experience of reading is decoding the author's language back into your own mentalese. For many authors, like mine, the goal is generally to make that process as easy and transparent as possible to help their reader focus their attention on the unadorned ideas.

But some of my favorite reading experiences were ones that required me to stretch my brain, or that juxtaposed a series of words together in such a surprising, novel way that I felt I'd seen a new color for the first time. Some ideas have lodged permanently in my head not because the author shot them into my skull with the ease of a crossbow bolt but because I had to tear apart the author's words with my bare hands and stuff each dripping piece of knowledge in my own mouth.

[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/09/08/the-hardest-pro...

- I have an extra copy of Goldberg's "Smalltalk80 the Language and its implementation" (HC)

- Also of the XINU Kernel osdev book (HC)

- A copy of "House of Leaves" (HC)

It's worth finishing I think — I enjoyed it, but that's not much to go on — but it is definitely the type of book that should remain unique in your collection. The eighties pop reference angle is interesting for those of us who had parts of their childhood in the eighties, but it is not something you would want to see repeated in a second or third book. A gimmick that works well once.

Reminds me of House of Leaves (Danielewski), which employs typography and layered (fictional) authors in a very compelling and unique manner. I can't imagine ever reading another book like that though (although I know I'll enjoy rereading it in the future). Any copy-cat would seem like cheap clone compared to the original.

House of Leaves - What literature should be. Innovative both in design and in prose. It's very long but you can finish it in a maddening evening, it's hilarious, it's terrifying. Along with Steven King's It, one of two books to give me nightmares. Incredibly complex. It's a puzzle I still haven't fully solved. I consider it the first modern-era novel, and expect others will come like it. When I wrote a novel a year and a half ago, its design was my greatest inspiration.

Finnegans Wake - This book can't be explained until you've seen it. The pinnacle of the English language.

This is exactly my point, though. You shouldn't put much value in what other people like to read. Maybe it's a good place to start, to find books in the first place, but tastes are inherently subjective. Even if hundreds of millions of people enjoyed House of Leaves, that should have no bearing whatsoever on your opinion of it. All that matters is if you enjoy the story or not.

This reminds me a lot of House of Leaves (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24800.House_of_Leaves)

House of Leaves. I've literally never read anything like it.

I assume you might be looking for books of a similar (technical) flavour, of which I don't have too many to recommend, I'm afraid. However, here's some (across different genres) that are in my memory at this moment:

Finance/statistics :
The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb
The Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

Math/science history :
Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Physics:
Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar

Lit:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Philosophy:
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Any of the upanishads but probably Kena Upanishad, Isha Upanishad, or Prashna Upanishad at first (selected for (relative) ease in readership by yours truly)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (for a gentle introduction into Eastern thought)

I'm missing countless others but this is what I have right now. Thanks for the prompt and happy reading! :)

The Bible. Harold Bloom's "Western Canon", Knausgaard's "Min Kamp", "The World According to Garp", Robertson Davies Deptford Triology, "Anna Karenina", "Consilience of Knowledge", "House of Leaves" "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" All these books messed me up to varying degrees.

Putting “house” in blue reminds me of House of Leaves, a book that plays with formatting & typography in unusual ways…

very minor spoilers

…as it descends into madness (blank pages, words in spirals, backwards characters, single-character pages, overlaid paragraphs…). The very first unusual formatting in the book, and spit-take surprising to me as I wasn't expecting anything unusual at all, was simply printing the word “house” in blue. A fun read, thanks for reminding me of it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves#Colors

I tell everyone I meet who is into books to read "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski.

Just a few off the top of my head:

  * The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander - changed how I think about American racism from an abstract concept to reality.  Should be required reading.

  * The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - the book I've read more than any other, a beautiful parable about finding one's place in the world.

  * Ishmael by Daniel Quinn - although it has many flaws, this book was very effective in making me question some basic assumptions about human behavior.

  * House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski - I can't exactly pin down what changed in me, but this book shook me in a way that no other book ever has.  In the right situations reading this book can be like meditation.

There are many other books that changed the way I think about literature, but I wouldn't say they affected my worldview.

A few fiction choices:

  * The Alchemist - the closest thing in my life to a religious text.  Just a beautiful story that I can recall at any time for some calm.

  * Desert Solitaire - just read this recently and it gave me an entirely new outlook on the relationship between humans and nature. 

  * Don Quixote - I was blown away by how a book that is ~600 years old could make me laugh and keep me interested.  Changed how I think about people 'a long time ago' since they could enjoy the same books I do.

  * House of Leaves - this one just split open my brain in an irreversible way, sort of like how you hear people describe certain drugs.

