10 books with unique concepts (that will blow your mind)

whether it's video games movies or books I personally love when the medium consuming things outside of the box when it tries to break the so-called fourth wall or has a unique spin to it in this video I want to show you 10 of these books with unique Concepts and twists that will blow your mind House of leaves probably the most well-known book on this list House of leaves became famous for being the first commercially successful example of so-called ergodic literature describing a form of text which requires a non-trivial effort of the reader to Traverse it in the case of House of leaves the text presentation order and design become part of the author's vision and expression some pages contain just a single word at times the reader has to turn the book on its head to continue reading sometimes we're switching between different narrators or layers sometimes we are reading footnotes footnotes or footnotes House of leaves is one of the most interactive books out there in that it requires of the reader a certain amount of attention and willingness to become part of its interactive reading experience the story itself also contains multiple layers of narration the top layer follows the first person narrative of young tattoo artist Johnny trond who's in search for a new apartment to live in he gets wind of a vacant apartment formerly lived in by recently deceased blind elderly man called zampano in his apartment Johnny finds a mysterious manuscript the so-called navidson record which acts as a book's second layer at some point the manuscript describes a film documentary about the netherson family who used to live on Ash Tree Lane this documentary then described in manuscript acts as the book's third layer over the years House of leaves gained a cult following as it's an interactive and deeply layered reading experience and it also invites the reader to start the experience over and over again in search for new Clues and breadcrumbs they might have missed out on preceding weed Crews Gatsby this book does not contain the letter e yes you've heard that right Gatsby is a 50 000 word long novel which leaves out the most commonly used letter in the English alphabet not in the sense that it just prints words without the letter e rather the author avoided all words that contains this letter altogether works of fiction with this concept are called lipograms and Gatsby is one of the longest and earliest liberograms out there the book was written in the mid-1930s and to achieve this goal the author had to tie down the E key on his typewriter to avoid slip-ups according to him the most difficult task was to avoid the added suffix of past tense verbs like in I walked he would try to circumvent these instances by using a lot of Constructors with do and did like I did walk for example he surprisingly still managed to describe difficult sceneries and objects despite this obstacle for example a detailed description of a horse-drawn fighter engine is made without using the words horse fire or engine as you can see the author went to Great Lengths to still tell a coherent story in it we are following 50 year old John Gatsby who's alarmed by the decline of his hometown Brandon Hills and therefore run is the city's youth to build Civic spirit and improve the living standards of his community the book starts around 1906 and continues throughout the first world war the prohibition era and Warren G Harding's Administration as president of the United States as author Ernest Wright had been so very imaginative with the English language and grammar the book therefore reads a bit Messier times and the language is a bit forced still Gatsby's literary unicorn it was unique for its time and is still one of the very few lipograns of this size and ambition out there pale fire this uh book is written by the same author as the famous novel Lolita Russian writer of Vladimir Nabokov I'm a little bit hesitant to call this a book in a common sense because palefire is in its core a poem of the same name 999 lines long written by a fictional poet called John shade pale fired the book then as many others has a forward index and commentary attached to it written by yet another fictional character called Charles kimbert who used to be John shade's colleague editor and neighbor kinbot is a scholar and known on campus as a bit of a shady figure but how far would he go what secret is he hiding it is only throughout this commentary and importation of John shade's poem that kimbert reveals perhaps more than he should be pale fire is seen by many as a masterpiece as it's essentially a character study hidden within the oftentimes most boring parts of many other books the forward the footnotes and the commentary the book can be read in many different ways either in a linear or a non-linear fashion you can read a poem line by line and put kimbot's commentary next to it or read it like a normal book maybe only occasionally jumping back to the lines he's referring to pale fire is a deeply layered work of art as the poem itself changes meaning and the reader's perception of it throughout the book and kimbot's commentary reveals layer by layer more of his intentions than character it's an interesting concept one that I've never seen done or explored before and one that Nabokov is really capable of delivering on him 253 this novel has been on the internet since 1996. for years it was only to be found on the author's website though but after getting picked up by internet hype it found its way into this print version the book essentially tells the story of a fictional tube right happening in 1995 going