Ergodic Literature: The Weirdest Book Genre 

Thank you for the heads up

You don't happen to know any good option for purchasing the book in the EU?

@@adenowirus Unfortunately as of right now there doesn’t seem to be one outside of getting a friend in the US or Canada to buy you a copy and then send it to you themselves. Other than that, maybe the secondhand market will correct itself eventually after new copies start circulating again

Astonishingly enough, I went ahead and ordered Scorch Atlas directly from Featherproof after watching this- and it was delivered to me during a torrential downpour, and was damaged by the rain. I'm not even mad, it just felt right, after watching what other folks put their volumes through!

Thousands of $$$'s?!! Sounds like more proof, if it were needed, that some folks have more money than sense...

Thanks for sharing. Yeah, this project started because a friend recommended me House of Leaves and I had the thought while reading "Why aren't there more books like this?" so I went looking for more and, wouldn't you know it, there were plenty more, it's just that they were very obscure

@@CloudCuckooCountry I just wish i had the time to do what you have done when I worked for the store, also thanks for the reply.

Where can you exchange books? In Germany thats only allowed if they're packed in cellophane or other casing :0

@@eridanuskelpi3908 in America, if you don’t like something, it’s your RIGHT to get your money back. (that was a joke from South Park, but it’s kinda true haha)

@@eridanuskelpi3908 The store I worked at is Barnes & Noble. Who have a return/exchange policy of 90 days after purchase of a book(s) as long as they are not damaged after the point of sale. Just have to bring the book in to the store, we even did this with online orders as long as they had the receipt that came in the shipping box. There are customers who would puchase a new hardcover, read it in a day or two and then exchange it for a different book. We had one person who had been doing that for about 3years. Hope this answered your question.

Omfg no wonder I like books like this I grew up reading those xD

Holy shit I forgot about that, I tried to make it go as fast as I could for my friend while waiting for the bus, great memories

so are the Big Nate books that have encoded text around the edges! they show you the code midway through and you can go back to translate

In a roundabout way, all those old Choose Your Adventure books also fall under the definition

damn, guys will really go from loving captain underpants to loving house of leaves (i'm guys)

That is completely amazing

Yesss, reader interactivity between the book AND each other! The story grows :) I really hope I can find my own old copy because I also remember (as a brainwashed religious kid who was somehow reading this book) making annotations, notes, even censoring some things. And I don't remember most of it, because, again, brainwashing. REALLY hope I brought it with me in my last move update: I found it!!! It's beat up like a textbook. At some point the front cover got ripped off. I don't remember how or why. The secondary cover (the collage mess of stuff) is shoved between pages 104 and 105. Like a bookmark? But both of said pages were completely struck out by my old pencil. Apparently I also really hated Johnny Truant's diaries. And why is there a mostly-used sheet of lavender heart stickers AND the CD cover of "The Best of WAR" album shoved between pages 220 and 221? I love that album but why is it here? Were they from my mom? It's a terrible place for a bookmark and an even worse book for randomly storing things in for safekeeping. I love it when books are constructively collaborative. This reread is going to be a trip. XD update the second: Rereading a book filled with your own notes and censors that you don't remember IS INDEED A TRIP. To CSI the bookmarks, I think the bookmark at page 220 was from my last reread attempt, where I probably got panicked and never finished the reread. I guess using an album cover from a band I loved as a bookmark didn't provide enough comfort. I also didn't live in the most emotionally stable household at the time, and reading a horror book about a House that gets unstable in the presence of unstable emotions probably messed with me on some extra levels. (I'm doing much better now though) I think the bookmark at page 104 was where my mom gave up reading. Apparently she didn't follow my recommendation to skip the segments I struck, and became put off, and / or she felt like the book was "too complex" for her. Not Her Cup Of Tea, at any rate. If you the reader made it past either point in your own read-through, congrats! You got farther into this labyrinth than we did. As for those struck sections themselves, I largely agreed with my previous assessments of which parts of Johnny's Diaries to skip. I was glad to have my old notes. I felt like I could skim though them with minimal guilt. Also the way I chose to strike them was by drawing multiple long vertical slashes across the paragraphs, which turned out to be Pretty Unintentionally Thematic, given Johnny's observations and experiences. Gave me the willies to turn a page and see slash marks down the page a few times late at night. And again, I don't remember most of this book, or most of these notes, or finishing it, but I had made relevant annotations up until the very end. So. I must have finished it and made those notes. And then got spooked and noped out of my next reread. That was another oddly thematic experience as Johnny's Diaries claim he didn't remember making many notes on the manuscript or his copy of it, by that point in the story. All in all 10/10 will read again and thank you to me from the past for scribbling in your book and adding to the fun. TL;DR annotations from an attentive reader enhances the ergodic literary experience. I hope my story can add to the discussion on scribbling in books. Definitely recommend making your own notes for yourself to maybe forget about and to come back & read later on funky books like this one. 👍

