This may be at the pinnacle of its genre and an impressive work of art that repays reading and rereading. But despite being a unique and memorable experience, it wasn't for me.

Tree of Codes is essentially a short story formed by Jonathan Safran Foer taking Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles and cutting out most of the words on every line. What is left is a story with a completely different title (___ _tree of C_o_d__es) and a completely different story. I only dimly comprehended the story, which seemed to be about a city, a father, and various other things -- although I'm sure that the dim comprehension was some sort of failure on my part. If it were printed like a normal story I would not have finished it, but the experience of turning the puzzle-like pages, each one cut in a different manner leaving holes and spaces and truncated words, was fascinating and worth doing once a lifetime.

The other big plus of this book is that it motivated me to read The Street of Crocodiles.