As headlines have been informing us recently, censorship is very much alive and well across the United States—but there’s a difference between a book you’re not allowed to read and one you simply can’t read. The subset of non-censored reading material out there that actively seems to dare readers to make any sense of it is deep and vast. From codices to puzzles to straight-up art projects, books that aren’t meant to be read (or are essentially impossible to read) present the bibliophile with a true conundrum: Just how hard should you have to work to read and enjoy a book?
Here, then, are six publications that you’re free to try to track down, but which have a seriously select group of readers nonetheless…
Cain’s Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers
Behold: One hundred pages, none of which are in order. If you want to read this book, you’re going to have to do a lot of guesswork—because there are 32 million possible combinations. As much a puzzle as a story, Cain’s Jawbone (first published in 1934 in The Torquemada Puzzle Book, “Torquemada” being Mathers’ pseudonym) is a murder mystery filled with red herrings, wandering sentences, references to books by Robert Louis Stevenson, puns, word games, and 18th-century French murder trials.
When first published, those who could solve the puzzle had the chance to win £15—but it wasn’t just about putting the pages in order. To pick up the cash you’d also have to explain who the six victims and their killers were. In 1935, two readers figured it out and claimed the prize—though the solution was never published. In 2019 the crowdfunded publisher Unbound collaborated with a charity, The Laurence Sterne Trust (whose namesake authored another famously unconventional work, Tristram Shandy) to publish a new edition and start the contest over. By the end of 2020 British comedian and crossword puzzle creator John Finnemore had solved the puzzle, noting in The Telegraph that being quarantined during the COVID-19 lockdown had given him the time he needed to focus on the task. He earned approximately £1,000—or the equivalent of £15 in 1934.
The Future Library
One reason you can’t read the books in the Future Library is that some of them haven’t been written yet. Another reason is that even the solicited submissions are being locked away in the “Silent Room” of Oslo, Norway’s public library. And a further one is that the trees that will provide the paper for the books to be printed on are still growing.
The Future Library project is a 100-year art project conceived by Scottish artist Katie Paterson and commissioned by Norwegian Anne Beate Hovind (along with some trustees), and is designed to give humans a greater sense of the expanse of time. Each year since 2014, one well-known writer has been invited to submit an original manuscript, a process that will continue until 2113. None of the manuscripts will be published before then, and all are being stored away in the Silent Room’s locked glass drawers. Meanwhile, the spruces from which the paper will be harvested have been planted in a forest north of Oslo and are set to spend the next hundred years growing. Authors who have submitted manuscripts so far include Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Han Kang, and Ocean Vuong.
The Voynich Manuscript
Technically, the Voynich Manuscript is readable. There are words, and there are even pictures. But that doesn’t mean anybody’s ever been able to read it. Radiocarbon dated to the 15th century (it’s printed on calfskin parchment), the 225-page codex is named after the Polish-American bookseller Wilfrid M. Voynich, who came into possession of the text in 1912. It’s a beautifully-rendered, totally incomprehensible collection of drawings, plus words in a language no one yet has been able to decipher. Reminiscent of a scientific notebook, the contents (available to view thanks to Yale Library’s digitization) can be divided into six areas: botanicals (including drawings of over 110 unidentified plants); astronomical/astrological drawings; cosmological medallions; pharmaceutical sketches of over 100 herbs and roots in jars; text (some of which may be recipes); and biological drawings—mostly of nude or pregnant women. It has the feeling of a journal left behind by an extra-terrestrial who’d taken careful notes, then vanished—but some insist it’s just a hoax.
20 Slices of American Cheese by Ben Denzer
Cheese lovers will melt for this book. Square and yellow, just like its contents, 20 Slices… is exactly what its title suggests: twenty pieces of sliced, individually-wrapped Kraft cheese surrounded by a hardback book cover. Since Kraft slices are shelf-stable, they won’t go bad very fast—which has allowed this book to be shelved in libraries around the world (including the University of Oxford), though usually in a plastic container. Created by book artist and designer Ben Denzer, he published it through his Catalog Press in 2018, and it now follows in line with some of his other 20-themed “books”—he’s also “published” 20 Slices of Meat, 200 Fortunes, and 5 Ketchups (which were, for a time, available at the Whitney Museum’s gift shop).
