Sunday, May 31, 2009

Books about Books

This is a translation from my original post over at the Cave.

After reading Ivanius' beautiful article about Ivanius about libraries, I went on a small recursive loop that resulted in a short list of books where books are main characters or motors of the story.
  • The Name of the Rose
    By Umberto Eco: During the XIV century, an eery benedictine monastery is silent witness to a rash of murders related to a misterious book hidden within its library.
    The Name of the Rose
  • The Dumas Club
    By Arturo Pérez-Reverte: An antique book hunter gets into grave trouble while researching an original manuscript of The Three Musketeers and an ancient book supposedly written by devil worshippers.
    El Club Dumas
  • The Neverending Story
    By Michael Ende: An introverted boy finds a book called the Neverending Story; reading it, he finds himself one of the characters involved in the rescue of Fantasia from the Nothing.
  • The Necronomicon and other stories
    This "terrible and forbidden" book comes from the imagination of HP Lovecraft and is a main character in many of his horror stories.
  • The Myst novels: The Book of Atrus, The Book of D'ni and the Book of Ti'ana
    By Robyn and Rand Miller in collaboration with David Wingrove: Prequels to the videogame where the books literally transport the reader to different worlds with subtly different natural laws
    The Myst novels
  • The Spiderwick Chronicles
    The first one of this series of books tells the tale of two children who move to a weird country house, where they find a field guide about the supernatural beings that inhabit the region.
Dear reader, if you think of another title, please add it to the list. I am not including anthologies nor textbooks nor reference works, although I was tempted to include Adler's and Van Doren's famous "How to read a book" for purely sentimental reasons.

2 comments:

Ivanius said...

Hi again, just to say that Sam Savage's Firmin is a much better experience in its original English text than in the Spanish translation available here in Mexico (from Spain). Cornelia Funke is also more aptly translated into English than it is into Spanish.

Yeah, I know. How nerdish of me.

Won-Tolla said...

A few weeks ago I read "Inkheart" by Cornelia Funke. In Spanish. It wasn't exactly painful, but the names don't just roll off your tongue.