Ergodic literature
Some books can’t simply be read front to back. You chase footnotes into other footnotes, shuffle loose pages, turn the book upside down, or choose your own route through it. The scholar Espen J. Aarseth called this ergodic literature.
“…nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.”
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The list
67 works
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Hypertext
253
Geoff Ryman, 1996
Each of 253 passengers on a London Underground train gets exactly 253 words; the reader moves between passengers through links (on the web) or cross-references (in the 1998 print remix).
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Footnote maze
Ada, or Ardor
Vladimir Nabokov, 1969
Ends with notes by an anagrammatic editor, Vivian Darkbloom; the reader moves between the text and notes to catch the novel’s multilingual puns and references.
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Hypertext
afternoon, a story
Michael Joyce, 1987
A Storyspace hypertext in which the reader chooses words that “yield” to other passages; conditional links change what appears based on the path already taken.
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Physical intervention · Typographic
Bats of the Republic
Zachary Thomas Dodson, 2015
Two stories set two centuries apart, told through letters, maps, and specimen drawings, ending with a sealed envelope bound into the book that the story warns you not to open.
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Typographic
Betrayals
Charles Palliser, 1994
Linked pieces in different forms (an obituary, a review, letters, a crossword); the reader assembles a hidden conspiracy from connections between them.
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Reader-assembled
Building Stories
Chris Ware, 2012
A box of fourteen printed pieces (books, pamphlets, broadsheets, a fold-out board) with no prescribed order; the reader chooses the sequence.
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Reader-assembled
Cain's Jawbone
E. Powys Mathers, 1934
One hundred pages printed deliberately out of order; the reader must put them back in sequence and name six murderers and their victims.
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Permutational · Physical intervention
Cent mille milliards de poèmes
Raymond Queneau, 1961
Ten sonnets are printed with each line on a separate cut strip; the reader turns strips independently to compose any of 10^14 possible sonnets.
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Typographic
Chasing Homer
László Krasznahorkai, 2019
Each chapter pairs with a painting and a recorded drum track meant to be heard while reading, so the pace of reading is set by music outside the book.
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Footnote maze · Physical intervention · Typographic
Codex Unfertho
Kienn Nguyen, 2026
Two vanished scholars leave a labyrinth of notes, footnotes, ciphers, and redactions; the reader deciphers them and may cut, tear, or fold the pages.
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Reader-assembled
Composition No. 1
Marc Saporta, 1962
About 150 unbound, unnumbered pages come in a box; the reader shuffles them and reads in whatever order results.
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Multiple paths
Crossings
Alex Landragin, 2020
Three stories can be read straight through, or in the alternate chapter order given at the front, which tells a different story.
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Typographic
Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany, 1975
Ends mid-sentence with words that complete the first line, making the novel a loop; the final chapter splits into parallel columns of a notebook the reader must interleave.
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Lexicon · Multiple paths
Dictionary of the Khazars
Milorad Pavić, 1984
Three cross-referenced encyclopedias (Christian, Islamic, and Jewish) tell overlapping versions of one event; the reader picks any entry and follows symbols between books. Published in “male” and “female” editions that differ by one paragraph.
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Typographic
Double or Nothing
Raymond Federman, 1971
Every page is typographically arranged, with words in columns, shapes, and patterns; the reader has to work out the reading path on each page.
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Typographic
Drift
Caroline Bergvall, 2014
A sequence based on the Old English poem The Seafarer, where spelling, letterforms, and spacing break down and drift across the page.
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Typographic
Ella Minnow Pea
Mark Dunn, 2001
An epistolary novel in which letters of the alphabet are banned one by one and vanish from the text, so the prose grows harder to read as the story goes on. Read in order.
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Typographic
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005
Photographs, blank pages, red-circled corrections, and overprinted pages interrupt the text, ending with a flip-book the reader runs backward through.
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Reader-assembled
Float
Anne Carson, 2016
Twenty-two chapbooks loose in a clear case, with no prescribed order; the reader decides what to read and when.
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Typographic
Follow This Thread
Henry Eliot, 2018
A history of mazes laid out as one: a thread runs across every page, and the reader follows it through puzzles and branching paths.
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Typographic
Here
Richard McGuire, 2014
Every spread shows the same corner of one room, with inset panels from different years layered over it; the reader moves across centuries within a single page.
