Jess Reviews: S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst

A lot of attention is paid to how books shape their readers, but not so much on how we readers shape our books. Folded down page corners, lightly pencil underlined sentences or even - from a particularly daring reader - notes scrawled in pen; as we read we leave traces of our thoughts and feelings which bend and shape and deform. Even the most tentative reader might wear down the spine at places they return to often. How much could a person read about us from this and the ephemera we leave scattered throughout our books?

It was a guilty pleasure of mine at university to read the annotations made by others in the library books I checked out - guilty because I know the library tried to discourage this delinquent behaviour. But there's something of a solidarity in knowing that readers before you have struggled through the same text. I used to like trying to figure out the unnamed annotator's essay title purely from the parts they'd underlined.

I'll admit that when I first found out about S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, it appealed to the part of me that liked playing games like this. Reading it gave me the same feeling of discovery. The book itself is made up to look like a library book of a book called 'Ship of Theseus' by the mysterious V. M. Straka, complete with library sticker and borrowing stamps - and annotations. Across most of the book's 400 pages are marginal notes, the scrawled conversations between two students as they read and reread Straka's book. Slipped between the pages are their notes, correspondences, news reports, a map scribbled on a coffee shop napkin. It is up to us to put these pieces together, to read their story in how they have read Straka's book.

Of course, there is much more to S. than simply its design. On the face of it, the plot is simple: the two students seek to solve the mystery of Straka's identity, looking for clues in his work. But parallel narratives unfold, in the text, in the footnotes, and on the page, revealing the interconnected relationships that drove each person to write and to read.

I've written a dissertation about this book and it still doesn't come close to the number of words I could spill over it given the opportunity. It captures so much about how we readers relate to our books and to each other through books, in a fun, exciting, bittersweet story.