Strangest Book You Have Ever Read?

[+Sorana]

1 hour ago, TheOrlionThatComesBefore said:

Sounds fantastic! 

Try it out. I found it strange and a bit lengthy. I simply didn't get the feeling for it. 

[Ripheus23]

On 7/10/2018 at 2:16 PM, Zellyia said:

Strangest book I'd like to read, but haven't (and if I'm honest, am nervous to try and read), is House of Leaves by Danielewski.

I've read the reviews and still can't begin to imagine how it works and what it's about.  Not to mention the irregular formats of text and pages (google it).  It's like a novel with beautiful terrifying pages of visual poetry tossed in?

HOL is like watching a movie, effectively. The implicit pacing caused by the changes in text flow gives off a "shaky-camera" vibe sometimes. There's also a nifty part you can only directly read in a mirror (though the text is the same as a "parallel" part so if you read the parallel...).

Only Revolutions and now The Familiar have their own peculiarities. OR is kind of like a flip-book merged with epic poetry; TF is... TF is Sanderson, if Sanderson was writing books while USING the magic systems he makes up

EDIT: S. (sort of by J. J. Abrams) is also pretty whack. For a less typographical oddity, there's always The City at the End of Time.

Edited November 7, 2018 by Ripheus23

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles]

It's not a book, per se, but one of the strangest stories I've ever read was in 8th grade English class (I was about 13 or 14, for reference). So this family—mom, dad, child; don't remember if it was a son or a daughter—move into the neighborhood, and they're a little odd: the dad always carries a radio with him that's always tuned to the weather, they stick close to home, and they don't accept any offers of food or drink. The narrator's mom says at one point that "I offered [the woman] a glass of orange juice, and she drew back like I'd thrown it at her!" 

A couple weeks pass, and the narrator's family finally convince the new family to accompany them to the carnival. The dad takes along his radio, and the three of them only eat cotton candy. Nothing but cotton candy. No one knows what's going on until a surprise rain hits, and the new family runs around frantically for cover, panicking as though their lives are in danger. 

"Oh, please," the narrator's mother says. "You'd think they were…" 

The rain strikes the family, and their faces and bodies crumple, pooling into the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West. 

"….made of sugar and thought they would melt." 

[Just a Lifetime]

A couple that come to my mind are The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town by Amos Tutuola and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.  It's been many years since I read them, though I recall very much liking the latter while finding the former more interesting than enjoyable.  I'll round out a top three with The Severed Wing by Martin Gidron, which I described as "somewhat Vonnegutian" in my review.  Perhaps a quick honorable mention to some of Neal Stephenson's earlier books---I'm thinking of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, especially the role of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in their climaxes.

[Quantus]

Setting aside a whole phase I did where I read every off-the-wall 70's sci-fi 2nd hand paperback I could find (most of which were terrible and lived up to the beatles song), there have only been a few that really stood out as just plain weird:

Weapon Makers  - Extreme Future society, took several sharp left turns

Principia Discordia  - If you though the Illuminati Trilogy was weird, this is the pseudo-philosophic, mostly crowdsourced, and entirely drug induced "religious text" it was based on. 

Replay  - Picture Groundhog day, but reliving your life from mid-college to your mid-life heart attack over and over. 

Slow Regard of Silent Things - Literarily speaking this one was a unique experience, something that engaging with Zero dialog.  I think this one will be studied in colleges in years to come.

The entire Speaker for the Dead followup to Enders Game. I think I was in middle school when I read them, and by the time they are done they've been exploring the lines between Plant and Animal, Religion and Mental Illness, Reality and Imagination, Integrity and being an insufferable a-hole.  Also a sentient Internet is a POV character.

 

 

[Orlion Blight]

10 hours ago, Quantus said:

Setting aside a whole phase I did where I read every off-the-wall 70's sci-fi 2nd hand paperback I could find (most of which were terrible and lived up to the beatles song), there have only been a few that really stood out as just plain weird:

Weapon Makers  - Extreme Future society, took several sharp left turns

 

Pffft.... that's not even VanVogt's weirdest novel! 

It's certainly one that I can see idiot libertarians or other idiot right wingers quote, but that's a whole other voyage of the space beagle! 

[Dunkum]

12 hours ago, Quantus said:

Setting aside a whole phase I did where I read every off-the-wall 70's sci-fi 2nd hand paperback I could find (most of which were terrible and lived up to the beatles song), there have only been a few that really stood out as just plain weird:

Weapon Makers  - Extreme Future society, took several sharp left turns

Principia Discordia  - If you though the Illuminati Trilogy was weird, this is the pseudo-philosophic, mostly crowdsourced, and entirely drug induced "religious text" it was based on. 

Replay  - Picture Groundhog day, but reliving your life from mid-college to your mid-life heart attack over and over. 

Slow Regard of Silent Things - Literarily speaking this one was a unique experience, something that engaging with Zero dialog.  I think this one will be studied in colleges in years to come.

The entire Speaker for the Dead followup to Enders Game. I think I was in middle school when I read them, and by the time they are done they've been exploring the lines between Plant and Animal, Religion and Mental Illness, Reality and Imagination, Integrity and being an insufferable a-hole.  Also a sentient Internet is a POV character.

Discordianism is extremely bizarre, and there are pieces of the Principia that I love, including the fact that most of the people writing it give themselves weird names resuting in passages like a dialog between malaclypse the younger and greater poo.

