Bookish Thoughts

I forget how I heard about this book, but as soon as I did, I became obsessed with reading it. It's an experimental sort of book, a collaboration between JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst. It's definitely a different sort of reading experience that any other I've had before. This is a book of many layers, and it requires the reader to keep track of a bunch of stuff at once. The foundation is the "fictional" book, Book of Theseus . Fictional is in quotes because that book does, obviously, exist. You read it as part of reading this book. But all the other information about it, the author and his life and the 19 books he wrote before it, do not actually exist except in the world of this book. Book of Theseus  is presented as the final book this author, Straka, ever wrote. And he actually died before he finished it. So his longtime friend and translator finished it for him and had it published posthumously. Footnotes throughout the book comment on their relationship, as we...

The premise for this book was really interesting. It's sort of a cross between a gothic novel and a choose you own adventure book. Jane gets invited to a party at a secluded mansion by a friendly acquaintance shortly after her aunt dies. But there's a lot going on at the mansion. After hinting at a variety of mysteries, Cashore puts Jane in a room with the option of following one of five different characters, each promising enlightenment about a different question. And then the book breaks into five different stories, one for each choice, with the remaining stories playing out in the background. It's the sort of experimental thing that I've gotten more and more interested in lately. But I think Cashore threw one too many elements into her mixing bowl. Each of the five stories is a different genre. This worked fine for the first few: a mystery, a thriller, even a horror story. The fourth story is science-fiction, and it's here that I think the book jumped the shark...