A novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic “documents” such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use.*
I enjoy this narrative style because it has a kind of innate intimacy… or baka voyeour-like furtiveness
The ones I have enjoyed are :
Dracula
Daddy-Long-Legs
Bridget Jones’s Diary
And most recent ones:
The Hired Girl - one of my best reads in a long long time
Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society
Have you ever read any such book? How do you like it?
And since each letter must be pulled from its own envelope, the reader has the delightful, forbidden sensation of reading someone else’s mail. Griffin & Sabine is like no other illustrated novel: appealing to the poet and artist in everyone and sure to inspire a renaissance in the fine art of letter-writing, it tells an extraordinary story in an extraordinary way.
I’ve read The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) by Goethe in the original as a requirement back in undergrad. It was interesting and earnest in its story telling- love triangle, unrequited love, suicide. I can’t say that I was fully engaged in reading it because it was required though Maybe I need to rummage through my boxes and re-read it for leisure, and see how I find it now.