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Multiple paths
Hopscotch (Rayuela)
Julio Cortázar, 1963
A table of instructions offers two books: read chapters 1–56 in order, or start at chapter 73 and hop through all 155 chapters following the number printed at the end of each.
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Typographic
Horrorstör
Grady Hendrix, 2014
Designed as a flat-pack furniture store catalog, with product pages that grow more sinister chapter by chapter.
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Footnote maze · Typographic
House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000
The reader follows nested footnotes, appendices, and an index across several narrators, and has to turn the book, read mirrored text, and track passages that thin to a few words per page.
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Gamebook
If
Nicholas Bourbaki, 2014
The reader is the second-person protagonist and makes a decision at the end of each chapter, steering toward one of twenty-two endings.
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Multiple paths
If on a winter's night a traveler
Italo Calvino, 1979
Second-person chapters about “you, the Reader” alternate with the openings of ten different novels, each broken off; the reader assembles the frame story across the interruptions.
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Typographic
Illuminae
Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff, 2015
Told entirely through a dossier of hacked files (chat logs, emails, schematics, AI transcripts), with text set in spirals and shapes; the reader reconstructs events across formats.
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Footnote maze
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace, 1996
Hundreds of endnotes, some with their own notes, carry essential plot; readers famously keep two bookmarks and flip back and forth.
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Multiple paths
Landscape Painted with Tea
Milorad Pavić, 1988
Subtitled a novel for crossword lovers: chapters are labeled Across and Down, and the reader can read straight through or follow the crossword’s directions.
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Footnote maze
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
Framed as a confession with a fictional editor’s foreword; read in order, but the narrator’s anagrams, allusions, and planted clues reward rereading.
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Gamebook · Physical intervention
Meanwhile
Jason Shiga, 2010
A branching comic: the reader follows tubes from panel to panel and jumps between pages using printed tabs, through thousands of possible stories.
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Multiple paths · Physical intervention
Milo and the Magical Stones
Marcus Pfister, 1997
Halfway through, the pages split horizontally into two stacks, one with a happy ending and one with a sad ending, and the reader chooses which to follow.
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Gamebook
Multiple Choice
Alejandro Zambra, 2014
Modeled on Chile’s university entrance exam; the reader answers multiple-choice, sentence-ordering, and reading-comprehension questions, and the answers shape what the stories mean.
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Typographic
Nibiru
Karl Tenbro, 2019
A hallucinatory noir with reversed sentences, shifting case, children’s drawings, and reproduced paintings set into the text.
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Typographic
Night Film
Marisha Pessl, 2013
A thriller interleaved with mocked-up web pages, police reports, and photographs; a companion app once unlocked extra material from images in the book. Read in order.
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Physical intervention · Lexicon
Nox
Anne Carson, 2010
A single accordion-folded sheet in a box, reproducing an elegy scrapbook; dictionary entries for each word of a Latin poem run alongside photographs and fragments.
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Multiple paths · Typographic
Only Revolutions
Mark Z. Danielewski, 2006
Two narrators’ accounts start from opposite covers, printed upside down relative to each other; the reader flips the book back and forth, usually eight pages at a time, alongside marginal chronology columns.
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Multiple paths
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood, 2003
Alternates between a post-apocalyptic present and the past that led to it. Read in order; no mechanic in this list’s vocabulary really fits.
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Footnote maze
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov, 1962
A 999-line poem arrives wrapped in a foreword, line-by-line commentary, and index by an unreliable editor; the story emerges as the reader chases cross-references between poem, notes, and index.
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Typographic
Parabola
Lily Hoang, 2008
Moves along the curve of a parabola, mixing stories with mathematical formulas and photographs that the reader must read as part of the narrative.
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Hypertext
Pry
Samantha Gorman & Danny Cannizzaro, 2014
A touchscreen novella: the reader pinches a character’s eyes open to see the world, or pries apart lines of text to reach his buried thoughts.
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Annotated dialogue · Physical intervention
S.
J. J. Abrams & Doug Dorst, 2013
A fictional library novel carries two readers’ handwritten marginal conversation, layered by ink color across time, plus loose inserts; the reader decides how to interleave text, margins, and ephemera.
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Typographic
Scorch Atlas
Blake Butler, 2009
Stories of strange apocalypses in a book printed to look water-stained and decaying, with pages of grids, lists, and blacked-out text.
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Permutational
Subcutanean
Aaron A. Reed, 2020
Generated so that every printed copy is different; each reader gets their own version of the story.