three stops from embankment station up to elephant and Castle right in the heart of London a tube train usually consists of seven cars and each of these cars has 36 seats this means that an ideally failed tube train in which each passenger has a seat and no one needs to stand carries 252 passengers adding the driver to edu account in 253. in this book by the same name every passenger on this tube ride gets a little literary portrait consisting of exactly 253 words you find out about the passenger's outward appearances what they are thinking and doing as well as inside information about them this way the author is taking us back and showing us within the seven and a half minute long tube ride with life in the mid 90s in London was like all portrayed in 253 words for 253 passengers the book is not really following an overarchic story but is perfect for those of you who love sitting in a cafe or park to watch other people and wonder about their lives where they came from and where they go to what their relationships between each other might be it's ideal to be consumed in small chunks which makes it a great book for the bedside table or let's face it next to the toilet and I mean that in best way possible hopscotch this book tells the story of Horatio oliviera an Argentinian Rider living in Paris with his mistress La Maga they surround themselves with the sophisticated bohem of the city and intricate and tightly knit Circle which called herself the club after an incident happened to La Marga oliviera is forced to move back to Buenos Aires and the book follows him on this adventure back to his roots so far so good the story already sounds fairly enticing but what makes this book so unique and special is the way it's constructed in his very own and unique boy Hopscotch can be interpreted and read as many books at once but two books above all it consists of 155 chapters in total and the reader is then invited to choose between two possibilities of reading it it can be read chronologically from chapter 1 to 56 at which point the story officially ends chapters 57 to 155 are seen as the second book which officially starts at chapter 73 and then asks to read it to jump around or Hopscotch between the chapters even going through parts from the first book again giving them a new meaning in the story is now extended context as you can see here directly after chapter 73 you are asked to read the first two chapters of the book again and then it's all over the place from there despite its conceptual structure the book carries a multi-layered meaning and message within it's deeply philosophical it explores and questions the themes of Love Liberty and life it also carries heavy Illusions to Jazz and political interests it's a really fascinating work of penmanship and one that you should definitely check out if On a Winter's Night a traveler this is a book about you trying to read a book called if on Winter's Night of traveler but thereby getting distracted by white assortment of other novels released in 1979. this post-modernist narrative is a so-called frame story each of its 10 chapters is divided into two sections the first part of each chapter is written in second person meaning it's speaking for you as the reader addressing what you did or are doing and it describes the process you will go through in the attempt to read the forthcoming second half this second half then is usually a book within the book it consists of 10 different novels from all sorts of genres writing stars or subject matters the aforementioned first half of each chapter written in second person still tells the coherent story The varying different novels you subsequently go through that make for a playful modernist puzzle as the telegraph once put it if on a winter Snyder traveler is very meta he plays with the expectations of how books should work and it puts a creative spin on the whole medium of books as well as the pros of reading in and of itself Kane's Jawbone this is a murder mystery the likes of which you have never read before and has been described as one of the hardest most begueling word puzzles ever published so far only four people have ever solved this puzzle twice in 1935 shortly after the book's original release and then twice more in recent years it was first published in 1934 as part of the torca model puzzle book a miscellaneous collection of all sorts of different puzzles and riddles 15 pounds at a time were offered at the first person able to solve Kane's jobber which will be equivalent to about 1200 pounds a day unfortunately shortly after this publication the book was lost for many decades but resurfaced in 2018 got a subsequent re-release with the new prize money of a thousand pounds comedian John finnemore eventually solved the book over a four-month period during the first Covey lockdown its solution though has never been made public Kane's Jawbone is essentially a hundred page book but the pages are in a wrong order to solve the puzzle the reader must determine the correct order of the pages first then also correctly predict the names of the murderers and victims within the story to do this there are all sorts of Clues hidden within a text namely a large number of quotations cryptic references puns and other word games to lead a reader on the right or the wrong path there is a special edition of the book that therefore comes in a bit of an unusual format as it's printed on cars to make figuring out the correct order easier this more classical version right here isn't a typical book format but you're incentivized to cut out the pages and start playing around with them so if you're the type of person who loves