the real house of leaves was the annotations we wrote on the book along the way

damn you got one extra layer of the book we only get the editor, Jonny, Zampanò and Navidson, you got an extra guy.

My copy was bought secondhand. I haven’t read it yet but I also own a digital copy for ease of reading at work. I might forego reading the digital one in the hopes the last owner left me notes.

That's wonderful to hear! Best of luck to your mother with her latest novel

This is awesome, man! Great luck to your mother, please give us an update when possible!!!

I’d love to know if she followed that idea. I absolutely love how bizarre the book changes and twists itself in to give the reader the idea of what’s happening and confusing them. It’s so damn good.

If your mother finishes that book, let us know, I want to read that now.

That's really cool! Tell your mother the best of luck to her, and I hope she writes something she's really proud of!

I'm going for the any% recommendation-to-viewer-purchase speedrun

@@CloudCuckooCountry Current record holder for that is Niick Nocturne, I believe. You're definitely on the leaderboard though! :)

@@NemesisTWarlock I believe May Lietz's video on House of Leaves may be another contender

Listen to Poe's album Haunted. She's the author's sister and wrote that album around his book. He read some into one of her songs, which was way better than it might sound. Literally might be my favorite album of all time, completely on its own; if not, it's definitely top 5. They're both brilliant.

It's an excellent book. Though potentially entirely my fault, reading this book has taken me more than a year to get halfway in. I like to challenge people in my school who feel curious about it to flip it to any page that's more than a quarter in. Because they've never seen a book presented that way. Ever.

My gf used this book for an essay and she wrote her own footnotes so i had to read another layer of someone using it

Imagine they don't realize it's your footnotes and they just go about their lives thinking your commentary is part of the story

Love this.

this is so good

Imagine if everyone annotated it and then sold it so it was just this passed on book that got crazier and crazier with annotations. I feel like that is thematic with the book.

Sorta like one of my favorites, 70 Scenes of Halloween.

And with that, there are now more plays written than there are atoms that comprise the earth.

In Chicago, we have a weekly show called the infinite wrench where the audience votes for which number scene with no context unless you've been before and the most loved scenes survive on the list

Great visual.

If he knew what the book was, he would understand.

lmao that would be a fun one for people to come over and ask "what the f are you writing"

is this a good thing or?

It’s the only book that made me question if, perhaps, I could be stupid to NOT tape a yardstick to the wall… and a second one under it to make sure the first one didn’t change without me noticing.

@@CloudCuckooCountry omg you're still alive!?

@@THEFRISKIESTDINGO this comment also deserves to be pinned ❤😅

What were you cooking ?

That game was so neat!

It took me so long to 100 % it, as far as visual novels go, anyway.

@@VarionusNW 100 % it. It took me a while to find the final log for the final achievement. And 12 hours is a long time for a visual novel. I've never 100 % completed one in less than 3 hours other than Analogue.

@@VarionusNW That's definitely not my experience. And by 100 % l mean getting all the achievements, usually on Steam.

That's a great game

Added to my reading list. Thanks!

I thought that too! I own a choose your own adventure romance book and I still haven't gotten through all of the different choices I could make lol My sister has my copy.

@@JustCallMeEmily I once had a nightmarish experience as a teenager with a choose your own adventure book, where I got lost in a labyrinth inside a mountain and couldn't find my way out. I even started drawing maps to help myself. But I was stuck. I started to feel like I was going insane, trapped inside a novel. So soon enough, I gave up... haven't done a choose your own adventure book since.

