Letter to a Student About Some Favourite Novels about Hidden Manuscripts

 One of my students and I are working together on an independent study course in which she would read lists of nonfiction books on a number of subjects, and novels that are linked by some type of trope. This week, we were working on novels that comprise linked short stories, and I wandered off-track and started thinking, instead, about novels within novels. 

This is the letter and the list I came up with. 

We didn't talk about this possibility, but another type of novel that I happen to love, and which might be of interest to you because it seems to me that you could make an argument that there is an element of fan fiction here is the trope in which a story is about the discovery of a book or a manuscript that leads the characters who discover said book to have an adventure.

Sometimes, the author of the novel actually writes an entire new manuscript within his/her own novel. Sometimes, as with the Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga, Hellenga builds a story about the recovery of a long-lost book called The Sixteen Pleasures by Ariosto. The book was banned at the time it was produced because the sixteen pleasures referred to are sixteen different ways of making love. Not quite the hundreds contained in the Kama Sutra, but enough that it was shocking for its time.

In recent years, the execrable Da Vinci Code was loosed upon the world by Dan Brown. I reject that book on the basis that it's not literary. It's barely pop fiction. It's dreck, and the fact that he got rich off a book in which he doesn't even know the name of his main character is shocking. (Da Vinci was where Leonardo was from. He did not have a patronym because his family was neither nobility nor rich.) Leonardo would have been known as Leonardo. When you take Renaissance history, he is referred to as Leonardo. To do otherwise would be like you being called Savannah: Bridgette of Savannah. Vinci was the small village when Leonardo came.

So, these ten books are ones that I have read and enjoyed. I haven't listed The Decameron on here, because I would argue it's not a book within a book, but rather 100 linked stories. Ten stories on ten days for a total of 100. If we opt to read some of Decameron and the Tales of Genji, then I would suggest we read one day's worth of stories from the Boccaccio and figure out whether we wanted to read all of Genji. (There's also a famous Japanese book that is a pillow book. I can't remember the title, but know that it was produced sometime around the 1400s.)

Here are ten books.There are certainly others including the one that contains a play within a play, the most famous of all: Hamlet. 

Ten of my favourite novels based on recovery of documents

Possession  by A.S. Byatt (Two academics, who are having an affair, discover evidence that the famous writer that they are both researching may have had an affair with another famous writer. Byatt is brilliant because she is writing a love story within a love story. This was the first of this type of book I had ever read and I remember thinking that I would never be smart enough to write this type of book.

The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler

(this might be a great choice because Richard and I became friends after he liked my Amazon review of the book. He contacted me, and we've been talking ever since. I interviewed him for Talking Writing, and he wound up writing more stuff for us. I think Richard would love to talk to you about how he accomplished this feat.)

Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga.

Hellenga does a wonderful job of writing this novel in such a sensual way.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (You would only know this if you read the prologue to the novel. A lot of high school teachers skip this part, thus robbing students of the knowledge that Hester Prynne's story was recorded in criminal records from seventeenth century Massachusetts.)

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (one of my favourite books ever. It's about World War I.)

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. (Dan Brown ripped off Eco to write his version of the story.)

The Missing Diary of Elizabeth D.by Nichole Bernier. (A modern-day mystery, as Elizabeth D.'s friend has been asked by her widower to go through his wife's diaries. Elizabeth died at the World Trade Center on September 11.)

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. (I don't remember much about this book other than that I devoured it in a couple of days.)

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruis Zafon. (A book about Barcelona during the Civil War (1936) in Spain. I would require students going to Barcelona with me to read this. It's a quick read; I'm not certain if it's considered YA or not. )

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. (one of our greatest living writers. Why she hasn't won a Nobel Prize is beyond me.)

The Princess Bride by William Goldman. (Goldman also wrote the screenplay for this film years after he wrote the book. This was the same year that he wrote the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of the few westerns that I love. Robert Redford and Paul Newman at the top of their game.)

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (I've never read this. Rob loves Stephenson and he recommended this book to me.)

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And so dear readers, I open the floor. What is your favourite book within a book, and why?