I found this second book in the series easier to read than the first one, although the descriptions of that one regarding the lights were excellent. I'm not sure why but perhaps the plot was easier to follow? The ideas were unusual, the writing as good as usual, and I was interested to see how the plot would pan out.
Perhaps this was easier to imagine as it was mostly set in a smaller area, and I do like trees! Although perhaps, this one was somewhat the stuff of a few nightmares!
The book was, like the other, very cleverly written and sometimes I did wonder whether the author might lose the readers' attention in his efforts to be a bit too clever? I felt that it made the book seem longer than it actually was, but I did want to get to the end to see what transpired. And interesting it was!

First we had Franz Kafka, writing early in the 20th century, then we had Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison some fifty years later keeping readers on edge and on their toes with fiction that shattered our perception of reality. And now we have Jeff Noon.

John Nyquist has a mystery to solve. He wakes up in a room to find a dead body near him. But finding the killer might be the easiest part of navigating in the city where everything is just part of a larger story. Literally. And I mean, <em>literally</em>.

I had been impressed with the first book in the series, <em>A Man of Shadows</em>, and looked forward to this volume, but I couldn't come close to imagining how deeply inventive this was going to get. I knew, though, that I was in for a wild ride as I read the last paragraphs of the opening chapter:
<blockquote>“They’re moving,” she said. “The words are crawling on his skin.”
Marcus didn’t believe her at first; he thought she must be mistaken. But he knelt down at Andrea’s side and saw the truth, and he felt sick. Neither of them spoke for a while. The only sound in the library came from the pages of the books as they rustled on the shelves.
All the empty pages.
Among them lay a man covered in stories.</blockquote>
If part of what makes for a fun, adventurous read is, as Bruce Coville once said, the "Cool Things Per Page" quotient, then this book jumps right to the head of the pack. From words moving on skin - a person literally part of a story - to the idea that "the pages of a book can be burned and the smoke inhaled ... it has an effect on the reader," to 'Alphabugs' - "they make their nests out of paper ... the paper has to have words on it, and then the larvae hatch out and they eat the words."

But no matter how great or creative an idea is, there still has to be character and story and Noon has that here in spades as well. Nyguist is a Sam Spade in an Alice in Wonderland world. We have no doubt that he will succeed in his goal, but the journey here is everything and this journey is about stories ("In this city you're nothing unless you're in a story") and Nyquist has to sort out not only the murder but the stories surrounding him as well. "I don't know where I am," he says at one point. "I don't know what story I'm in." Together, Nyquist and reader will figure it out.

I haven't enjoyed this kind of a read - speculative fiction - in a long time (other than the previous Nyquist volume) and it was an absolute delight to be here.

Looking for a good book? To use the words of one of author Jeff Noon's characters from the book itself, "<em>The Body Library</em> is a novel, a book, and a rather special one at that." If you miss reading creative fiction of the sort that was produced so well by authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Harlan Ellison, or Philip K. Dick, then you must read Jeff Noon's <em>The Body Library</em>.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

To improve on A Man of Shadows was no easy task - especially when it comes to my opinion, because I loved that book. But here I am, having just finished The Body Library, and I'm absolutely dumbstruck.

I'm almost too scared to write this review, because there is no possible way for me to convey what the experience of reading this book was. It was...surreal, it was meta, it was thoroughly encapturing and mesmerising. The way Jeff Noon uses language is something I've never seen before.

How to describe anything of the feelings this book evoked? It was a fully-immersive experience; it was absolutely revelationary. Read it - read the series, actually - you won't regret it.

John Nyquist wakes up in a room with a dead body - he can hear the man's voice - and starts on an investigation into his murder.

The tale takes place in Storville - a city where the citizens are readers, writers and characters of their own and others' narratives.

I hadn't read the first in the series which I think I should have, as jumping into the second of a series with a slightly off-kilter storyline just didn't work for me.

It is apparently well reviewed by others.

Having not read the first book in this series, I wasn't sure where to go into this one and whether I would miss the plot entirely. Luckily, although the references to the previous story were annoying, the book was fairly self-contained and readable as a standalone.

The book is well written, with twists and turns and I found myself interested in the story quite early on, during the plot set up in the first few chapters. There is a spooky vibe to the story, and it is clearly noir fiction. There were a few 'jokes' which were trying to be satirical which didn't land for me, however, I understand the approach.

Overall, 3/5 stars - enjoyable read and I may read more in the series in the future!

Superb. Like any book written by Jeff Noon this is outstanding. I would definitely recommend. Thank you for the opportunity to review it.

The body library begins with a creative hook, a dead body in a library. Want a book that is creepy and unsettling but still a murder mystery? This is for you.

In a city where everything is stories and stories are everything, what happens when the plot shifts a little? When an infection of ideas has the potential to overturn the balance of fictional how strange can a murder case be? How strange can anything be when words flow just under the skin? It a city where stories are everything and everything is stories, what do a dead man’s whispers mean? Once upon a time a man called Nyquist followed a job right into trouble.

The Body Library is, in more ways than anything else, a story about stories. Yes, it’s still a detective story and there is still a case to be solved, but neither of those feel like the core of the book. I’m not sure that Jeff Noon meant for the mystery bits to be as overshadowed by the story about a story bits, I haven’t read the previous Nyquist novel so this may just be part of his writing style. The nature of the book also makes it somewhat hard to dig into without spoiling it, so this one might be a little thin on details.

A big part of the story here is focused in on Melville 5, an abandoned apartment building and home to all manner of strange folk. More importantly, it’s something of a flux zone where the strangeness of Storyville is eclipsed by something more, by pages with shifting words and trees with ink flowing through their leaves. This is fascinating to me, this sort of space where reality is kind of separated from itself, just slightly tilted.

There’s a lot of slightly tilted reality to go around here. Storyville itself is a town built on tales where each person’s individual story is quite important and monitored to ensure that it doesn’t interfere with anyone else’s story. There’s a great feel to it when Nyquist is going through the city chasing a lead, just being shown the various areas of this sprawling city of words. Different parts of the city are known for different kinds of stories which feels interesting and I would like to see more of it. The city is probably my favorite part of The Body Library.

The flipside to my enjoyment of the city is the characters. There’s a flatness to the characters, I’m not sure if it’s something of the writing style or if it’s something of Nyquist as a focus character but it felt off. Tied up in all the story elements of the book, the characters can feel less like characters and more like character sketches. Things don’t ring right emotionally. This is especially noticeably when it comes to Zelda. Nyquist has this whole thing towards her, this significance for her that doesn’t really get built up in any satisfying way but that is a driving force throughout the run of the book. The thing is, of course, that it’s a driving force I have a hard time buying into and so it feels forced.

There were some definite issues with the flow of the story. It’s worse towards the end than early on, but I think that sort of ties into the characters issue. Things feel like they could have been set up more solidly. Ideas crop up here and there, but the frame work can feel like it’s missing in places. The connections aren’t there.

Ultimately, I think I like the background elements and workings of The Body Library more than I like the actual story. There is a lot there that’s already solid, that would have been really well done, if it had been better set up. Would I read Jeff Noon again? Probably. While I had issues with some parts of the book I quite enjoyed others and would like to see what the background work in his previous Nyquist book is like. Because of that, I’m giving the body library a three out of five with the note that it only loses out on a four because of the flow issues towards the end.

Imagine randomly finding an abandoned looking library. You walk in and browse the books, but all the pages are blank. And then you come across a man covered in letters, a moving text, a story inked in as an ever evolving complicated tattoo. That’s how the Body Library begins and as far as beginnings go it’s definitely one of the most striking and memorable ones in recent literature. From there on it gets progressively stranger, but then again Noon is an expert in strange. Man of Mystery, the first book introducing Nyquist and my personal introduction to the author, was auspicious on every account. Body Library raised the stakes, taking the gruff detective from Dayzone (the city that defied the natural order of time itself) to Storyville (a city where everyone lives in and for a good story). Multiple narratives interweave, some deadlier than others, and now it’s up to Nyquist to unravel a tangled web of a book that comes to life. And also, of course, there is a murder to solve. This is, after all, a detective novel, however unconventional. Man of Mystery was odd, peculiar, strange, Body Library is so much stranger still, with an M.C. Etcher’s logic and Moebius plot twists. And for all that, it’s absolutely mesmerizing, the mind is wowed even when it’s struggles to follow along and visually it’s a spectacle of such outlandish creations. Noon’s world building is superb, Storyville comes to life (much like its eponymous creation) in the most vivid technicolor way. It’s a dizzyingly bizarre and probably not for everyone, but for the right reader or the right mood, it’s really awesome. I may have finally figured out the genre for it to, it’s bizarre noir or noir bizarre. Nice, right? Sat in the past (1959) of some parallel universe and told like a mad fairy tale. Absolutely singular, nothing like it out there. Noon’s originality and imagination continue to astonish. Gorgeous book. Thanks Netgalley.

I went into this really enjoying but as I progressed through it, I found the experimental nature used by Noon harder to connect with making the book harder to get through. Whilst i did enjoy a majority of it, I wish I had read the first one as I think that may have helped with this one.

"The only sound in the library came from the pages of the books as they rustled on the shelves. All the empty pages. Among them lay a man covered in stories." In Storyville Central, the location of the Twenty-First International Festival of Words, people have gathered to share stories. "The night was liquid, flowing with words, with language itself, dissolved and shared like wine amongst the poor." Private investigator John Nyquist has been hired to follow Patrick Wellborn, and he trails him through the festival. They wind up in a supposedly vacant apartment building called Melville Five that turns out to be under the spell of a book titled the Body Library. Nyquist was also the protagonist of "A Man of Shadows" but this is not a sequel and can be read as a standalone.

I was fascinated by this strange fever dream of a book, although a lot of the time I had no idea what was going on. Nyquist must find a missing book, solve a murder and save a city, but there is nothing straightforward about any of this. It's all about words and writing and deconstructed literature. It has buildings that won't let you leave, words inhaled as narcotics and people who exist simultaneously in both a fictional and nonfictional world. Places are named after Calvino, Melville, Chaucer, Marlowe, Bronte, Blake, Asimov, Wharton, Plath, Kafka and other writers. In the Grand Hall of Narrative Content, "millions of stories that currently threaded their way through the city were represented and accounted for." People can be arrested for interrupting a narrative in which they are involved.

This book is weird and confounding and I'm sure it's not for everyone but I enjoyed it (although I did prefer the prior book). I look forward to whatever unexpected trip the author takes me on next.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Well written book, but failed to connect with it, felt very lost and confused as to where the book was trying to take eme

I really enjoyed the first Nyquist novel and for me, this one was even better. It takes Nyquist to Storyville, where everyone has a story to tell. When he is tasked with following Patrick Wellborn, he discovers a world of words where fiction and truth are blurred. Throw in language viruses and the joy of having every street name be a famous author, this was always going to tickle the itch for any book nerd (like me). I thought that the narrative was much clearer here and although it did go to some very strange places towards the end, I think that Noon did really well holding all of the different elements together. The book has a real noir quality that I thought worked nicely and the character of Zelda fit well into the femme fatale role. Ultimately, I really enjoyed this book and will look forward to the next Nyquist mystery.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

In A Man of Shadows, Jeff Noon created a metafictional world where his detective hero John Nyquist needed to transgress the boundary between the cities of Dayzone and Nocturna – one of perpetual day and one of eternal night – to catch a killer. In its sequel, The Body Library, Nyquist finds himself in Storyville, where a new mystery unfolds after he kills, in self-defense, the man he was hired to follow. Like its predecessor, the world of The Body Library eschews all the figuration we expect from symbolic representation in favor of direct implication. In Storyville, streets and buildings are all named after famous writers, people get killed by viruses made up of stories, and the government fastidiously manages each of the stories that make up its residents’ lives. To cross the threshold into Storyville is to accept that every action, every interaction, every choice, is valuated solely in terms of its place in a story. It is a world, ironically, made up almost entirely of references, rather than the metaphors and allusions we generally associate with literature and storytelling.
Nyquist has his own story to tell, and part of the allure of taking a case in Storyville is that it gives him the opportunity to work on his own memoir (not surprisingly titled A Man of Shadows, because Noon can’t seem to leave meta-enough alone) about his search for the elusive serial killer Quicksilver. Nyquist may be suppressing, or outright avoiding, aspects of that experience, which in turn is keeping him from completing his new narrative – finding out who is responsible for a novel manuscript called The Body Library that has inspired cult-like devotion in some of Storyville’s residents, and appears to have an unnerving control over the stories of those who encounter it.
Most commercial SFF series published today treat its subsequent volumes as tentpoles in a larger ongoing saga. By contrast, The Body Library is a traditional standalone sequel, the way Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels were sequels that required little or no knowledge of the other novel’s events to be comprehensible. That isn’t to say that reading A Man of Shadows first doesn’t inform your reading of its sequel; it does, much in the way that reading The Big Sleep is not crucial, but helpful, in reading the novels that follow it. References to A Man of Shadows are clearly explained where they are essential to the current story. In fact, for a pair of novels that flaunt their surreal settings like a peacock plumes its feathers, there is a surprising amount of clarity of intent in its pages.
While most novelists prefer to explore gray areas, Noon’s Nyquist novels take on the black-and-white of their id-centered world. “Normal” in this world is whatever fits an established pattern; “mystery” is what occurs when a pattern is not immediately apparent. This is more or less true of all fiction, but rarely is it rendered so explicitly. The Body Library, the unfinished, ever-evolving novel inside the novel, is a dangerous agent of disorder – expanding outside of the confines of its pages in a world that prefers to keep its metaphors and allusions tucked safely between the margins.
Noon is one of those authors whom I admire more than enjoy. The Body Library is as much of an intellectual/artistic enterprise as A Man of Shadows, and just as maddeningly opaque. Characters seem to pantomime their emotional lives more than feel them. Everyone is so hyper-aware of the formulas that dictate their narratives it is near impossible to connect with anyone on a basic human level. Even more egregious are the instances in which the novel fails/refuses to account for some of the ritualistic formulations within its metafictional framework. Through much of the novel Nyquist is driven by an injustice done to a “fallen” woman – a nod to one of the most overused conventions in both literary and genre fiction, but Noon offers the reader neither a personal investment in Nyquist’s obsession nor a probing commentary on the narcissistic moral outrage of the white male hero in western literature.
What we are left with, if not a novel that we can connect with on a base emotional level, is an ingeniously manufactured art object, directing the reader’s attention with a concatenation of smoky-eyed dreamlike imagery punctured by the Pavlovian responses of its actors – like a film noir mystery directed by Luis Buñuel and edited by Lev Kuleshov.
The Body Library can’t help but propel Nyquist toward the center of the labyrinth, his gaze retreating further inward with each turn of the page. The image of Odin bleeding from his self-inflicted wound, dangling face-down from the world tree (or in this case, the word tree) trying to penetrate the water’s depths for that final key to true wisdom, projects outward from the center of the maze. Like the one-eyed god, Nyquist has already given up a piece of himself in his quest for knowledge; masochism is the only avenue that remains in his dogged pursuit for more. A cynical solution to the mystery of self-knowledge, but a haunting one nonetheless.

He de reconocer que me descoloco bastante el cambio de localización de la novela. La primera estaba centrada en una ciudad que tenía bastante por explotar con aquello de que una parte estuviera con luz y otra a oscuras siempre. Y eso que apenas se profundizaba en ello, siendo este quizá su mayor defecto. Ahora, sin embargo, el protagonista despierta en una ciudad donde las letras son lo importante, donde todo el mundo escribe o tiene historias que contar, y estas son clave para la historia.

Esta segunda entrega de las aventuras de este detective me ha resultado algo más interesante que la primera. Es una novela más "negra" en su argumento, cercana a esas novelas de detectives que se mezclan con lo fantástico y que se lee a toda velocidad dado que su ritmo es mucho más alto que "A man of shadows". Una novela con un punto de locura importante y un protagonista al que sigo esperando conocer más en profundidad. Quizá en futuras entregas.

I had previously read the first book in the John Nyquist series, A Man of Shadows also as an e-ARC from NetGalley and honestly that book messed with my head so much I just had to request the second book. This series is a mixed-genre of thriller, and fantasy; the protagonist – John Nyquist – is a private investigator but lives in the kind of world where different time zones occur in one city; ones for businessmen, lovers, those who hate the dark, those who hate the light; and now in The Body Library, where people are essentially trapped in a book.

I particularly like the way Noon builds his stories. You have no idea what could possibly by the cause of the strange goings on until he is literally about to tell you – they’re simply so abstract I don’t know how he thinks it up. Noon begins his stories with a chapter introducing the reader to the strange occurrences so immediately they are met with mystery and the desire to keep turning the pages to find out the significance.

Unlike the first book, this one focuses less on Nyquist’s flaws and past and more on his present self. Because of this I found the book much more captivating and interesting than the first. In terms of character development this meant the protagonist could move away from his past and into a more relatable present; that being said the story does tend to focus much more on the story itself rather than the character, so I never really felt like I bonded with the character a great deal.