​@@BooksAndShitButNotLiterallyIan Livingstone firestop mountain? The fighting fantasy books are very underrated!

Yasification

Sexy eagle

gay

Foxulous!

im sorry if this comes off as rude but if the 'long segments of johnny' were the least interesting aspects of the book for you, then you have been missing out on what makes House of Leaves a brilliant story. I suggest reading/studying the Whalestoe letters and then re-reading HoL.

@@abhiroopdas3232 That's what I'm about to do actually. I read HoL and got -so- annoyed at the Johnny parts throughout the whole book; they seemed unnecessary and really tainted what I thought was the focus of the whole story. Then I read the Whalestoe letters at the very end and it reframed the entire book for me. Now I'm just waiting to get up the motivation to tackle the book again so I can reread it in this new mindset and hopefully enjoy it more!

​@@abhiroopdas3232 that does come off as rude

@@abhiroopdas3232 While Jonny's notes sometimes have some great horror elements and are somewhat important to the story, most of the time they are just horny hot garbage that does nothing for the story but lower its quality. Most of his notes just are I HAVE SEX!!!! for a couple of pages and then a single good and scary paragraph in the very end.

Kindred Spirit Detector Alarm

You could totally write a book with that idea imo

Thanks for an idea to steal!

Thanks for sharing. I briefly considered stepping into ARGs for this video, but what stopped me was that I think most of them are closer to games than they are to literature (unlike interactive fiction, which despite being often classified as games I believe to be closer to literature) and also that I think Night Mind has more thoroughly covered the genre for people interested in them

I feel like homestuck doesn't have nearly as much potency for genuine mental harm as the described book has, homestuck just kinda gets boring from time to time to set up some genuinely epic domino show, or, more frequently to make fun of itself/it's fans/the internet culture/combination of any of the prior choices. Now this does give me a thought, homestuck is sparingly ergodic in nature in some places, but I didn't even notice till the "main event" (referred to as such as to avoid spoilers).

ive always called homestuck "the hell you love to be in" and i also always tell friends not to read it. incredible experience!, would not recommend.

​@@goldend791 genuinely cant tell what u mean by "main event" (cascade?) but now that you mention it, there are a few pages (such as the ones that introduce wayward vagabond and the other chesspeople) where u can click on links to extra pages with images but no dialogue, but ure obviously not required to do so. in fact i didnt notice they were links the first time around, which made me backtrack to check them out. since homestuck is inspired in great part by old cyoa text games it does have a couple sections u can check out in arbitrary order, but it _is_ disappointing that later on ure literally railroaded into a specific order during a part made to look cyoa. i wonder if all that makes it count as ergodic or its "not enough", or maybe just "not relevant enough" to count.

@@lazy_bt I was referring to the event that takes place near the end and involves passwords

That is particularly funny that because of one event you could just skip to the end of Homestuck if you wanted by knowing the password of an infamous event

i think reading these books years ago planted the seed in my brain that led me to house of leaves later on, i don't remember them very well by now but they definitely made me love these unconventional style of books

As someone who owns, and finished, his copy of House of Leaves- you're in for a ride and depending on how you approach it you might leave it feeling uncomfortable or feeling like you got catharsis. Have fun!

There are definitely things that can be spoiled in HoL, but I'm not sure how major any of them are. It depends in part on what you consider to be the main story(ies) of the book. Depending on your perspective, the two biggest whammies in the book could be considered part of framing devices.

Will's brother is eaten by the house

"Game books" of that sort were a fairly big deal in nerd circles in the late 80s and early 90s. A lot of them, including the big dog, Games Workshop's Fighting Fantasy series (yes, the Warhammer people), were from the UK for some reason.

Making a note of that

Oh god no wonder people who read her are such insufferable asshats.

I completely agree. I was thoroughly unsettled by Truant's intro, because his paranoia and anxiety were so palpable and seemed to imbue the text with some kind of horrible power. There was also a dead bug in my copy right after the point when he was talking about seeing hands at the corner of his vision which freaked me out lol. Took me a while to be brave enough to keep reading it.

yeah! I started reading it over 2020 quarantine and had to take a veeeery long (multi-year) break to protect my mental health lol.

