encouraged by Sara Jakša who hosted this month’s IndieWeb book club selection to write about why I hadn’t finished the book, here goes: why I meant to read An Unauthorised Fan Treatise | Last Seen Online, but didn’t.
for context, An Unauthorised Fan Treatise is centred around a fandom blog by the fictional blogger and fangirl Gottie. the prequel novella was published chapter-by-chapter to a WordPress site in 2019. the brainchild of author Wren James, it later formed the basis of the 2024 novel Last Seen Online, published by Walker Books under the name Lauren James. I picked the interactive option, which includes blog entries, Tumblr posts, and entertainment reviews for the fictional TV series Loch & Ness, a show featuring a set of paranormal detectives.
the subject matter had me out of my comfort zone (September saw me immersed in a Philip K. Dick reading bonanza, interspersed with Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel), but I was drawn to the fact that it’s an epistolary web novel that functions as an immersive multimedia mystery.
I have a long-standing fascination with avant-garde reading experiences dating back to those delicious choose-your-own-adventure books of my youth that did much to instil in me a sense of self-empowerment as a reader (which is why it was a real treat when Netflix released Black Mirror: Bandersnatch as an interactive film in 2018; sadly, and inexplicably, said brilliant Black Mirror anthology episode has since been removed from their website). a few that come to mind are Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta. oh, or S. by Doug Dorst J.J. Abrams. these aren’t just books, they’re experiences. they transport you into the story world to such an extent that you’re no longer a reader enjoying a book, but a participant engaging in a storied universe that’s often of your own making (Composition No. 1, for example, is published as a box of loose-leaf pages that you can shuffle at random every time you read, meaning the story is never the same twice).
so why, then, did I not finish the book? the thing with avant-garde style books is that they require additional effort. if reading fiction is generally viewed as a relaxing experience, then ergodic and kinetic works ask way more of you. the additional work you put in to interact with, make sense of, the content is the joy you get out of it. at least if you’re me. however, after a long and unhealthy break, I recently got back into reading fiction as part of my do-things-for-the-love-of-it-not-the-productivity-of-it life overhaul. while the choice to pick the “hard” version was made by Old Me - the one who likes to sing for her supper - it’s New Me who’d be reading it. while An Unauthorised Fan Treatise, as an epistolary novel is easier than Ship of Theseus, she definitely would’ve found Last Seen Online a lot easier to rest-read to😅
takeaway? sometimes, the easy option is the superior choice - quite a revelation for a recovering Type A!
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