Can I actually read this?

A standard Hogwarts textbook classifying the magical creatures of the world, and one of the few fictional books you can order tonight and have on your desk tomorrow.

An Arabic history of a knight, found in the Alcana of Toledo, translated by a Morisco for a few raisins and wheat, from which — so the frame insists — Don Quixote was put into Spanish.

A Sanskrit epic as long as the Ramayana, written by the woman who grew a city from seeds, whispered its citizens their lives, and at two hundred and forty-seven sealed the poem in a pot for whoever came after.

The poems of a shepherd who does not believe in hidden meanings — written by a Lisbon clerk who needed a master that was not himself.

A copper-coloured book bound in silk, with two snakes swallowing each other on the cover, in which a lonely boy reads of a world that is dying for want of a name — and then writes one in.

A Florinese romance of true love and high adventure, abridged by a screenwriter who claims his father read it to him, leaving out the pages about packing and the history of Guilder.

A history of the game from the marshes of Queerditch to the modern professional leagues, borrowed from the Hogwarts library and never quite returned on time.

A red-leather manuscript of hobbit memoirs and translated Elvish lore, from which — so the frame insists — The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were translated into English.

The history of a sentient stone, left over from the repairing of the sky, that begged to see the world of red dust — copied off its own surface and read, in our world, as the great novel of a declining house.

A book of wizarding fairy tales left to Hermione Granger in Dumbledore's will. One of the five stories in it turns out to be the plot of the novel.

A picture book about a lost cow, read to a baby by the most dangerous man in Ankh-Morpork, at six o'clock, every single day, no matter what.

A mocking, meticulous life of the radical critic Chernyshevsky, written in Berlin by a young émigré who is done with civic piety, and so true to its author's taste that the journal publishing the novel around it would not print the chapter.

A poem in four cantos, 999 lines, about a man's life, his daughter's death, and the persistence of pattern — printed in full, then kidnapped by a commentator who is sure it is about him.

A Sanskrit chronicle of Macondo, written in advance of the lives it records, which the last Aureliano finishes reading as the wind erases the town — and which is, at that moment, the novel in your hands.

A young man's account of the Blue Mesa — Cliff City, Mother Eve, a friendship spent on pottery and air — remembered by the professor who loved him, and printed as the open window in a dark house.

The Discworld's first newspaper, founded by a young man who wanted to write things down accurately and did not anticipate what that would cost.

A roman à clef issued under a dead woman's name, about unnamed lovers in rented rooms, and inside that a pulp tale of a blind assassin and a mute girl on the planet Zycron.

A small brown book of the myths and legends of a dying Earth, carried across four volumes by a torturer who cannot forget anything he reads.

A seventeenth-century revenge tragedy, complete with poisoned saints' feet and a lake full of bones, whose surviving texts do not agree on whether they mention Trystero.

A novelist's notebook about the novel he is writing, which has the same title as the novel you are reading — Gide's cubist joke, and still the cleanest machine for watching a book invent itself.

A compendium of all Galactic knowledge, compiled on a resource-poor planet at the edge of the spiral as a hedge against a coming dark age — and, it turns out, as a pretext for something else.

A Victorian narrative poem about the Breton fairy who married a mortal on condition he never look at her on Saturdays — written by a woman who was trying to remain unseen.

A writer's attempt to keep life in separate books — black for Africa, red for politics, yellow for fiction, blue for the day — and the fifth notebook in which the divisions fail.

A poem Ivan made up and memorised, never wrote: Christ returns to Seville at the height of the Inquisition, is arrested, and listens in silence while a cardinal explains that the Church has corrected His work.

A practising magician's book of English magic, written against his teacher's wish that the Raven King be shaken out of the subject like moths from a coat.

Two books of the same title: a standard history of 1147, sabotaged by a single negation, and the novel a proofreader then has to write, in which the crusaders do not help take Lisbon and a love story has room to happen.

An electronic guidebook in a plastic cover, more popular than the Encyclopaedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper and has the words DON'T PANIC in large friendly letters on the cover.

