Which books are told in the most interesting / creative/ mind bending ways? How does it add to the book overall?
My all time favourite is Ella Minnow Pea where the book is a series of letters. The characters have to think of more inventive ways to write their letters as an increasing number of letters are outlawed as the book progresses.
Honourable mentions include:
Maribou Stork Nightmares where the narrator is trying to suppress his dark past by allowing himself to slip into hallucinations of a whacky south African safari adventure.
Flowers for Algernon where the narrator becomes more articulate by taking part in a scientific experiment.
Raw Shark Texts, used to be a Reddit fave but has completely fallen off its radar. I don’t get it - it’s so good. One of the few books to live up to the hype.
Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie, it’s amazing how something so seemingly simple but kind of revolutionary having a culture with a single gender, and that uses exclusively feminine pronouns is.
The use of typeface, spacing, and page format in the synesthesia sections of Alfred Bester’s Tiger, Tiger, or in the USA The Stars my Destinstion. Also, just doing The Count of Monte Cristo but science fiction and shorter was cool, as was The Burning Man.
Slaughterhouse Five and the back and forth chronology of it. The way it’s written really does the best it can at expressing what it’s like for someone who’s experiences all their time at once (or the experience of someone with terrible ptsd(or both).
It’s not the best written book but I liked the way Dune used history books to tell the story, giving you little hints of future events
If on a winter’s night a traveler… by Italo Calvino uses second person omniscient. So it’s not that you’re reading a letter addressed to somebody in second person (that’s been done) or anything like that. He’s describing things that happen to you as the reader, from an omniscient perspective. It’s very unique.
Two that I can think of:
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Nominally a book where Marco Polo describes the cities he’s been to to Kublai Khan, the cities are often very abstract and impossible. They are linked together by the chapter titles.
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. First 100 pages is a series of diary entries (I think), then the next 400 is collected interview answers which touch on the lives of two poets, and then some more diary at the end. Perhaps this reduces it too much, because it’s one book that I’ve read where I feel polyphonic actually applies. You also get the sense of these poets from so many different angles.
Borges has many ways of dealing with fake books or narratives all contained within a short story. Pretty impressive
In the manga series Gantz by Hiroya Oku, the author inserts discussions by people on chat message boards about the protagonists. Often these message boards deride or dismiss the protagonist’s actions which become growingly known worldwide. This further projects his feelings of isolation and foreshadow his character growth while also acting as a social commentary on modern culture.