I have been saying I've "reached the end of the internet" for awhile now. I am 44 and have been working on the web since mid 90s. I remember so much cool stuff from then. Trying to get a 56k modem to work, dealing with the fact that you couldn't always get online or if you did you could get kicked off at any time. I remember streaming the Tibetan Freedom Concert with realplayer back in '98. The first mp3 i got, napster, rotten.com, the excitement of ordering from amazon, searching for cracked passwords for photoshop and dreamweaver... in general just figuring shit out. The internet was a mess back then and even though it was frustrating as hell, it was exciting.

Now it just seems like every website online is trying to steal and sell your data. I feel like I have to have a heightened sense of awareness around anything I do. The internet used to be just barely within reach and now it's just crammed down your throat all day long. Nothing seems to work and all for the wrong reasons. Nothing worked back then but that was part of the experience.... now it's just... blah.

I have fallen into a terrible habit of looking at reddit since I don't use any social media. I read crap on r/politics before bed and end up being so frustrated that I have a hard time falling asleep.

Recently I decided to check out a book from the library (House of Leaves, very interesting so far!) and have been reading before bed and not looking at my phone at all. I have been able to fall asleep much easier and I actually have crazy dreams and wake up refreshed. For the first time in years I look forward to going to bed.

Not sure what to make of all of it. Fortunately I have found lately that I'm desiring more analog activities (reading, woodworking, hiking) than I have in a long time. It is nice to be able to use the internet as more of a tool to augment my activities rather than being THE activity.

I loved House of Leaves. The most recent example where the 'shape' of the content really contributed to the experience, albeit in a much, much subtler way, was Infinite Jest.

While cramming stuff into multiple-page-long footnotes and footnotes with footnotes felt a bit gimmicky at first, a few experiences stand out:

1. getting so drawn into a long footnote that I forgot it was a footnote. The confusion upon getting back to the main story felt right for that point in the story (or the book in general)
2. a large number of footnotes that were mildly interesting at first and turned out to be hugely valuable later on (but not crucial to enjoying the book).
3. footnotes that were funny precisely because they were footnotes and somewhat self-aware of it.

If you like Wallace' essays or the themes he kept going back to (depression, self-analysis, addiction, irony, media), I can highly recommend going through the effort of reading the book. It took me multiple tries over a period of maybe a decade to finally finish. Once I got past 200 pages it became difficult to put the (massive) book down and now, weeks later, I'm still thinking about it regularly. Few books have had that effect on me.

After reading a string of books that basically did nothing for me, and then reading a book that completely enveloped me and messed with my head (House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski), I've made a a point of giving books about 50-100 pages to grab my attention, and then moving on if I'm not interested.

I do seek out books from lists like "100 greatest books of the 20th century" and similar, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest to say that War and Peace was dry, repetitive, and completely uninteresting, or that Ulysees' and Gravity's Rainbow's prose were so incoherent, I couldn't make it even 50 pages in either book. On the other hand, The Brothers Karamozov is easily one of the top three books I've ever read, so I don't think its an aversion to classic literature in general.

I think using other people's opinions of books is a good starting point for finding books to read. But I derive no enjoyment whatsoever from knowing that someone else likes the music, or books, or movies that I like, so why should I feel guilty or question my tastes when I disagree with even the most highly regarded opinions?

I’ve started to become suspicious of Amazon too, and I have a feeling that Prime isn’t helping because it places instant gratification above quality or authenticity.

The reason I say it is that I’ve ordered several books from Amazon, with no indication of them being supplied by a third party seller, and I’ve always picked next day with Prime above any other option.

In almost every situation the book has arrived in a cheap, non-Amazon jiffy bag (like a book needs to be bubble wrapped?) and the quality of the paper and print has felt a bit off. And it makes me think that I’m unwittingly buying counterfeit books that might have been run through amazon’s publishing program.

What really made me think that was when I bought a copy of House of Leaves, which is suppose to be printed in colour. The entire book was black and white, which meant it stopped making sense when trying to discuss the content with others (who consider the colours significant).

The same with an O’Reilly book that I recently ordered. The screenshots were really poorly printed, no publisher with a reputation would be happy with the quality of that.

Did I get get a dodgy, possibly pirate, print just because I wanted cheap and fast?

If I understand correctly, you say that software as an art form must by default have a conventional and easily usable UI or means of interaction, ("practical considerations of the medium") before considering anything artistic such as the gameplay itself?

But what if, beyond working on the gameplay itslef, it was artistically interesting for someone to play around with the practical necessities of the medium and try to diverge from the norm? Everyone believed in a standard, approachable reading format from left to right until poets and writers started messing around with that (I'm thinking ee cummings and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski). People tried to defy conventional ways to listen to music or watch movies too.

The DF UI is definitely a pain on the practical side and it's made it difficult for me to really get into the game yet, but from an outside perspective I think it's interesting that way too.

