If you loved how Wonderbook turns the act of writing into part of the story—those diagram-laden pages that talk back to you, the allusive captions, and the way the layout makes craft feel like an adventure—Calvino’s novel puts that spirit into a narrative. Each chapter restarts the story from a new angle, addressing you directly as “the Reader,” much like Wonderbook’s conversational sidebars invite you into a creative game. It’s a mischievous, mind-bending celebration of how stories are made.

Those dense, marginalia-filled spreads in Wonderbook—with diagrams, annotations, and visual cues that make you read the page several ways—find a narrative counterpart in S. You’ll handle a faux library book stuffed with postcards, napkins, and maps, while two readers’ handwritten notes snake through the margins, building a second story atop the first. It’s the same delight in nonlinear navigation and discovery that Wonderbook’s collage-like pages evoke.

If the worldbuilding sections of Wonderbook—with their ecosystem maps and creature-crammed illustrations—sparked your imagination, The Vorrh dives you into a living, uncanny forest whose rules feel organic and ancient. Catling layers myth, colonial history, and surreal biology into a setting that breathes, much like Wonderbook urges you to think of worlds as interlocking systems rather than backdrops.

The playful asides and cartoon-inflected jokes in Wonderbook—those wry captions that puncture solemn writing advice—mirror Adams’s deadpan footnotes and mock-reference-book gags. If you grinned at Wonderbook’s irreverent tone while still soaking up big ideas, you’ll love how Hitchhiker’s mixes cosmic silliness (Vogon poetry! a depressed robot!) with sly commentary that keeps your brain buzzing.

If Wonderbook’s emphasis on subtext, layered symbolism, and the careful placement of clues had you flipping back and forth between diagrams and examples, Wolfe’s masterpiece puts those lessons into practice. Following Severian through a far-future world, you’ll catch hidden meanings and elegant misdirections that reward the same forensic reading Wonderbook encourages when it talks about pattern, motif, and revision.