Recommendations you can check.
by Kobo Abe
Who uses, recommends or left The Box Man, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.
1 person
A reader reminded me that one of my favorite authors, Kobo Abe, has a very fun and formally bizarre novel called The Box Man
'Short Little Difficult Books' — his list of formally or stylistically demanding novels you can read in a day; book links are bookshop.org/a/88357 affiliate links.
2025-11-18·countercraft.substack.com ↗
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.