Inspired by my recent font-astic discussion with Mark Danielewski, the release of Helvetica, and the return (finally!) of my lent-out copy of The Raw Shark Texts, I'm feeling the itch for a roundtable. I mentioned it ever-so-briefly a few months back, but I think it's time to examine how text arrangement and other inserted-into-a-novel ephemera works/doesn't work in recently published novels. Now that the initial "wow, that's cool" and "oh, but there's no story there" and "that's just gimmicky" discussions are over and now that the individual books have been exhaustively reviewed for the textual and non-textual components, it seems that taking a look at the trend as a whole might be worthwhile. I'm curious about taking a step back, seeing how this trend (is it, though?) has emerged and evolved, how it irritates readers or not, and what that might mean for future novels.
I could be wrong. It has happened before. Yesterday, in fact. Still, I think I'm up for it. Are you? With the holiday madness about to rain down upon us, I'm open to holding off on the roundtable for awhile...even until January if that's the kind of time that is needed.
Possible books to explore include:
- House of Leaves & Only Revolutions by Mark Danielewski
- The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
- The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
- Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
- Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
- U.S!: A Novel by Chris Bachelder
There are many other books that make sense here, but my mind is failing me. If you are interested in such a discussion, drop me a line and let me know what books you'd like to discuss and when in this mad, busy world you'd actually have time to discuss them.