ONEPIECE by Ilan Manouach
Got some time? Then you might want to dive into One Piece, the incredibly popular manga series written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda, which has been serialized in the Japanese magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump each week since 1997. It’s the best-selling manga series ever, with over 516.6 million copies in print as of August 2022, and has been adapted into an animated series with more than 1,000 episodes. But the book version that encompasses all of the various volumes of One Piece exists in the form of a 21,450-page collection put together by artist Manouach. He printed out digital pages from the manga, then compiled them into a single volume that literally cannot be read without breaking the entire piece. Only fifty copies were made, and cost approximately $2,000 each (and they’ve sold out). So how is this not some kind of major copyright issue? As the French publisher JBE told The Guardian, ONEPIECE is not really a book—it’s “sculptural material,” and is not meant to be read.
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
Okay, slow your roll, Joyceans: Certainly, it’s easy enough to sit down with a copy of Finnegans Wake. Of all the books listed here, Joyce’s 1939 stream-of-consciousness experimental masterpiece is clearly the most accessible. That’s not the same as saying it’s comprehensible. Joyce’s language includes a lot of made-up constructions, portmanteaus, dream imagery, and super-long sentences, which make it a book you either need to concentrate on, or ideally, hear read aloud. (And once you finish, you can start all over again; the final sentence of the book links to the first, making the book one big circle.)
What’s it about? Well, it’s probably simplest to say that it’s about the Earwicker family, whose patriarch is under attack and whose children are trying to usurp him. Some find it very funny; some have compared it to Dante and Shakespeare. Of course, Joyce is hardly the only author to write seriously dense, meandering novels that are as much about the experience as the comprehension or interpretation—just look at the works of David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker), and Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow). You might make it to the end, but that doesn’t mean you’ll ever fully understand all their layers of meaning—they’re books that don’t make the price of admission easy, but they do make the journey something special.
Randee Dawn is the author of the funny, fantastical pop culture novel Tune in Tomorrow, which was a finalist in the 2023 Next Generation Indie Awards. She’s also the co-editor of The Law & Order: SVU Unofficial Companion and co-edited the anthology Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles. An entertainment journalist who writes for The Los Angeles Times, Variety, Today.com, and many other publications, Randee is working on her follow-up to Tune in Tomorrow and lives in Brooklyn with her spouse and a fluffy, sleepy Westie.
I was going to mention Margaret Atwood’s book, but I see it’s listed in The Future Library collection. Stunts like this are pretentious and annoying, and I very much doubt anyone will ever see these books.
The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities
The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring
The idea behind The Future Library is simply fascinating
For those delightfully entranced by The Voynich Manuscript, I’ll put forth the Codex Seraphinianus.
It’s a little different because we know who wrote it, and it is exactly what it is, a book published in Italy in the late 20th century, no conjectures needed, but like the VM, it means nothing more than its visual experience.
I was thinking my next novel.
If on a winter’s night a traveller. By Italo Calvino. A book about trying to read the book you are reading. I’m not really sure it is a book…but it’s a great read.
Slightly off topic, perhaps, but there was once on Wikipedia an extraordinarily comprehensive article on fictitious books–that is, not books of fiction, but books that only existed within fiction. It listed many hundreds of nonexistent titles, many from the realms of fantasy and science fiction. I once linked to it in a comment on this very site. Then it vanished! How ? Why? It was a fascinating collection of books you could never read, but once upon a time you could at least read their intriguing titles.
Props for mentioning the Voynich Manuscript. Edward Kelley, the collaborator of queen Elizabeth I’s famous court wizard John Dee, is the name I’ve seen most frequently associated with theories that the manuscript is a hoax. Myself, I prefer the proposition that it slipped into our world through an interdimensional rift from a parallel universe, on aesthetic if not evidentiary grounds.
@@@@@#8: There is something similar at the Invisible Library; was the old Wikipedia article you mention more comprehensive?
Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren is often cited by many as unreadable (I disagree).
@8 – Part of that list perhaps survives; there is an article on the invented books of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Joyce is hardly the only author to write seriously dense, meandering novels that are as much about the experience as the comprehension or interpretation—just look at the works of David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker), and Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow).
I’m not sure that Riddley Walker belongs on this list. I’ve read it, and it’s not particularly dense or meandering. It’s a short novel (220 pages) with a single fairly simple plotline and a single first-person narrator that proceeds in a pretty much linear fashion at a brisk pace. (This is not meant to be dismissive: complexity doesn’t make a good book or simplicity a bad one, any more than being tall makes you a good actor.)
It’s a little tricky to get into at first because it isn’t written in standard English, but lots of books aren’t written in standard English. Feersum Endjinn comes to mind, and that’s a good deal more complex, structurally speaking, than Riddley Walker.
That explains the relatively low output of John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme during Covid, at any rate.
@11 Ajay beat me to it. If you are familiar with a modern Kentish accent and can read it in that voice (aloud if you have to), it becomes pretty easy. The accent is just a gimmick. I’m actually more dismissive of Riddley Walker than Ajay is: I think it’s nothing more than its gimmick.
