5 Books You Probably Shouldn't Try to Explain

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]In fact, these are books that remain intact only if you leave them partially unaccounted for.

[00:00:08]>> [music] [music] >> Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching Leaf by Leaf. My name is Chris.

[00:00:24]I can't stop reading. I can't stop thinking about books and I can't stop making lists. So recently I decided, "Why not share some of these lists I come up with with everyone else?" There are books that I do enjoy trying to explain. Books where explanation feels like an extension of the reading, a way of clarifying what's already there, of making connections more visible. And then there are books where I eventually realize that I probably shouldn't ever try to explain them. Not necessarily because they're difficult in some obvious way, and not necessarily because they're obscure or experimental or intimidating, but because explanation on the part of the reader feels like the wrong form. Yes, the reader has a form, too. To try to explain a book is to try to stabilize it in some way, to say what it's about, what it means, how it holds together, to put some scaffolding around it. And for sure, I do this a lot. But some books don't want that. They don't resist understanding entirely, but they resist being converted into understanding. They're built in such a way to where the moment you start trying to explain them, you've already stepped outside of what matters most about them.

[00:01:47]So this isn't a list of books I can't understand. It's a list of books I wouldn't try to translate into clarity because I think their meaning depends precisely on not being settled. In fact, these are books that remain intact only if you leave them partially unaccounted for. Number one, How It Is or Comment C by Samuel Beckett. When you think of the couple we were, Pim and I, part two, and shall be again, part six, 10, 14, so on, each time for the unthinkable first, when you think of that, what we were then, each for himself and for the other, glued together like a single body in the dark, the mud, how at each instant both ceased and was there no more either for himself or for what the other vast tracts of time. How it is is almost impossible to explain without immediately falsifying what it is.

[00:02:46]There's no stable narrative voice, no clear progression, barely even sentences in the conventional sense. The text almost breaks down into units of speech that are more like breathing than language. You could say it's about memory or suffering or embodiment or disembodiment, but none of these explanations will stay attached very long. Reading this book becomes about endurance, repetition, rhythm, again, breathing. The moment you step outside of that experience to explain it, you've already replaced it with something smoother, more coherent, more manageable, which is exactly what this book refuses to be. Number two, Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin. "That's the Americans' number," Hitler said, "and all of their data in every field except for the production of Coca-Cola should be divided by three." Blue Lard resists explanation in a completely different way, not by reducing meaning necessarily, but by overwhelming it.

[00:03:52]Each time you think you understand this book, it shifts tone or genre, shifts register. It's philosophical, it's grotesque, historical, satirical, and it moves through all of these modes without settling into any one of them for long enough to be summarized. So, any attempt at the explanation of immediately results in failure. Well, okay, let's say it becomes tentative at best. So, what Saroyan does is he destabilizes the very conditions under which explanation becomes possible. So, the book doesn't conceal meaning, it proliferates it to the point where no single account can hold. And that excess is kind of its point. Number three is The Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot. At times I said to myself, "This is death. In spite of everything, it's really worth it. It's impressive."

[00:04:46]But often I lay dying without saying anything. In the end, I grew convinced that I was face-to-face with the madness of the day. This is perhaps the most direct case, a book about the impossibility of explanation itself. The narrator is repeatedly asked to give an account, to explain what happened, to make their experience legible. And every attempt breaks down. Meaning approaches, but never quite arrives. Language circles, withdraws, and fails. What Blanchot is showing is that explanation isn't a neutral act. It carries a demand that experience be coherent, that it be shaped into something communicable. But this text refuses that demand. To try to explain it would be to impose the closure that the book constantly dissolves. So, what you're left with is something more fragile, a form of meaning that exists at the edge of articulation. Number four is Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson. No matter where one situated them, how could there be any way in which any two objects could be any distance from each other except equidistant? At first this book seems like something you could explain, a voice speaking, a world empty, a mind circling art, philosophy, memory. But the difficulty lies in what you're tempted to ask. Is she really alone? Is she reliable? Is this literal or symbolic? The book invites those questions for sure, but then it quietly recedes because what matters most here isn't what's true in the narrative. It's how our thought behaves when there's no external confirmation, how reference functions when there's no shared world to stabilize it. To explain the book, of course, would be to choose one explanation or one interpretation. And in doing so, to reduce it, to reduce this voice that seems so singularly exposed. And number five, I wish I had the book jacket for it, unfortunately I don't, but it's The Jade Cabinet by Ricky DuCornet. Let's suppose the memory is like a jade cabinet, but a cabinet belonging to an infinitely irresolute collector. Each time we look inside the jade appears to be the same, yet the mind is forever replacing one chimera for another that resembles it. Let's suppose the memory is a cabinet of chameleons and the mind as unstable as the moon. This is the last book in her tetralogy of elements, the magisterial tetralogy of elements, this being the book of air. This one resists explanation through accumulation. It doesn't feel like it builds toward a central claim or structure. Instead, it moves associatively through stories, images, fragments, histories. Each piece feels complete in itself, and yet the whole never resolves into a single pattern you could summarize. So, explanation here is forced into the act of selection, curation. This theme matters, that one secondary. This image is symbolic of this. But, the book resists hierarchy. Everything seems to carry equal weight. Its meaning doesn't emerge from any single thread, but rather from the texture of their coexistence. To explain it again would be to narrow it, to choose coherence over richness. So, what these five books share isn't necessarily style or structure or tradition. It's a shared resistance to being finished by explanation. They don't reject meaning.

[00:08:38]They reject the idea that meaning needs to be fully articulated in order to be real. So, the most honest response to books like these isn't clarification.

[00:08:49]It's a kind of restraint, a willingness to let parts of the reading remain unresolved, untranslatable, intact.

[00:08:57]Because for some books, that's not a failure of the reading or a failure of the understanding. It's the condition that allows them to keep operating on you. Now, I would love to hear from you about some books that you think operate best when you don't try to explain them.