This is very interesting to read. I personally had an experience that increased my anxiety by using the video app Whirligig. It has a cinema mode that puts you in a room, but off to the left there's just a dark, open space. After reading House of Leaves I found myself really creeped out by the dark, open void that existed to my left, and found that feeling followed me for several hours after leaving virtual reality. It seems like in VR it's very important to have control of your surroundings, because a game/app developer could easily cause trauma or scare people who aren't expecting it. The immersion and its effect on your subconscious is really shocking to people who haven't tried it.

Here are all the ones I read this year

  A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire) by George R. R. Martin
  A Feast for Crows: A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) by George R.R. Martin
  The Confident Speaker: Beat Your Nerves and Communicate at Your Best in Any Situation by Harrison Monarth
  House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewsk
  To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War by Jeff Shaara 
  Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
  Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender
  George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution by Brian Kilmeade
  Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain by Steven D. Levitt
  Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
  Finders Keepers: A Novel by Stephen King
  The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I by Barbara W. Tuchman
  The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
  Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson
  The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
  Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute by Emma Craigie
  The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
  Robopocalypse: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Daniel H. Wilson
  Robogenesis by Daniel H. Wilson
  In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick

My 5 favorite ones from that list are

  In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
  Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
  To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War by Jeff Shaara 
  Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
  The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

"House of Leaves" by Mark Z Danielewski

and

Catch-22 by Josepf Heller

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)

House Of Leaves (Mark Danielewski)

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I never finished House of Leaves. I found the house aspects of the story really interesting, but all the parts outside it (the tattoo artist guy) I found insufferably boring. Does it ever actually have any point to his side of the story? It felt like half the book was a waste of time, but maybe it pays off in the end?

I don't know if nobody reads. Nobody reads modern books, perhaps.

It's tough to say something meaningful in a medium that's existed for centuries. You know? So much has already been done that now the medium is shrinking. The people who do remain are less likely to be as talented, because the really talented people have moved on to other things.

Television, for instance. The last 10 years has seen better TV shows than ever existed in the past. The best-written thing I've come across in the last two years was The Wire. I'd compare the quality of writing in that to anything up-to-and-including Shakespeare. And it did stuff that you couldn't have done in a novel. Or in a movie, for that matter.

Mind you, my all-time-favorite novel was published in 2006. And Mark Z Danielewski is still innovating within the form: his House of Leaves is a classic, and it was written just 8 years ago. But those writers are rarer. There's less to be done within the form of pure prose than there was even 40 years ago.

Redliners by David Drake. Burned out soldiers are sent to baby-sit a planetary colonization. Fortunately for the story it turns out to be a planet full of monsters. Baen Free Library.

Accelerando, Iron Sunrise, and Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. Singularity stories.

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. Supernatural meta-fiction with half the story in the footnotes. Reminiscent of the movie Donnie Darko.

Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Private eye gets retained by the White House to track down the other U.S. Constitution. To quote William Gibson, "Stop It. You're frightening me."

Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg. Story of his teenage daughter's descent into manic psychosis.

A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett. Kids' stories, so they have wall-to-wall story, unlike some of his more situational adult books.

James H. Schmitz science fiction stories. Available from the Baen Free Library of digital books.

"Beating" Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books is still to this day one of the funnest reading experiences I can remember. The other was House of Leaves (http://is.gd/njTgTf) which borrows a lot of concepts from the former (at least in terms of how you feel when you're flipping through pages frantically).

I know there have been a few attempts using wikis to recreate the experience (http://is.gd/GNwcAR), but the format just isn't quite right.

Maybe just thinking aloud, but the idea of being able collaborate with multiple people to create fractured stories that could be played by others sounds really promising. Curious to see how this evolves.

House of Leaves is so good! I have yet to come up with a good description of what it's about, but I always try when I tell people about it.

I usually describe it as a story about a guy who finds a manuscript. The manuscript is a collection of essays that detail a documentary that was made about a house that randomly changes rooms.

So at the center of the novel, you have this really creepy story. But there are all the layers above that storyline that you have to read to get there. There's the storyline concerning the people who make the documentary. Then there's the storyline of the guy who wrote the manuscript ABOUT the documentary. Then you have the storyline of the guy who's reading the documentary.

Then there's you. You're reading about a guy who is in turn reading a manuscript about a documentary which was made about a house. It was so well done that at the end, I found myself not really sure what the hell I was reading anymore.

I'm still not sure what the book is, but it's certainly a stroke of genius.

I just finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

A fictional story told, in part, from the perspective of a tattoo parlor apprentice living in Los Angeles, who stumbles upon a monograph of a documentary film, authored by the late, blind neighbor of a friend, about a family who moves into a house in Virginia that is ≈ ¼" bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves