Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is a post-modern, stream-of-conscious, choose your own adventure novel. Its loaded with meta text, extended allegories, and language experiments that, at once, are beautiful and frustrating.

An unconventional book demands unconventional advice:

• The book is difficult because it has been written and structured to resist understanding.
• The book is difficult because the reader resists understanding the book.
• The book is difficult because the book resists understanding the reader.
  -Difficulty resists readers because books are.
• Your baggage informs the reading
• When your baggage informs the reading, you are reminded that your baggage informs everything
• Don’t read it
• With the right mindset and effort, everything is valuable
• Expectations will weigh you down
• Most books set up expectations then fulfill them. This book sets up expectations then sends them into a black hole.
• Read it
• If your neural pathways have already hardened, if you’ve already accepted a fraudulent order to reality, this will be more painful.
• Don’t read it.
• Tension and release are the foundations of jazz. What if you could produce both with a single note? That’s what this book is.
• The choice is yours, but there are consequences.
• Read it
• It bifurcates, intentionally and unintentionally, pulls asunder, under, drags up from the recesses of time, plops back down in a land of coffee, mate, and the inebriated ramblings of pseudo intellectuals. Or maybe you, dear reader, are the inebriated one.