Yep, I have paranoid schizophrenia, and so much of the book reminds me of the terror of going through an episode of psychosis, where you feel like you're the only sane one and that it's the rest of the world that's gone insane. Especially the stuff with Johnny Truant's mother, where halfway through the book you're told to go to the end of the book in the appendices to read all the letters his mother wrote to him. And she starts going crazy, at this mental hospital, and creates this big conspiracy in her mind where she thinks she's sane and that all the doctors are going against her and keeping her there illegally and so on. It's so incredibly vivid, and incredibly like what it feels like to have psychosis, believe me. Eventually she starts writing in code and so you have to get a pen and some paper and, if I recall correctly, write down all the first letters of every word she writes to find the actual message she's trying to get to her son. I've done things like that before. Eventually she gets put on a better medication and the real her comes back, instead of the psychotic her, and she basically apologises for the craziness and understands that the doctors were actually trying to help her, not keep her locked up for nefarious reasons. It's genuinely a real thing that happens, you get put on a different medication that works much better, or a higher dose of your existing medication, and you come out of the psychosis, and even though it was only say 2 weeks ago you were deep in the hole of psychosis, you wonder how on earth you actually believed all that stuff about conspiracies of friends and family conspiring against you behind your back. It's just weird. And embarrassing. And you feel ashamed for thinking those things about people you care about who care about you too. But yeah that's probably my favourite part of the book. Even though it's so damn real and vivid that it's like reading about myself. I've heard from some people who read the book that they didn't even know that part was there and they never read it, because it's in the appendices. Or they only read all of it at the end, instead of reading it in the middle of the book when you're supposed to. It's crazy to me how arguably the best part of the book is something that a lot of people apparently completely missed by accident. So I always bring it up in discussions about House of Leaves, because people are doing themselves a disservice if they don't read it.

@@duffman18Hi!! I also have schizophrenia, and I’m extremely interested in reading House of Leaves - would you recommend the book to other people with schizophrenia?? i’m a bit worried about how the book could possibly affect my psychosis / delusions, but i would love to hear from someone else with schizophrenia about what their perspective is, because i would really love to read the book if i can!!

@@tksm97 it could upset you if you're not fully mentally prepared for it. I've had schizophrenia so long (over 15 years now) that reading about it isn't uncomfortable anymore and it doesn't like spark off an episode of psychosis to read a book that involves someone else going through a psychotic episode. If you know what you're getting into before you read it then you'll be fine. Really that whole part with Johnny Truant and his mentally ill mother writing letters to him, is only a small part of the book, and really it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, it has nothing to do with the *house* itself. Also I've met people who either skipped that whole section or didn't read it cos they didn't realise it even existed (because you're halfway through reading the book and then have to all of sudden flip to the appendices at the end of the book and read all the letters there, and you only do that if you're paying attention to the footnotes and follow a particular reference that guides you to the back of the book, but it's easily missed). So yeah I highly recommend reading the book. It's the moet unique and imaginative book. It's just that simple. It's astonishing, and it's the only book I've ever read that has genuinely scared me. The actual main bit of the book, the meat, which is the textbook you read about the video documentary about the *house* and the family who've just moved into it, is just amazing. It's absolutely impossible to film it. I don't think there'll ever be an adaptation of it because of that, it only really works in print form. So yeah. I've bought the book so many times as gifts for people and for myseof to replace copies I'd worn out or lost, or like when I decided I wanted to get the colour version. Everyone I've got the book for loved it.

Now I want to make a biology/anatomy textbook version of this with made up creatures and diseases

​@@victorvale1015 That's a great idea. I'd buy two copies

@@victorvale1015 I used to have some Book of Monsterology (the title was something like that) which detailed different mythological creatures and allowed you to go out and collect "samples" in real life of these creatures and store in the book. Things like griffins' feathers or a Sphinx tooth or something.

@@victorvale1015 i remember reading something like that as a kid. it was called something like “zombie’s guide to the human body”, with “zombie’s” scrawled on the cover. it was real anatomy info with annotation by a zombie. pretty fun

@@victorvale1015 As far as I know "The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black" is an anatomy atlas of fictional creatures.