@8 Steve Morrison, thank you! I think that’s it, or very close to it! I’d hypothesized that whoever had created that wonderful list second guessed their decision to post it on Wikipedia and moved it elsewhere. This “Invisible Library” supports my hypothesis. Please message me via this site if I can ever do you a favor, because I owe you one.
@10, the original Wikipedia entry had many Cthullu mythos books, not just the Necronomicon, but others created by authors like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and Robert Bloch. I suppose a complete list of mythos books alone must run into the hundreds by now, though.
Regarding Dahlgren, perhaps it is readable, but my sense is it’s one of those books more people claim to have read than actually have.
@@@@@ no. 3 (rickarddavid):
“The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring”
Ouch, well played! :-)
One of the funniest takes on Books You Must Not Read is the GK Chesterton short story “The Blast of the Book”. Most of the story is about an academic studying the supernatural who receives a mysterious and awful book – one glance at the contents causes the unwary reader to vanish, snatched away by the Devil. And there’s a succession of baffling disappearances to back this up, culminating in the evaporation of both the academic’s own secretary and the man who brought him the book.
Eventually Father Brown deduces that the whole thing is just an elaborate practical joke by the secretary, fed up with his boss’s attitude of superiority.
There was another long silence and then Professor Openshaw laughed; with the laugh of a great man who is great enough to look small. Then he said abruptly:
‘I suppose I do deserve it; for not noticing the nearest helpers I have. But you must admit the accumulation of incidents was rather formidable. Did you never feel just a momentary awe of the awful volume?’
‘Oh, that,’ said Father Brown. ‘I opened it as soon as I saw it lying there. It’s all blank pages. You see, I am not superstitious.’
My college friend went to three different libraries looking for S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure. She never found the unabridged version.
@10 Dahlgren is readable, but I’d argue it is not worth the trouble. It is a weird and pretentious book, and not in a good way. I suppose if you need to read a book about what was edgy when it was written (‘OMG gay people exist and have sex!’, ‘OMG the big black man had sex with the little white girl and she liked it!’), but it now just seems dated. The whole book just tries too hard.
@16 See also The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. The title of the novel is also the title of a play, “The King in Yellow,” which causes whomever reads it to go mad. Excerpts of the play are interspersed throughout the text; presumably, just enough to allow the reader to maintain whatever sanity they may have.
Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless.
I have been trying to read Carlyle’s Sartor Resartis off and on for over 40 years. I am about half way through.
There’s Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) a poem by William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. which was released in two forms, a floppy disk version which would encrypt itself after being read once, and book version which faded as soon as it was exposed to light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)
I read maybe half of Dahlgren and couldn’t get myself to keep going…
I disagree with 1; a project to seal a Margaret Atwood novel in a vault and prevent it from being published I’d a laudable and public-spirited endeavour and I only with they’d started sooner.
For all practical purposes, every volume in Borges’ Library of Babel.
Stanislaw Lem wrote a typically brilliant book, A Perfect Vacuum, which is a collection of reviews of books that don’t exist.
Yeah, I read “Dahlgren” and wished I hadn’t (William Gibson loves it though). Other difficult books are “J.R.” by William Gaddis and, well, anything by Umberto Eco, but I found “Island of the Day Before” to be particularly tough going.
I’ve never found Faulkner unreadable or even close. Some of his stuff is as hilarious as his other stuff is dark, sometimes in the same book. I liked Hoban’s children’s books–Frances, The Mouse and His Child, The Story of Hester Mouse Who Became a Writer…,–more fun than Riddley Walker. I thought it wasn’t any denser than A Clockwork Orange.
I read Dhalgren when it came out. I didn’t find it dense. It was like a lot of SF from the period, an attempt to be literary. I’ll admit it, I like Delany’s space opera better than his serious stuff.
Dhalgren is available as an audiobook, now, as is Gravity’s Rainbow. In both cases the readers are good, and this is a good way to read, then re-read these books (or in my case, re-encounter these books from immature readings when they were first published).
Dhalgren benefits immensely from being accompanied by Heavenly Breakfast.
Dhalgren, by Samuel Delaney
Zettel’s Traum (Bottom’s Dream) by Arno Schmidt. I have a copy of the German version, but never got beyond the first few pages of the 1500 pages. Maybe I should give it another try…
Little, Big or others by John Crowley.
I’m still trying to find The Mirror’s Mirror: or, The Noble Smile of the Dog by Alcina Lubitch Domecq, not entirely convinced it actually exists.
In Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”, several characters read a tract , ” The Old Apple Woman of Wimbledon Common” which was written by the character Lady Jane Sheepshanks .The title parodies a real tract ,”The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain”.
