Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books

This is very short – it’s a glorified pamphlet, really.

The best I can say is that it introduced me to George Perec, who is a French writer. He died in 1982, but he did a lot with something called constrained writing, which is where you put arbitrary constraints on your writing to do something original.

For example:

• He wrote a 300-page novel (in French) that didn’t use the letter “e”
• He wrote another one where he the only vowel that appeared was “e”

And so on. He did some other thing that might have come full circle is he had lived longer (he died at 45). For example, many people have speculated that the third novel in the above set would have only used words that didn’t fit in the first two sets.

This book is none of that. It’s just a collection of essays. And the first few chapters have nothing to do with books. At the end, there are a couple that do involve organizing books, but not to any particularly notable degree. They seem kinda random.

Mostly, it’s books about life and his opinions on things. Some of it is insightful, but, again, just totally random.

This is the second book that I picked up at a little bookstore in Berlin, along with On Connection, which was equally as odd and random.

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