I'm not sure what you consider to be the "entire" speaker for the dead follow up, but I've read most, but not all of the Ender series, give or take a couple of the puppet books, and it definitely gets weird.

[Snipexe]

Xenocide (Speaker for the dead ) was definitely it for me. Admittedly a lot of it went over my head but still it was just weird

[Pagliacci]

The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake. I highly recommend it.

[Trizee]

I don't know if it's the strangest I've read, but Philip K. Dick's Ubik was definitely weird.

[Quantus]

12 hours ago, Dunkum said:

I'm not sure what you consider to be the "entire" speaker for the dead follow up, but I've read most, but not all of the Ender series, give or take a couple of the puppet books, and it definitely gets weird.

The extreme future trilogy (Speak For the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind).  It really spent a lot of time delving into the metaphysics of perception and reality, while taking a fairly stark look at society and family dynamics.  As far as I know he never revisited that Era in any of followup novels, but please tell me if I missed one.  I want to say I saw clues that the super-smart family it featured might have been descendants of Bean,  but it could have just been me reading too much into it.

9 hours ago, Snipexe said:

Xenocide (Speaker for the dead ) was definitely it for me. Admittedly a lot of it went over my head but still it was just weird

Did you ever read the third one?  They really jumped the alien metaphysical shark in that one

[Dunkum]

7 minutes ago, Quantus said:

The extreme future trilogy (Speak For the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind).  It really spent a lot of time delving into the metaphysics of perception and reality, while taking a fairly stark look at society and family dynamics.  As far as I know he never revisited that Era in any of followup novels, but please tell me if I missed one.  I want to say I saw clues that the super-smart family it featured might have been descendants of Bean,  but it could have just been me reading too much into it.

I haven't read all of the ones that follow Bean, but as I understand it, late in that his story merges back with Ender's in some way or other, presumably after the events of Children of the Mind.

[Snipexe]

22 minutes ago, Quantus said:

Did you ever read the third one?  They really jumped the alien metaphysical shark in that one

I did but at that point I didn’t really know what was going on so it just went in my brain then right back out

[Quantus]

21 minutes ago, Dunkum said:

I haven't read all of the ones that follow Bean, but as I understand it, late in that his story merges back with Ender's in some way or other, presumably after the events of Children of the Mind.

Just got back from Ye Internets, It looks like he does have a Planned novel tentatively called Shadows Alive that is intended to be the conclusion to the whole thing and tie the two back together.  Shadows in Flight is a tie-in with Bean that bridges it some, apparently grew out of the first chapters back in 2012.  Other than that there are a few at the early days of human galactic expansion, but none that actually tie back in with the Piggy timeline.  Closest is a short story that apparently shows Ender first meeting Jane.  

 

Dammit, now Im really excited for the actual conclusion. 

[Dunkum]

4 minutes ago, Quantus said:

Just got back from Ye Internets, It looks like he does have a Planned novel tentatively called Shadows Alive that is intended to be the conclusion to the whole thing and tie the two back together.  Shadows in Flight is a tie-in with Bean that bridges it some, apparently grew out of the first chapters back in 2012.  Other than that there are a few at the early days of human galactic expansion, but none that actually tie back in with the Piggy timeline.  Closest is a short story that apparently shows Ender first meeting Jane.  

 

Dammit, now Im really excited for the actual conclusion. 

yea, my basic understanding is that Bean heads off into space during Peter's Hegemony and goes off exploring and doing stuff at relativistic speeds, so by the end of his story, we are back to the distant future of the speaker for the dead books.  I haven't read all of the books on that side though, so that is about as much as I know.  I had thougt the final book was done, I think the last time I looked into this was a few years ago, so I'm surprised it isn't out yet.

[Quantus]

Just now, Dunkum said:

yea, my basic understanding is that Bean heads off into space during Peter's Hegemony and goes off exploring and doing stuff at relativistic speeds, so by the end of his story, we are back to the distant future of the speaker for the dead books.  I haven't read all of the books on that side though, so that is about as much as I know.  I had thougt the final book was done, I think the last time I looked into this was a few years ago, so I'm surprised it isn't out yet.

Per wikipedia he heads off into space with the three of his children that inherited his genetic deformity, leaving his wife and normal kids behind.  It's all about the four of them trying to survive alone, cure the deformity that makes them giant geniuses with an expected lifespan of 20 years, and meeting some surviving buggers.  Bean apparently reaches 14 ft but they fear he cant survive outside of relativistic microgravity.   

[Zurvanight]

Riverworld by Phillip José Farmer. It takes place on a "Super-Earth" that is probably a hundred times bigger than our planet with a massive river valley running down the middle of it. The whole of humanity from before written history till like early 2000's gets revived on the planet with no clue why or how they got there. It starts out about as well as you'd except: Absolute chaos.

After awhile people form groups and tribes and they find these devices called Grails that provide food and clothes. The main characters are all famous historical figures like Richard Francis Burton, King John of England, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) Alice Hargreaves, Mozart, Tomoe Gozen, Hermann Goering and Cyrano de Bergerac. And that's just a few of them.

 

They find out that a mysterious omnipresent group of aliens they dub the "Ethicals" revived them after Earth went boom due to a catastrophic first contact event from another group of aliens (supposedly). Humanity is then given a trial on Riverworld to see if they are worthy of being resurrected. It's a lot more complex than that but I won't get too into it. It's just really bizzare when you have characters like Mark Twain and Mozart fighting against aliens lol.