The next book of The Kingkiller series.
@33 Yeah, really. Who outlines only two days of a three day weekend?
Also, there’s at least one portion of Alan Moore’s JERUSALEM which must be read out loud to be intelligible, but I still wouldn’t call it accessible.
Another possibility for this list, although it’s technically not “unreadable” – “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates” by RAND Corporation. It’s totally lacking in plot, dialogue, grammar, spelling, and characters, in both senses of the word – “characters” of the typesetting variety only include numerals. If you’re looking for a good random number generator, it might be the answer to your prayers, though.
The most entertaining thing about this book are the reviews for it on Amazon.
Thanks for an interesting list.
Wow. All this hate for Dhalgren. I read it after finishing Babel-17 and Nova, both of which I adored. I admit, I was perplexed for the first hundred pages, but once I got into it, I really enjoyed it. The ending is a bit of a disappointment, but the rest is worth a read. De gustibus.
Speaking of which, whoever said Little, Big needs to read some Lewis Carroll (it especially helps if you’ve read the Sylvia and Bruno novels) and try again. Little, Big is Crowley’s masterpiece. My wife rereads it frequently. She named her daughter after Ariel Hawkmoon. Ariel is also a fan of the book. Now, his Aegypt series is another matter entirely.
Also, come on, people. Yes, Gravity’s Rainbow is dense, but it’s also frequently brilliant, occasionally funny, and one helluva send up of the war in Vietnam (by recounting a fictional version of WWII). Genius. My daughter also read it in high school and again in college. My wife is a fan of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, another dense novel, but I found it to be a bit too precious.
When I first saw the title of this article, I thought of two works: the Gormenghast Trilogy, which I’ve never managed to wade through (it’s just SO BORING), and John Barth’s postmodern behemoth LETTERS, a 770-page epistolary novel comprising correspondences between the characters in his previous novels. Now, THAT’S pretentious.
@36 DYAC, I changed Sylvie back from Sylvia twice. Stupid phone.
@25 — Borges also had a pattern of writing reviews of non-existent books. But I particularly note A First Encyclopedia of Tlön, which bleeds through layers of unreality.
Finnegans Wake as “the most accessible” of Joyce’s works? Seriously? It’s literally, objectively, the least accessible. Is this an error, maybe? Serious question. “Oxen of the Sun,” arguably the most incomprehensible of the chapters of “Ulysses,” is more accessible than any single page of FW.
@39 – That’s not at all what she wrote. The article says
(Emphasis mine.)
.” If you’re looking for a good random number generator, it might be the answer to your prayers, though.”
How do I use it to generate a random number?
— oh, just open it at a random page and start reading at a random point on that page.
And how do I pick which page to use and where to start?
— Well, at random, obviou– oh. Ooh.
@39 — Oxen of the Sun becomes more accessible once you realize, as I eventually did, that the story is about the birth of a baby and the style is about the Birth of English. I was confused by the beginning which I thought was reminiscent of Old English, but by the time I got to Dickens ( my favorite author) I was thrilled. Read each paragragh as if you are reading a parody of different author, a basic English schoolboy assignment.
A lot of dislike for Dhalgren, a book I loved when I first read it. It may have helped that that was not long after it was published… having reread it several times in the intervening decades, I see ever more clearly how very much a book of its time it is.
Gotta tell y’all, I read “Dhalgren”, and all of Samuel R. Delaney’s stuff in junior high and high school, between ’71 and ’78. I loved his style, and I loved that “Dhalgren” took a lot of effort to read. I could and can blow through Heinlein, Asimov, Norton etc like a toddler gobbling candy. But Delaney, Silverberg (try “Tower of Glass”), Ellison, Sturgeon, Gunn, Tiptree? They take some effort on the part of the reader. My fifth grade reader was “The Hobbit”, I had devoured the “LoTR” entirely before 6th grade started.
Samuel R. Delaney was an openly gay college English professor before that was considered normal, and the “omg gay people exist” etc commentary comes from someone quite young, I think. I never found “Dhalgren” pretentious. It’s a period writer stretching himself, and carries a meaningful story, even though I agree that the ending was weak, or at least unsatisfying.
I own several examples of Delaney’s works, including two author autographed copies, a paperback “Dhalgren” and a hardback short story collection, “Spindrift”.
I don’t believe a novel or story that requires effort on the reader’s part is “pretentious” nor dense. It’s engaging writing. And “Dhalgren” is a book I go to during the depths of Fargo’s winter. Crackly low fire, hot tea, a side shot of Jameson’s- let the wind howl and the snow build; I’m in Bellona!