What book have you read that made you think '"I didn't know a book could do that"?

>>24467290 (OP)
Fleshlight instruction manual.

>>24467304
you didn't know a book could have instructions?

>>24467290 (OP)
All epic poetry.

>>24467329
what like Dante and stuff?

Tristram Shandy

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the one adapted and illustrated by Robert Sabuda as a pop-up book.

It's a rather impressive pop-up book that told the story in a new way making full use of pop-up book as art. A medium I written off as basically a gimmick to impress babies.
Started looking into other pop-up books that were more art than gimmick and was pleasantly surprised by what was out there.

>>24467290 (OP)
The Darkness That Comes Before

>>24467323
Are you new?

>>24467290 (OP)
The Child Abuse chapter in the Tunnel by William H. Gass. I was really struck by how carried away I felt reading it.

>>24467290 (OP)
In the Mouth of Madness

>>24467757
I wish self help books like this weren't like 60-70% pure wordslop

Unironically Infinite Jest

unironically finnegans wake

>>24467846
Ppl actually read Gass?

When I first read Steppenwolf, it surprised me how the last part was so surreal and magical without any real logical explanation. If I wrote something like that, I would have been tempted to clarify it was a hallucination or establish there's magic in that world or something, but Hesse didn't do that. He just bended the rules of reality for the sake of the themes and then didn't comment on it in any way, just letting it be what it is. It sounds pretty simple but I just love the idea of the universe changing to prove a point to the protagonist. And it came off perfectly natural. You can really do anything in literature.

>>24467846
>The Child Abuse chapter in the Tunnel by William H. Gass. I was really struck by how carried away I felt reading it.
I used rape in my book(s), as a vehicle to make the bad guy b-a-d, and you felt for the victim and people working on setting things right. I can see where lurid child abuse, would accomplish that.

Not sure this qualifies for OP, but still surprised me. Was friends with used book store owner. I come clean to owner, I tried writing, had issues. Owner hands me paperback, buy this anon.
I buy paperback. (forget title)
MC is a female lawyer. Also, author. Hmm. MC finally writes good book. Is getting offers, and bids on movie rights, etc. Twist...
Female is using male pen name, because it was a male type book. As a lawyer? SHe "represented" the author. The legal nom-de-plume, had taxes paid. I forget the plot device, but people REALLY wanted to know the author. She got a real life male, so she now had proof of who the author was. He annoyed hr, because he had his own book he couldn;t get an agent for (She said he was try to do a Tom Clancy. (It was not perfect?But better than she thought it would be).
In the course of their adventures, which were enjoyable, I accidentally learned about the book industry circa early 80s. And? The MC mentioned writing techniques. Little things I never would have thought of, example character models.
>
Write what you know about? The author wrote about... writing! And it worked.

>>24468096
That's not how Gass used that chapter. It's not about rape or something as simple as "oh man this character is evil." The narrator is the one commiting the abuse, and the whole impressive bit is how I felt completely taken up in his actions, like his own frantic, impulsive, livid actions were something I was swept up in and couldn't extricate myself from. The point was making the reader feel complicit and intimately involved in it, I think.

>>24467898
>self help book
Retard confirmed.

>>24467290 (OP)
Outer Dark

>>24467290 (OP)

Book: 120 Days of Sodom
What it did that I didn't think it could do: make pee pee hard

>>24469009
I had a feeling it was coming because I was familiar with McCarthy and read a lot of his other books before this, but it still feels crushing and brutal, the fact that it feels inevitable towards the end just made it more so

A Scanner Darkly made me think about unreliable narrators more and what can potentially be done with that

I read The Idiot early on into me reading "real"/"good"/"classic" literature and was my first Dostoyevsky and it made me realize what books can be, felt like characters were being shown on a deeper spiritual level than I'd read before and the ending got me good

The Sound and the Fury was my first Faulkner and made me feel haunted after and how a novel could be great by making you feel in an impressionistic way and not a linear plot driven way. How books can take you to the same destination by different routes

I like this thread. Wish more anons explained though.

Reading Sartre's Nausea for the first time opened my eyes to precisely how cerebral prose can be

>>24468823
If it looks like piss and smells like piss, it probably is piss

>>24467290 (OP)

Italo Calvino's book If on a winters night a traveler. Kind of a reddit take, but I liked it.

>>24467846
>child abuse
He shakes the crib out of frustration and bangs it against the wall once.

>>24470743
That's the title of the chapter. And he shakes the crib violently with his kid in it:
>I have both hands on the crib rail and I am shaking the bed back and forth, pushing it away, bringing it back, thrusting and jerking, yelling SH AH T, the baby's body rolling to one side and then to another until it is bouncing against the far rail which raps it over and returns it to the other side, LA LA BY, I am yelling, LA LA BY BAY BEE you bastard, shut up shut up, push pull, shut shut, up and down, the crib banging like the baby against the wall until I fling the rail loose from my fists and flee

>>24467898
I think How To Read A Book is actually quite good. Not only does it give proper rules for dissecting and digesting a book, it also gives some backgrounds as to why those rules would be beneficial for a deeper understanding of a book and a better retention of knowledge.

I see the 'wordslop' coming back a lot more in different, more modern, actual self-help books. I hate that they almost always have this formula of
>Let me tell you a story about a very particular man
>born in the dark, grisly, rat-infested streets of Shropshire, son to a peasantly blacksmith and a bed-ridden mother, no one really thought anything of him
>While his contemporaries were merely pooping in an outhouse, he was shitting in his cupped hands instead! How peculiar!
>All his colleagues deemed him crazy, yet he simply kept at it, scooping up his turds one at a time
>Even when a flushable, porcelain toilet was invented, there he was, pulling them right out of his asshole
>That man's name? You probably won't believe it was Winston Churchill, one of the most influential men in the 20th century
>Winston's story was not just some frivolous detail. It actually tells a lot about persistence in the face of ridicule etc. etc. etc.

Janice drowning her baby in Rabbit, Run. I've never went back to re-read a page so many times. The passage is haunting.

>>24467404
>surely not everything can go..as..planned?
>...can it?

delighted me as well

>>24467290 (OP)
The soft machine made me physically ill

Zaregoto

>>24467290 (OP)
House of leaves
Mostly in terms of quantity / magnitude and not quality

>>24467290 (OP)
Ulysses

some good answers in this thread, but as another anon pointed out, no one's elaborating

>>24471526
lmao are they really all like this? I've only read part of how to win friends and influence people and it was just like that

Valis, which is not a fiction book but dressed as one. I loved the booknotes.

Snow Crash, for the fun it brought. Everything just so fun in this book.

Building Stories (was I allowed comic books ?)

>>24467290 (OP)
Suldrun's Garden, the way the narrative unfolds. I know jumping around isn't anything new, but the different tones for the different characters is striking. I almost wish Vance spent more time creating loose ends and plots that go nowhere, but he struck a nice balance between focusing on the overall narrative and creating a sense of depth and scale.

>>24467358
And Milton