A novel that begins, breaks off, and is replaced by another novel that begins and breaks off — ten times — while the Reader tries to find a complete copy of the book in his hands.

A hostile, opportunistic, extensively researched biography published within weeks of its subject's death. Almost everything in it is true, which is the problem.

A sixty-page life of a blind shamisen master, printed on handmade paper for a memorial, written in the old literary style, in which the devoted pupil who supplied every fact appears only in the third person.

Thirteen diary entries by a man who sees cannibalism in every page of the Confucian tradition, framed as a recovered manuscript by a friend who reports that the author is now a candidate for an official post.

A novel of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notsri, burned by its author after a Soviet journal destroyed him, and given back by the Devil with the remark that manuscripts don't burn.

An unfinished counter-novel whose notes tell you to read in any order, leave the important lines out, and treat the reader as an accomplice — which is, not coincidentally, the method of the book that contains them.

A play about a duke poisoned through the ear in a garden, staged at Elsinore so that a king will flinch — Hamlet's name for it, when he wants a lighter one, is The Mousetrap.

A blind man's scholarly account of a film in which a house is larger on the inside than the outside — a film for which no other evidence survives.

An unfinished love story that becomes a captivity: a woman who loses her voice, types to the man who taught her, and is locked in a tower until the room absorbs her — written on an island from which novels themselves then disappear.

A Bolivian scriptwriter's daily soaps — nuns, judges, disastrous love — which begin as separate worlds and then leak characters into one another as their author comes apart.

A Victorian epic of the northern apocalypse — Ymir unmade into earth, the gods still unburdened, blood as a gift that can be spilt — written by the century's public poet in a private hand.

A vast Latin work on noses, from which Tristram lifts one tale — a stranger, a long nose, Strasbourg in uproar — because his own biography has got stuck on the same organ.

A woman castaway's history of an island, a taciturn Cruso, and a tongueless Friday — the story she desires to be known by, which the man of letters will not write as she wrote it.

A pirate comic in a world that has no use for superhero comics, about a marooned sailor who commits horrors to save his home and arrives too late to be anything but the horror.

A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name on the cover. Inside it explains how the world of Oceania actually works, in the voice of the man the Party has appointed as its enemy.

A symbolist play about the world-soul at the end of time, performed once, on a homemade stage, to a mother who cannot stop being an audience, and then put in the stove.

An interactive book that teaches, interrogates, and protects the girl who owns it — a Victorian primer rebuilt with nanotechnology, bound to one child's life.

A N.E.W.T.-level Potions textbook. The printed text is unremarkable. The previous owner's handwriting in the margins is the entire plot of the sixth novel.

The Sisterhood's private concordance of the world's faiths — the bibliographic marvel from which the Orange Catholic Bible was assembled, and with which the Bene Gesserit go on engineering religions after the assembly is finished.

A Hyperborean grimoire that has come down, Smith says, through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in a lost language — the Necronomicon's older cousin, from the other end of the correspondence.

A battered dwarf-record of Balin's attempt to recolonise Moria, found on his tomb. The last line trails off in another alphabet: they are coming.

A cloth-bound octavo bought from a Bible seller in Buenos Aires. It has infinite pages, none of which can ever be found twice.

A Latin grimoire written in prison by a Flemish sorcerer who claimed to have survived the Ninth Crusade, and printed in Cologne the year after they burned him.

A dictionary of the opinions one is supposed to have, planned by two clerks as the only project left after agriculture, medicine, love, and archaeology have defeated them.

A treatise, endlessly footnoted, in which a savant argues that night is an accumulation of black air, that the earth is sausage-shaped, and that houses are a sanitary mistake.

An unfinished epic by a foul-mouthed, centuries-old poet, about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans — and, he comes to believe, a poem that summons the thing that is killing them.

A cookery book by Nanny Ogg, published anonymously as "A Lady", in which almost every recipe turns out to be about something other than food.

A play in two acts. The first is harmless, even banal. The second, once read, is not something a mind comes back from.

