If On A Winter's Night a Traveler

Having been warned by reviews that this was a 'difficult' book I ploughed on, undaunted. And gladly. I sometimes wish that people wouldn't label books this way, although I am attracted by a challenge. I can see why people would hate it, it is like a Russian nesting doll of novels and makes you question the very nature of reading itself. It can mess with the brain, yet here I am in the sure knowledge that I could read it dozens of times and still get something out of it.
The structure is somewhat mind-bending in the way that it is narrated. The book begins in the second person describing how you, 'the Reader' goes to a book shop looking for Calvino's new novel and begin reading it, the second chapter is purportedly that novel, but only the first chapter. At the end of the first chapter, the novel returns to 'the Reader' who realises that he is not reading the book he is supposed to have bought, and the rest of the novel is missing. The rest of the book is divided into second person narrative sections describing 'the Reader' on a frantic, fruitless quest for the rest of the novel, and the ten first chapters of the rest of the novels he encounters, all vastly ranging in genre and breaking off at a plot climax. If you didn't know what you were letting yourself in for, you would probably find it a really frustrating book to read, but there is some sort of plot in 'the Reader's' quest and his meeting of a fellow reader, Ludmilla and the other characters. It could all become too mind-bending, but is saved from this by the author's playfullness and the fact that it is not just one good story to read, but at least eleven (not counting the anecdotal stories 'the Reader' hears on the way).      
It's an extremely postmodernist book and I can see the way that it relates to the dreaded structuralist and post-structuralist texts I had to study at uni. On one hand it would have been great to study this alongside that part of the unit, on the other hand, I'm not sure I would have 'got' it at the time. We can't all be David Mitchell (the novelist who wrote a review in the Guardian describing how he was amazed as an undergraduate but not so much re-reading it). It also relates to the idea of the death of the author in that there is seemingly no unifying 'author' or 'authorial voice', there is the narrative voice of 'the Reader' sections, then the voices of the ten other authors. I can also see how it has influenced subsequent fiction. 
Anyway, hopefully I will re-read it again one day and perhaps study it in more detail.