4 ms·
There's a discussion in GEB about mystery/detective novels, and how the physical fact of seeing that you're near the end of the book leaks information about the
by dmd 8y ago
There's a discussion in GEB about mystery/detective novels, and how the physical fact of seeing that you're near the end of the book leaks information about the state of the plot to you.
He muses - what if you inserted some number of blank pages at the end, so you weren't sure where the end was? But no, that's too easy - you might flip through and see them. What about Lorem Ipsum text? Well, that's better, but still obvious.
What you really need to do is pad out the book with text that looks as much as possible like the real book, but isn't.
And then one reads the latter parts of GEB, and you start wondering...
- optimuspaul 8y agoWait what? Are you suggesting that at some point in the book the text is just padding to throw you off? I haven't read it yet, but if that is what you are suggesting then I actually want to read it now. (if not then my interest is still don't feel any pull to it at all)
- svat 8y agoYes that's perfectly plausible :-) A lot of the book similarly makes you wonder about the book itself, what tricks are being played. That's one of the enjoyable things about it. (See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17464621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17464621)
- phyzome 8y agoYes, and in fact he makes it perhaps a bit too explicit that that's what he's doing.
- mtreis86 8y agoFrom what I can tell the book has no real beginning or end, but three threads each of which start and end in different places, none of which start or end at the beginning or ending of the book. That chapter seems to be the end of one of those threads as the rest of the chapter after that statement doesn't really make sense.
- KevanM 8y agoChuck Palahniuk wanted one of his novels to direct the reader to a page number when the chapter ended so you wouldn't be able to tell when the book was going to end, seems like a sensible solution.
- jweather 8y agoI appreciate being able to turn off the percentage progress indicator in the Kindle app for exactly this reason when reading fiction.
- mikhailfranco 8y agoI notice HN makes my Chrome plugin Win7 Scrollbars invisible - perhaps for the same reason.
- ummonk 8y ago>There's a discussion in GEB about mystery/detective novels, and how the physical fact of seeing that you're near the end of the book leaks information about the state of the plot to you. I noticed this when watching mystery tv shows. When I find myself wondering "wait is this the real culprit?" I just look at how much time is left till the ending...
- softawre 8y agoYouTube videos do this sometimes. I've seen it in the StarCraft space.
- mindcrime 8y agoWhat you really need to do is pad out the book with text that looks as much as possible like the real book, but isn't. One of the best things I've seen in that regard (although I doubt this was the reason for it) is simply the old "preview of forthcoming novel FOO by $AUTHOR" section.
- ajmurmann 8y agoThe Kindle version of Leviathan Wakes pulled this off. They included an entire other book at the end as a teaser for another series. I was somewhat shocked when the actual book ended suddenly around 50% in.
- rspeer 8y agoThis is implausible. The gag about having a story trail off into badly-written nonsense was used in that dialogue, but clearly doesn't refer to the book as a whole. The last dialogue of GEB is an excellent example of something he's been doing for the whole book, aligning a dialogue with a Bach canon. The six speakers line up very well with the Ricercar a 6, including in details such as the midpoint where the conversation changes topic and drops down to only three speakers, and everyone rejoins on a new theme. The topic of the dialogue is Hofstadter's philosophy of consciousness, the thing which he wishes more people understood (which I don't personally believe, btw), and which he wrote most of I Am A Strange Loop to emphasize. He wanted people to read and understand that part. It also ends with a signature "strange loop" flourish, introducing the "Author" as a speaker, who begins a quotation, the content of which (as implied by the page layout and the label "Author:" at the start of the introduction) is the entire book. If that's not the true end of GEB, what is?
- donutte 8y agoSo, I’ve never finished Infinite Jest. My father once told me that’s okay— it ends in the middle. Cloud Atlas employs the same structure deliberately, with wonderful narrative impact. You have to climb up the mountain in order to climb back down. I do think GEB is the same way. The first half of the book is the climb. The second half is merely the question, what can we see from way up here?
- freehunter 8y agoThat seems exactly like what House of Leaves does. The actual book ends maybe not even halfway through the pages, but there are footnotes upon footnotes, and footnotes within footnotes, then a huge appendix at the end.