A letter from a fabulous Christian king beyond the Muslims, full of marvels and political convenience — which Baudolino says he helped to write, and which, in our world, really did circulate in the twelfth century.

One of several biographies of Paul Atreides written by the woman who married him, never shared his bed, and was left with nothing to do but write the official record.

A twee picture book about a rabbit in trousers, found by a colony of newly intelligent rats, who take it for a description of how life could be.

An autobiography that stops after the dedication — "to those who see with one eye, who speak with one tongue" — on a shelf of English books in a triangular room in a village on the Nile, with not one volume in Arabic.

The most famous book that does not exist. A grimoire of pre-human history and summoning rites, surviving in a handful of guarded copies, quoted just often enough to convince generations of readers it was real.

The only book of prophecy that is never wrong, and therefore the only one that did not sell — each prediction being perfectly accurate and perfectly useless to anyone except the descendant it was meant for.

The composite scripture of the Imperium, assembled after the Butlerian Jihad from the surviving religions of humanity. Its central commandment is directed at machines.

Several chapters of Don Quixote, word for word as Cervantes wrote them, produced independently by a symbolist from Nîmes who did not want to copy the book and did not want to compose another one.

Lovecraft's first invented book, older than the species that later tries to read it — fragments from a library-city that was not built by men.

The genuinely lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, dealing with comedy — reconstructed by Eco, hidden in a Benedictine library, and defended by a murderer who poisoned its pages.

The holy book of Omnia, assembled from the words of seven prophets, and enforced by an Inquisition. The god it describes has not been consulted about any of it.

A German study of surviving secret cults, printed in Düsseldorf in 1839. Its author was strangled six months later in a locked room, and the manuscript of his second book was torn to shreds.

A Kilgore Trout novel that escaped the way Trout's stories usually do not: another writer finished it, put Trout's name on the cover, and sold it.

A body of philosophy consisting entirely of the everyday sayings of an Ankh-Morpork landlady, revered by monks who have mistaken exasperation for enlightenment.

A Bombay detective novel, reviewed in detail, in which a law student hunts a man he has never seen — and the hunted man may be God, or the hunter, or a series of mirrors.

A novel that runs backwards and splits: thirteen chapters, nine possible books, one railway platform at the end — or the beginning — of all of them.

Death keeps a library containing one book for every person who has ever lived or will live. Each writes itself, continuously, in real time, and stops mid-sentence.

The Book, without attributes — a myth the child remembers, of which every actual volume is a clumsy falsification, including the one Father leaves on the table.

An unpublished monograph, or a hypothesis that refuses to become one: that Ross's Nobel was steered by a secret Calcutta practice whose first method is not to write anything down.

A Swedish theologian's masterpiece, in which Judas is not the betrayer of God but God — the Word made flesh as the worst of men.

A last novel in which a man is dying, and he is the book — heaving, drawing up a ghostly knee — written by a Russian who had switched to English and would not be around to explain it.

A book of pure mathematics so rarefied, Holmes says, that no man in the scientific press was capable of criticising it — which is the entire review, and the entire threat.

The second novel of a vanished German, about which we are told that a publisher stayed up two nights, woke his wife, and said they would have to publish it — and almost nothing else.

Not a book: a palace. Every dream in the empire is to be written down, sent in, sorted, and read for the one that might topple the state.

Five English children's novels of the 1930s, in which the Chatwin children holiday in a magic land called Fillory — later revealed to be a real place, and the books a cleaned-up report of how they got there.

Volume XI of a forty-volume encyclopaedia describing a planet that does not exist, in such completeness that the planet begins to.

An incoherent manuscript left by a Chinese governor who abandoned power to write a novel and build a labyrinth. His heirs found the novel unreadable and the labyrinth missing. They were the same object.

A novel, reviewed at length, that treats the Epic of Gilgamesh the way Joyce treated the Odyssey — compressed into the thirty-six minutes it takes to walk a condemned American soldier from his cell to the noose.

A game, almost a liturgy, in which players make audible the correspondences between all the arts and sciences — the organ of a province that has withdrawn from history in order to play.