English class has messed with all of us ;w; "The door is red', now what do you think the author meant by this?"

She is an academic who has no time for your "non-linear recountings" and "artistic ordering".

> the literary equivalent of a Beksinski painting this is such a description

From the description in the video Seabed, and probably the rest of The Scorch Atlas, seems very similar to a subset of the "weird fiction" genre which, in the last few years, became reasonably popular in Poland. Wojciech Gunia is probably the most prominent writer of that movement, but there's also David Kain, Anna Maria Wybraniec and (my personal favorite) Paweł Mateja, just to name the few I'm more familiar with. I highly recommend checking them out, should they be ever published published in English. As for the English language writers, the only good example I've read so far is "Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales" by Christopher Slatsky, but I'm also planning on reading the works of Thomas Ligotti, who gets a lot of praise and is often ciced as a major inspiration by Gunia.

That's a really great idea, actually

I once seen a video on the AI dungeon where it had a slightly better run. There it looked like a dream. All actions make sense if you only look at the surrounding few sentences. But if you go a bit further it stops making sense. This also applies here, but in the other video it wasn't such a terribly bad story.

Part of me wants more details on how George the Redhanded went from criminal caught in the act and arrested, to assumed missing person with no criminal record, to rescued prisoner with information on the actual missing person.

Thanks for your kind words. I'm glad you liked my video

I would bet most people from Gen-X onward first encountered this sort of thing in elementary school in the '80s in the form of a combination of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure literature like you did, with interactive literature text games, early computer RPGs, pen-and-paper RPGs, ASCII art, pop-up art books, word-picture poetry by the likes of e.e. cummings in literature textbooks, and a revival of interest at the time (and ever since) in gothic literature from the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Brahm Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stephen King (which, in telling stories in a non-linear fashion using collections of letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, confessions written by raving madmen, etc. which all amount to puzzle-pieces that tell a bigger story when added together, paved the way for the more extreme examples of this sort of storytelling found in 'House of Leaves' and its like....

I was actually looking for a mention of the Goosebums choose your own adventure books. I remember going through so many while I was in elementary school.

I to read xhoose ypur own adventure

Please do give some recommendations! I'm game for anything

If you know any fantasy or political fiction ones, please do! Otherwise wouldn't mind any in general

Yes please! I enjoyed House of Leaves and I also like books that are aware they are books

I’ll read legit anything in this format, would love to hear your suggestions I was introduced to it with Tree of Codes which is the most I ever spent on a book (it was like $40 something new?? Idk I normally always buy used books) I just love that author)

do you have any horror ergodic novel recommendations?

Yeah, this, causality is broken and reality is just going away a little at a time, taking the protagonists with it.

I have dragonology, one of my favorite childhood books of all time

There are also "Alone Against the Flames/Dark/Frost/Tide", four solo scenarios for the Call of Cthulhu RPG where Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style paragraphs substitute the GM, but the rules stay the same. Another hybrid CYOA-like book is Storm Weavers, in which combat encounters are played out using the included game boards and cardboard miniatures.

This video covers like 7 books. Feel free to skip ahead to the next parts

@@CloudCuckooCountry An ergodic video about ergodic literature. How fitting!

His "Last Love in Constantinople" suggests reading the 21 chapters in the order of a shuffled major arcana Tarot deck.

I just looked him up, his work seems super interesting

The Dictionary of the Khazars and Landscape Painted with Tea (the only Pavic novels I've read) were the first books that came to mind when I tried to think of other examples of ergodic lit. Loved both, especially the former. Spent way too much time trying to figure out the difference between the male and female versions tho.

How'd the read go?

Thanks very much. The talksprites were done by DragonFoxGirl and a link to her twitter is in the description

The alternate endings, too

I regret to say that I immediately thought of Homestuck when hearing about this genre

Thanks! Hope you enjoy the book

Thank you very much!

Omg thats the worse sentence about tits I've ever seen my eyes!!!

I know I'm late to the party but thanks for recommending Jasper Fforde. On the third Thursday Next and I read his Constant Rabbit. Fantastic stuff!

@@thelunchlady8276 I'm delighted to hear it :D