Reader's Block is a "different" kind of book, even more of an anti-novel then Wittgenstein's Mistress which I read for an MFA class last year (though apprarently still more of a novel than This is Not a Novel which I haven't read).
Wittgenstein's Mistress was about the last person in the world, who, overwhelmed with lonliness and insanity, rambled away into a typewriter about every fact she could muster and every thought she had, thoughts and facts which tended to focus on artists and writers and their untimely ends. In Reader's Block we still have the rambling facts, but we've lost the grounding of a real narrator. Instead there are one sentence mentions of "Reader" and "Protagonist" popping up about once every couple of pages, painting us just the barest of ideas that the "Protagonist" is a lonely old man and the "Reader" is, well, just as lonely. The facts focus primarily on various how artists died or committed suicide and which artists were anti-semites.
It's surprisingly an easy book to read, since there are only about 10 lines per page, so despite its density of (puportedly) non-fictional content, I zoomed through it. And despite its lacking of a real narrative I found the whole thing immensely sad. Even though you only get a few moments of "Protagonist," I felt like this whole book was his suicide note, his expression of grief over his lonliness and the world's cruelty to and by its artists.
Someone told me (and I have no way to back this up) that when Markson fills his books with thousands of trivia details about artists and the world that he doesn't actually look any of them up. Rather, he has spent his life jotting down these facts on index cards and that in his house he has thousands and thousands of index cards from which he pulls out these facts while writing. Pretty amazing if true.
