Ergodic LIterature

Ergodic literature is a genre of literature in which nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text. The term was coined by Espen J. Aarseth in his 1997 book Cybertext—Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning “work”, and hodos, meaning “path”

Here’s a list of books classified as ergodic literature.

Agrippa, William Gibson. A 300-line semi-autobiographical novel. It exists in two forms, either on a 3.5″ floppy disk, where the text scrolls by automatically, and encrypts itself once it has passed, or as an artist’s book, of which the pages have been treated with photosensitive chemicals, such that the first exposure to light would effect gradual fading.

Bottom’s Dream, Arno Schmidt. A novel, published in folio format with 1,334 pages, told mostly in three shifting columns, presenting the text in the form of notes, collages, and typewritten pages.

Building Stories, Chris Ware. A graphic novel presented as fourteen separate works packaged within a box. Each component work has a distinct presentation—including a mock Little Golden Book, newspaper, broadsheet and flip book—and can be read in any order.

Cain’s Jawbone, Edward Powys Mathers. The book consists of a 100-page prose narrative with its pages arranged in the wrong order. To solve the puzzle, the reader must determine the correct order of the pages and also the names of the murderers and victims within the story. The story’s text includes a large number of quotations, references, puns, Spoonerisms and other word games.

Cent mille milliards de poèmes, Raymond Queneau. A set of ten poems, printed on card with each line on a separate strip. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, allowing for 10¹⁴ (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems.

Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavić. Three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias, sometimes contradicting each other, each compiled from the sources of one of the major Abrahamic religions.

Fighting Fantasy, Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone. A set of fantasy novels written in the second person in which the reader makes choices throughout, leading to a number of different possible endings.

Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar. A stream-of-consciousness novel which can be read either linearly, or according to an alternative chapter order listed at the start.

House of Leaves, Mark Z Danielowski. A novel with a very unusual layout, presented as a story about a manuscript about a movie about a house that is larger on the inside than the outside.

The I Ching, China, as old as 900 BCE. A divination text in which bundles of yarrow stalks are arranged to form numbers.

Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec. A “series of novels” that can be read both linearly and non-linearly by navigating through an index of characters and stories, which Perec thought of as hypertext links.

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov. A novel consisting of a 999-line unfinished poem in four cantos, written by John Shade, and a pseudo-academic analysis by his neighbour and university colleague Charles Kinbote, where the majority of the book’s “plot” is situated, and an index. Aarseth notes that it “can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, jumping between the comments and the poem.

S, JJ Abrams & Doug Dorst. Composed of the novel Ship of Theseus (by the fictional V. M. Straka), hand-written notes filling the book’s margins, and supplementary material loosely inserted between the pages.

The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy, Nick Bantock. Three stories, told through a series of letters and postcards between the two main characters. Every page features a postcard or a letter enclosed in an envelope.

XX, Rian Hughes. A science fiction novel told in part through ephemera such as declassified documents, artworks, graphics, and a novel within the novel