A detective novel whose printed solution is wrong. A last paragraph lets the reader notice, go back, and outsmart the detective.

A banned novel, inside a novel about a world the Axis won, in which the Allies won instead — though not the way they won in ours.

A novel, reviewed and not written, in which an ex-Nazi in the South American jungle recreates the court of pre-Revolutionary France and decrees that German shall be French.

The standard history of the wizarding world, on every Hogwarts book list, and the first place Harry ever reads about himself.

An Australian novelist's rewriting of Ulysses in which Molly Bloom leaves the bedroom, walks Dublin, and is no longer required to be Joyce's idea of a woman.

A poem, misunderstood by the Right and the Left alike, by the only talented writer in an Argentine clan that had had its baby photographed in Hitler's arms.

A film so entertaining that the people who watch it stop doing anything else, including living. Its title is the novel's. Its other name is simply the Entertainment.

A vast unfinished work intended to show that all the world's myths are corruptions of a single original revelation — compiled by a man who cannot read German, will not finish a chapter, and marries a young woman to be his secretary.

A Bengali merchant's tale — flight from the snake goddess Manasa, drought, ships, a land without serpents called Gun Island — that a sceptical bookseller is asked to treat as a document, and that the climate then starts to corroborate.

A map of the Empire whose size was the size of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it — later abandoned to the sun and the winters, in the deserts, inhabited by animals and beggars.

An unfinished biography of an invented eighteenth-century intriguer, abandoned when the biographer realises he has been using a dead man to justify being alive.

The novel Schulz was writing when he was shot in Drohobycz — a Messiah coming toward the town from the eastern Carpathians — which survived, if it survived, as a rumour, a forged bundle, and a fire.

A directory of the gods and demons of the Discworld, giving their names, addresses and summoning rites. Its author preferred to be known as Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches.

A book that changes the lives of the people who finish it, quoted nowhere, hunted by a father who would rather murder readers than let the new life spread. Pamuk's novel has the same name and will not show you a page.

A Venetian folio of 1666, illustrated with nine woodcuts, said to be a working copy of a book Lucifer wrote. Three copies survive. They do not quite agree.

A poem begun by a boy in an Elizabethan oak park and finished by a woman in a motor-car, about the English land, taking three hundred years because the poet had to become several people first.

An ocean whose waters are stories, polluted by a cult of silence, fed from a wellspring that must not be dammed — the library as a sea, which is the only form that can hold every tale at once.

The spellbook the Creator left behind after making the Discworld, containing the eight Great Spells. It is chained in the cellars of Unseen University, and it has opinions.

A District Commissioner's planned book on the civilising of the Lower Niger, in which the man we have just spent a novel with will make interesting reading — perhaps not a whole chapter.

A world-conspiracy, generated for a joke from occult manuscripts and a computer named Abulafia, which occultists then treat as a document and try to extract the secret from — hanging one of its authors from a pendulum when he will not hand it over.

The book that explains how to make a Horcrux, removed from the Hogwarts library by Dumbledore and kept in his office. Hermione steals it on the way out of the castle.

A forgotten novel, perhaps the last copy, chosen by a bookseller's son in a secret library — while a man who has taken the name of the Devil from its pages burns every other one.

A book of dragon-summoning stolen from the Unseen University Library by a secret society, on the theory that a dragon would make an excellent political instrument.

The register of Ankh-Morpork's noble families — their arms, their descent and their claims — and, in the hands of a policeman, a list of suspects.

The novels of a man the narrator loved on the page and found, in person, ordinary — until the ordinary man dies in front of a little patch of yellow wall, and the books are what remain.

An oeuvre whose author says there is a single pattern running through it, visible once you have been told to look, and invisible to every reviewer who has ever praised him.

Djelibeybi's guide to the afterlife, being a parody of the Egyptian Book of Going Forth by Day, adjusted for a civilisation with a relaxed attitude to punctuality.

A textbook that has to be restrained with a belt, attacks anyone who opens it, and can only be calmed by stroking the spine. Flourish and Blotts keeps the stock in a cage.