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46 Comments
Perhaps Gnomon. A surveillance state arrests a woman and hooks her brain up to an extremely safe and unbeatable mind reading machine. She promptly beats it and dies. All the data from her mind is not her own memories, but instead she remembers being a Carthaginian alchemist, a greek banker, an ethiopian artist, and an entity from the end of time. And an inspector has to relive these memories to investigate the death. But the way things tie together is wild.
It was a really good book, inhaled it in two days or so
A protagonist who is very inept at academia, gotta love a relatable character lol
Got the same “is this deep or just weird” vibe from Going Bovine, a book about a kid who gets diagnosed with Mad Cow Disease and ends up going on a possibly-not-real adventure through materialistic pop culture alongside his guardian angel and a lawn gnome.
"The Eye" by Vladimir Nabokov. Russian authors are something else, man. I really liked it at the time, but I think if I reread it today, I'd probably hate it. It's a surrealist book about a guy who kills himself only to find out that the mind is too powerful to truly die. That's in the first two or three pages. The rest of it is about him becoming obsessed with this guy that he sort of kind of knew when he was alive, but not really.
The weirdest book I have ever read is probably The Towers of February by Tonke Dragt. It's about a kid who is transported to a parellel universe that briefly overlaps with our universe on leap year days, except he doesn't know that's what has happened at first.
Ice by Anna Kavan came to mind. It was one of the first books I read, as an adult, and wasn't for school. I found it super weird.
Woyzeck broke me. I question my entire existence and even more the existence of this book. Or rather, the fragments of the book 😂
Cormorant Run by Lilith Saintcrow.
What a freaking masterpiece
Can you backflip?
Ever read Peeps? (It stands for parasite positive). Read it back in high school. There's a sequel that I never tracked down but really should.
Weirdest?
" A Brief History of Time". By Stephen Hawking.
Read it the first time in 1998. I knew who wrote it and what it was about. I didnt expect to really understand it, much less enjoy it.
But I did.
House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
Easily the most hilarious and weirdest thing I think i will ever read. Definitely NSFW by several miles.
“It says here that you would favor having three Italian airplane pilots in uniform shoot their comeloads onto your belly while you cup your clitoris with a wooden spoon.”
“They don’t necessarily have to be Italian,” Rhumpa said. “And they can be race-car drivers if that’s easier.”
Recursion, Blake Crouch.
Also Hamlet.
100 Years of Solitude. There are about 75 characters in this book and, like, three different names. It's like the antithesis of, "all character names should start with a different letter in order to be easier distinguishable." You cannot distinguish anyone in this book and the telling of the story is far from chronological.
I had to check my book shelf and from the books I still own it was probably Next by Michael Crichton. I didn't remember what it was about but just seeing the cover made me go ah, yes, this one.
I guess you have to give it credit for being interesting enough?
How to Make a Hat Entirely Out of Dried Cucumber by Xandiloquence Bizarre the Ab3rd
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
I don't think anything can beat House of Leaves in the "weird book" category
A clockwork orange or the wasp factory both come to mind. Journey to ixtlan, In that it's meant to be non-fiction but essentially has magic. Castenada could be a charlatan or he could be tripping. Very cool read though, I think of it like a watered down yaqui bible with a narrative woven in.
Echoplexia.
Probably fractal noise by christopher paolini. Let’s go on a walk to a really circular hole. What’s the worst that could happen.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Sisyphean is a collection of novellas. It's based in a world where centuries of genetic engineering has made life unimaginably different and strange. In one story the dead rain from the sky in new bodies. In another, a private detective investigates a primordial creature (this one mate me shed tears twice).
Chthon by Piers Anthony. It reminded me of "the cave", only with a bit more insanity.
I tried to read Flatland. It was too weird to get through.
Bought these books on world building. It's all about helping writers think more about what they put to pen. I loved it
"S" is a very weird book/experience, it's a meta-novel with a bunch of stuff written in the margins and things tucked into pages at various points in the book. I can't say it was my favorite book to read but it was by far the most unusual
If On a Winter's Night a Traveller – had me wondering a few times if I was still reading a book, and even what a book actually is
The Norm(Норма) by Sorokin.
Ella Minnow Pea. Weird and perfect
The 13 1/2 lives of captain blue bear
Definitely a very weird one, but quite fun!
i loved Vita Nostra, i'm sad the rest of the series isn't getting translated 😭
het gouden ei
The “weirdest” book I’ve read is The Bird That Drinks Tears which is a book originally written in Korean (눈물을 마시는 새) and what makes it weird is how it can sometimes switch perspective mid sentence. It’s kind of written like you’re an invisible person who can look into only one characters head at a time but you can switch between them willingly at random. I do speak Korean to a certain extent and have tried reading some stories too and I do know that it is sometimes a bit unclear in that language who’s perspective you’re following, so I am not sure to what extent that writing style is common in Korean and to what extent it is unique for this story.
The book is very good though, once you get used to it
The weirdest book I've ever read, it's hard to pin down but a strong contendor is probably "Pölsan" by Torgny Lindgren – it's a book about an old man living in an old people's home in the middle of nowhere, Sweden, in the early 2000s picking up writing again when his old boss dies (he got fired from his newspaper job at the end of the 1940s for making stuff up) except most of the book is what he actually writes about and there is no way for me to summarize that in any manner even resembling concise (it features among others lots of tuberculosis, a potential nazi war criminal in hiding and the northern swedish specialty food pölsa)
The Circle Trilogy, I think? The first book is called Red if I remember correctly. Interesting premise, the main character gains the ability to travel to another world when unconscious after a near death experience. Then it gets weird. Spoiler that time travel is involved. And religion to an extent? But it feels very out of place.
There's another time travel related book that ends up attempting to take a religious turn half way through that left me going "eh" as well.
I'm very picky when it comes to time travel stories and both of them failed in my opinion, though ironically, the time travel itself in those books weren't the reason for my dislike 😐
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Need to finish the series, I've been putting it off for too long.
Sounds about right, the first thing came to mind when you asked was Vita Nostra and i lost it when you pulled it out.
“The Metamorphosis” by Frank Kafka. It’s short, it’s confusing, it’s generally agreed that there is theme(s) but no one…really can agree what those theme(s) are
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Shits wild.
The weirdest book I've ever seen was a child's book with a picture that could be a duck or rabbit. The entire book is two people arguing if this picture is a duck or a rabbit. That's it that's the book.
Vurt – jeff noon
Dosadi Experiment, same author as Dune except it doesn't pretend to be a space opera.