In this very “insider-baseball” episode we discuss Metafiction! What is it? Who is it for? Why should you read it? Plus: Children’s books that help kids figure out what’s real and what isn’t, comic books with a lot of bondage, and marginalia written by library patrons.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jessi

Recommended

• No Bears by Meg McKinlay, illustrated by Leila Rudge
• This is My Book by Mick Inkpen
• We’re in the Wrong Book by Richard Byrne
• Logicomix: An epic search for truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou,illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna
• Opus by Satoshi Kon
• Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour, translated by Sara Khalili
• Gen13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy by Adam Warren
• Empowered by Adam Warren

Read

• Redshirts by John Scalzi
• The End (almost) by Jim Benton
• Multiversity by Grant Morrison and various artists

Did Not Finish

• The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
• If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver (Recommended)

Other Books Mentioned

• Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (Recommended)
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (Recommended)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Recommended)
• There’s a Monster at the End of this Book by Jon Stone, illustrated by Michael J. Smollin
• Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed (Recommended)
• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Anna meant to say that she was saving A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara for a quiet time in her life to read. But Life After Life counts too as she owns a copy she has yet to open. Nothing metafictional (maybe) here – just books Anna wants to read)
• How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
• Inkheart (Inkworld #1) by Cornelia Funke, translated by Anthea Bell
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (Recommended)
• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Kitten Clone: The History of the Future at Bell Labs by Douglas Coupland
• The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua
• Animal Man Omnibus by Grant Morrison and various artists
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Links/Other

• An article about the glossary doodles/annotations in The Kingdoms of God by N. K. Jemisin.
• Recent Writings (not) by Walter Benjamin (but some libraries suggest that it is)
• Your home library may also use BiblioCommons
• British Columbia Library Association – Readers’ Advisory Interest Group
• A short story by Jorge Luis Borges that is a review of a non-existent book
• The list of “50” (111) metafiction books Anna mentioned
• Two-Fisted Library Stories just released Issue 6!
• Image of the meta-metafiction handwritten conversations Jessi found in If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
• Duck Amuck – go (find &) watch it!
• Felix the Cat
• Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice in Community
• Supernatural has a few metafictional aspects and episodes such as the episode we mention. Seriously someone has (of course) written a paper about it.
• The SCP Foundation story about the monster that kidnaps you if you write about it
• The SCP Foundation story about the thing that can’t be described
• We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five – The first of a series of SCP Foundation stories about the Anti-Memetics division that affected Matthew’s dreams

Check out our Pinterest board and Tumblr posts for all the books about Metafiction people in the club read (or tried to read), and follow us on Twitter!

Join us again on Tuesday, December 6th, when we discuss Philosophy!