Book about you reading the Book

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Book about you reading the Book

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1nbs29
Edited: May 29, 2013, 3:29 am

In the book you go to a book store and buy the book.
In about all the stuff that happens to you as you read the book.
Switches perceptive a lot.
Please help, thanks

2bookel
May 29, 2013, 4:03 am

You can give more information than that, can't you?

Children's or adult fiction?
Paperback or hardcover?
Earliest year you read it?
Old or new book at the time?

"In about all the stuff that happens to you as you read the book."

??? Rephrase??? That sentence doesn't make sense.

3wester
May 29, 2013, 8:23 am

4SylviaC
May 29, 2013, 8:27 am

Could it be If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino? You buy a book, but you can't finish reading it, and keep replacing it with more incomplete books. The plot and style keep changing whenever the book is switched.

5LibraryPerilous
May 29, 2013, 11:31 am

>3 wester:, 4 Calvino's book was my first thought as well, especially because the narrator is "you," as both the OP and SylviaC have described: "you have grasped a copy and you have carried it to the cashier."

A long shot if that's not the right book is Robert Grudin's book grudin*. The plot doesn't match--it's about a professor who finds out someone is trying to kill both him and his book. But the narrative styles do shift from chapter to chapter. At one point, the footnotes run rampant! So, the perspective changes and you have to think about what is happening to you, the reader, as you are reading the shape-shifting book.

*touchstone difficulties

6jjmcgaffey
May 30, 2013, 5:47 am

Or The Neverending Story - the boy gets (buys?) the book, begins to read and it starts telling him what he's done. It also goes off to a fantasy land...not sure of order, it's been a lot of years since I read it. But I do remember him arguing with the book that it was just telling him what he'd been doing.

7Petroglyph
May 30, 2013, 8:19 pm

If this isn't If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (I don't think the query sounds like The Neverending Story) I would most definitely want to read it.

8LibraryPerilous
May 30, 2013, 8:42 pm

>7 Petroglyph: The Calvino is one of my favorite novels. I also would be interested in a read-alike.

If it's not the Calvino, I wonder if another Oulipo author might be a possibility? It's been a few years since I went through that phase, but Calvino wasn't the only author in the group to explore the act of reading. Perec's Life: A User's Manual and Queneau's Exercises in Style don't fit this query's plot, but the nesting of stories was a common motif within them and in other Oulipian works.

9nbs29
Jun 3, 2013, 3:05 am

Yup, its" If on a winters night a traveller?". Thank you so much, sorry for the lack of information, yet you guys still found it, you guys are awesome