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Gamebook
The Paradox Paradox
Daniel Hardcastle, 2025
A choose-your-path adventure for adults: numbered sections and choices, with time paradoxes that loop the reader back on themselves.
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Footnote maze
The Quincunx
Charles Palliser, 1989
A Victorian inheritance mystery built on a five-part pattern, with genealogical tables the reader consults to untangle who is related to whom. Read in order.
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Typographic
The Raw Shark Texts
Steven Hall, 2007
A conceptual shark made of words swims through the text; the reader watches it form out of typography and flips a long sequence of pages to see it move toward them.
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Reader-assembled
The Researcher's First Murder
John Finnemore, 2024
A new puzzle in the style of Cain’s Jawbone: the pages are out of order, and the reader must reorder them to solve the case.
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Typographic
The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt
Caroline Preston, 2011
A novel told entirely as a 1920s scrapbook of vintage ephemera with typewritten captions; the reader pieces the story together from the collage.
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Footnote maze · Typographic
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
Reif Larsen, 2009
Maps, diagrams, and side notes fill the margins, linked to the main text by drawn lines; the reader keeps leaving the story to follow them.
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Physical intervention
The Strange Library
Haruki Murakami, 2005
The illustrated English edition, designed by Chip Kidd, opens with a folding flap like a library pamphlet and mixes found images into the story, so handling the object is part of reading it.
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Typographic
The Supernatural Enhancements
Edgar Cantero, 2014
Told through diaries, letters, transcripts, and diagrams, with a cipher puzzle the reader can try to solve alongside the characters. Read in order.
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Typographic
The Tunnel
William H. Gass, 1995
A historian’s digressive confession, broken up by cartoons, shaped text, and shifting typefaces that the reader has to parse as part of the story.
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Reader-assembled
The Unfortunates
B. S. Johnson, 1969
Twenty-seven separately bound sections come in a box; the first and last are marked, and the reader reads the rest in any order.
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Typographic
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami, 1994
A novel that folds in letters, war stories, and computer chat transcripts. Read in order; no mechanic in this list’s vocabulary really fits.
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Typographic
theMystery.doc
Matthew McIntosh, 2017
More than 1,600 pages of fragments, transcripts, photographs, blank pages, and screenshots; the reader assembles a story from a document that keeps changing form.
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Physical intervention
Tree of Codes
Jonathan Safran Foer, 2010
Die-cut from an English translation of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles; holes in each page expose words on the pages beneath, so the reader reads through layers of paper.
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Permutational
Tristano
Nanni Balestrini, 1966
Paragraphs were shuffled by computer so that every printed copy has a different arrangement; each reader holds a unique version.
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Hypertext
Twelve Blue
Michael Joyce, 1996
A web hypertext of twelve story threads; links in the text disappear once followed, and the reader weaves between threads shown as colored lines.
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Typographic
Unflattening
Nick Sousanis, 2015
A doctoral dissertation drawn as comics, where panel layout carries the argument. Read in order.
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Lexicon
Unlanguage
Michael Cisco, 2018
Written as a course in a strange language, with lessons and exercises; the story of a suicide survivor emerges as the reader works through them.
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Footnote maze · Typographic
Viljevo (August After Midnight)
Luka Bekavac, 2013
Three parts: a transcript of a damaged tape, records of otherworldly radio transmissions, and a mock scholarly article with footnotes; the reader assembles one story across them.
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Typographic
Voices: The Final Hours of Joan of Arc
David Elliott, 2019
Joan of Arc’s story told by people and objects around her in medieval verse forms, with some poems shaped like their speakers on the page.
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Typographic
We Used to Live Here
Marcus Kliewer, 2024
A horror novel interleaved with found documents; Morse code at the end of each interlude and stray capital letters spell hidden messages for the reader to decode. Otherwise read in order.
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Typographic
XX
Rian Hughes, 2020
A novel about a signal from deep space, built from documents, transcripts, and pages where typeface and layout carry the story.
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Gamebook
You Are Reading These Words
David de Léon, 2026
The book addresses the reader directly and sets fourteen exercises to perform, some in a chair and some out in the world; the reading happens in the doing.
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Typographic
Z213: Exit
Dimitris Lyacos, 2009
A fugitive’s diary in broken fragments, with gaps and bracketed omissions; the reader reconstructs the journey from what remains.
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