The writing style was good and he story kept a good pace meaning the reader wouldn’t lose interest, and the story is well tied together. I definitely wasn’t as confused throughout book 2 as I was throughout book 1.

Overall I’m awarding this book 4*/5; I would recommend this to you if you enjoyed the first John Nyquist book, but also if you enjoy a mix of fantasy and mystery/ thriller. I would’ve liked the know John better so I felt more of a connection to the protagonist, but I liked that the author had moved on from John’s past to his present.

Jeff Noon's new novel is a sequel of sorts to his previous book A Man of Shadows, which I reviewed here on Goodreads. It is a sequel in the sense that it involves the same detective character, John Nyquist. Both novels seem to have a mid-20th-century setting; they are set in a world without computers or mobile phones. Having left the city of Dayzone/Nocturna, where the previous book took place, Nyquist now lives in Storyville, a city of a very different sort. Both books are science-fictional noirs, set in unique settings which are characters in their own right, and largely control the shape of the novel. Storyville, the city where The Body Library is set, is a city dominated by words and stories. Everything you do needs to be told, to yourself and to others - it becomes a narrative, that intersects with other people's narratives. This means that words are important - there is no separation between words and deeds, because words are themselves deeds, the most important deeds - they determine the shape of your life. Stories are real, but they are also self-conscious fictions, and this duality, at the heart of how words relate to bodies, is also what drives the novel. On the one hand, Storyville seems like a totalitarian state, since a vast bureaucracy is continually keeping tabs on all the stories, trying to make sure that they cohere and follow a logical narrative course. At the same time, stories as fictions continually threaten to evade this surveillance, to the point where people split into two, their "real" self and their fictional self, which seem to follow separate courses, though they remain entwined with one another. Add to this a subculture of avant garde novelists (dadaists, experimental modernists) who write narratives in which words, and therefore bodies and characters, do strange things; and people - readers - who become addicted to this strange form of literary production, in the way one becomes addicted to a drug. There is "midnight ink," which writes crooked texts but also sticks to bodies, and causes changes of consciousness when inhaled. There are lightning bugs that are illuminated with letters of the alphabet. There are typewriters that mysteriously spell out sentences on a sheet of paper, even in the seeming absence of a typist. I don't think that The Body Library comes to any firm conclusion about the metaphysicla and aesthetic issues it raises, but it is filled with powerful ideas, or perhaps I should rather say with words made flesh. These issues become embodied in the tropes of noir narrative. It is as if the two sides of 20th century literature -- say, James Joyce on the one hand and Raymond Chandler on the other -- had somehow become entangled, or had sex and gave birth to some monstrous, but darkly beautiful progeny.

I am really confused on what to think about this book. I don't think it's a bad book, but it's very weird, even for the fans of hard-core science fiction. I found it difficult to finish, but I think it's cleverly structured. Maybe because I haven't realised this is a 2nd of the series, and didn't read the first book.
Will I pick from the same author again? Yes, I might do.
I think a fan of this genre (weird fiction? sci-fi?) will be bananas about this book. But didn't work for me unfortunately. I would recommend this to die-hard sci-fi readers.

So this book took me quite some time to finish, I'm ashamed to say. I found it pretty confusing, so I kept putting off reading it.
However, I am happy I pushed on and finished the book, because the last half of the book was enjoyable, and trippy, albeit still kind of confusing.
Nyquist is a private detective in Storyville. Yes, it's a town driven by storytellers, writers, readers, and the like. It's their life. They get high on words, they drink it in. So this entire book has these wonderful nods to literature. Plath Lane? Beetles with letters on their backs? A special police agency that moderates stories? It's a delightful world Noon has built.
Nyquist finds himself wrapped up in this weird mystery surrounding an uncoventional book that seems to control people, a mysterious sketchy building where each apartment complex tells it's own stories, and a multitude of interesting characters. It is write, or be written. This premise is really intriguing.
BUT! The story is a little confusing, and I did get lost. It wasn't so much "What's going on?" But more "Why is this happening?" and "How did we get from there to here?" and "Holy crap, run-on-sentences."
Despite all that, I think this book was an interesting exploration outside of what I normally read, and I'd recommend it to people who enjoy weird Noir sci-fi fantasies.

Thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!