Reality bending books

In PopCo Scarlett Thomas writes about Alice Butler, a toy company code-breaker whose gift for pattern recognition leads her deep into a mystery involving Victorian cryptography, consumer manipulation, and buried treasure. But that description barely captures it. I fell in love hard with this book. I think I wrote gushing fan mail. It's definitely time to read this one again. I have this vague memory of something about a train station… what was that?

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall follows Eric Sanderson, who wakes with no memory of his past and starts receiving letters from his former self about being hunted by a "conceptual shark" - a creature that feeds on human memories. The book itself becomes unstable - letters form shapes on the page, words swim into new patterns. I haven't actually read this one yet. It sounds demanding and rewarding. Readers describe turning the book in different directions, holding pages up to mirrors, getting completely caught up in how the story was teaching them to read it differently.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski took me three attempts to read. Not because I didn't love it, but because it absolutely terrified me. It starts simply enough - a family moves into a house that's bigger on the inside than the outside. Then everything fractures. The footnotes become their own stories, the text twists around the page, you find yourself following threads deeper and deeper... I still think about those endless dark hallways. I don't know if I'll ever read it again, it's a powerful experience. I actually own multiple copies of it because I just had to have my own after reading a library copy first and then I've found others with different formatting and presentation and …. (side note: I remember a work colleague, a Professor of English, being very disparaging about this book. They saw pages with very little text on them and felt it was environmentally irresponsible. I really had no idea what to say to that. Books are beautiful.)

Remainder by Tom McCarthy was a random bookshop find that is now one of my all-time favourites. A man receives a massive settlement for an accident he can't remember, then starts spending the money recreating moments of authentic experience - hiring actors, building elaborate sets, staging increasingly complex reenactments. Pretty sure I wrote fan mail about this one too. And am I imagining it that the author responded?

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson follows Cayce Pollard, who has a kind of allergy to corporate logos and marketing. She gets drawn into investigating mysterious film clips appearing online. I want to be Cayce Pollard when I grow up.