solving puzzles this might actually be a really cool thing to check out dancing lessons for the advanced in age this is a book about a rambling old drunk man speaking to a group of sunbathing women the young ladies remind him a bit too much of Lover's past so the elderly man begins telling the woman his life story we learn of his Amorous Adventures of scandals military adventures and domestic feuds of life back in the day in what has become a society ever since it's not the story itself though that gives this book a spot on this list of conceptual books but rather than even though it's relatively short Affair as you can see here it's written in one long sentence its author Jack writer bohemil rabal developed a unique method which he termed palavery whereby his characters Ramble On and monologues for hours on end published in 1964 dancing lessons for the advance in age has since been described by critics as a humorous and breathless Affair it's partially a drunken boast a soul-rendering confession and a metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time given that you can finish it in the afternoon is probably worth checking out an eternal Golden Braid this is an intimidatingly thick and dense book very hard to summarize and therefore definitely one of a kind the title refers to our three protagonists mathematicians could Google artist MC Escher and classical musical composer Johann Sebastian Bach the subtitle of this book The Eternal Golden Braid refers to the notion of strange Loops as the author calls them which is his explanation for Consciousness and Free Will strange Loops are an interaction between levels which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it while at the same time being its self-determined by the bottom level sounds complicated well you've definitely seen Loops like this before for example in optical illusions like this one or MC escher's works of art the book describes and defines this concept of recursion and discusses its application in computer science art music biology and other fields like artificial intelligence the author thereby Dives deep into goodle's incomplete's theorem ashes endless loops and optical illusions and bust cannons and fugues as they help to various degrees to illustrate the characteristics of Consciousness the book that alternates between chapters of scientific theory and fictional dialogues between characters such as Achilles and a tortoise this might be one of the most dense and mind-bending books you will ever read in your life you don't need to be a mathematician to understand it but you need to be open to dig through about 100 pages of number Theory it's crazy to think that just one person alone wrote this as every page creates another link another reference not a loop inside the book thereby creating one big reference to the overarching theme of strange Loops I think I'm in a strange Loop myself s this book is written conceived by Doug dwarst and DJJ Abrams creator of TV series like lost in Fringe as well as director of films like Super 8 or two Star Wars movies as with a few other books on this list it tells yet another deeply layered and conceptual story within a story the book is designed in his visual appearance to look like an old copy of a fictional novel called ship of Theseus written by fictional author William strucker published in 1949. the pages are designed to look worn and yellow with Library stamps and stains on them this ship of Theseus then is the book's first layer it can be read in and of itself like any Normal book and tells the story of an Amnesia on a journey to discover his true self the aforementioned fictional author of this book VM strucker is a man of mystery though ship of Theseus marks his last novel before his mysterious death and his enigmatic life is considered one of the literary world's greatest Mysteries and shrouded by conspiracy theories and strange rumors a second layer of storyline that takes place in books margins here we can find a dialogue of Eric and Jen two students of Laguna Verdi High School who borrowed the ship of Theseus from their school's library to find clues of veeam struck as life and death hidden deep within the text of his last book in the physical version you can also find maps hidden postcards and other supplementary material tucked between its pages that give the whole book a very Lively and real feel to it even though everything is fictional if you are a fan of JJ Abram's more mysterious works like the TV show Lost you will absolutely love this book as it has the same ring of mystery and story building to it many reviewers also described it as the most intricate novel they had ever read and truly worth of the hype as with all the books on this list I've put a link to it in description below I would really love to welcome you back on my channel in the future so thank you for subscribing and if you're now in the mood for more strangeness and weirdness why not check out one of my other videos like this one where I talk about my 32 biggest life lessons from 32 years of weird life thank you and see you next time ciao foreign

Channel: Nicholas Beutler

Views: 143,707

Keywords: books, book reviews, house of leaves, conceptual books, concept books, cool concepts, unique books, unique concept books, interactive books, cains jawbone, gadsby, pale fire, vladimir nabokov, s., jj abrams, jj abrams s., 253, hopscotch, if on a winters night a traveler, gödel, escher, bach, MC escher, johann sebastian bach, artificial intelligence, special books, top 10 books, top 10 unique books, best books to read now

Id: czbNtWj83Ic

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 11 2022