[ SECRET POST #2540 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2540 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 053 secrets from Secret Submission Post #363.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Weird Books

[sarillia]

Recommend some weird books to me! Or just talk about the strangest things you've read whether you liked them or not. I love strange books and I'm always looking for more.

Re: Weird Books

[tei]

As a kid my favourite book was the Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles! I'm not sure how weird it is really but it seemed pretty out there when I read it?

Re: Weird Books

[loracarol]

I read that when I was younger too! I don't actually really remember a lot about it, though, but I remember it being very odd.

Re: Weird Books

[sarillia]

I'm a little sad I didn't get to read that as a kid. It sounds like something I would have loved.

Re: Weird Books

[loracarol]

I'm not sure how you define "strange", but one of my favorite "weird" books to read in public is "The Poisoner's Handbook". It always gets double takes. :)

(Note: it's actually a book about forensic toxicology in the Jazz Age, not actually about how to poison people.)

Re: Weird Books

[sarillia]

I may have to look into that. I've been meaning to read more nonfiction and that sounds really interesting.

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

The One Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out the Window and disappeared! It's by this Nordic author Jonas Jonasson and it is hilarious, its just so outlandish and strange but it just doesn't seem strnage until you try to explain the plot to someone else (especially when you get to the pet elephant!). If you have any knowledge of history, esp. Cold War history it's 100x times better as well. But yes, delightfully weird and amazingly fabulous.

Re: Weird Books

[sarillia]

It does sound fabulous! Thanks.

Re: Weird Books

[caecilia]

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, if you can handle some incest.

From what I can remember (spoilers): There's a guy who gets off to having fruit thrown at him, a girl who is in love with her mother, who happens to be involved with some guy and...pee roleplay?? and at one point she has sex with a woman while the cat is in bed with them.

Venus Envy is kind of out there too but Rubyfruit Jungle is better written. I have more of her stuff but I haven't read any others yet.

Miranda July's short stories are excellent. Her writing style is kind of experimental/surreal and she mainly explores strange/taboo relationships.

Haruki Murakami. I like Dance Dance Dance and After Dark (both of which I don't see recced very often, or really at all). Haven't read all of his stuff because after a while... you start to catch onto his formula. But I've been wanting to check out IQ84.

I thought the scenes with the cows in Cold Comfort Farm were delightfully bizarre.

Re: Weird Books

[sarillia]

I really like what I've read of Haruki Murakami and I've heard of Rubyfruit Jungle but haven't read it yet, same with Cold Comfort Farm and Miranda July's stuff.

Re: Weird Books

[lynx]

IQ84 is AMAZING. REALLY AMAZING. It's my favourite Murakami book, and that's really something ;3 Check it out if you can!

(The Murakami Bingo is sadly accurate, ahahah, but I have fun finding out on his patterns)

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

Anything by China Mieville, bless him. Un Lun Dun is my fave, but he also wrote a book whose genre was...let me remember how I described...a dystopic sci-fi socio-linguistic thriller. I appreciate his reverance for and facination with words.

Re: Weird Books

[flipthefrog.livejournal.com]

John Dies at the End and its sequel This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It) by David Wong are both really weird and pretty great. Also throwing a rec towards the Laundry series by Charles Stross if only because the mashup of post-cyberpunk and Lovecraftian horror works surprisingly well.

DELETED AND RECOMMENTED BECAUSE I CAN'T HTML

Re: Weird Books

[dethtoll]

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I think that's king of the weird books.

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

Every book Robert Rankin has ever written.

Re: Weird Books

[riddian]

One time, years ago, I was bored in a thrift store and encountered a book that was about a man who had spontaneously turned into a giant breast. Just... a gigantic, sentient boob. His girlfriend was weirdly okay with it.

Sometimes I think about that book and wonder what the fuck was up with the person who wrote that. And then I wonder if I should try to track the book down. It wasn't terribly well written, so I always decide against it.

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

Almost every book RA Lafferty ever wrote. The man was a bizarre genius. My favorite work of his is The Reefs Of Earth; it's about a family of beings (who might be goblins, or might be aliens) living in a small town in Oklahoma whose children try to destroy the earth with murderous poetry after their parents are imprisoned. Then you have Past Master, which is about a future utopia which brings Sir Thomas More to the future from the past to save them from disaster. The Three Apocalypses of Enniscorthy Sweeney, which is about a man who prevents all the major disasters of the 20th century - all the World Wars and Depressions - by writing them into massive tragic operas. Annals of Klepsis, where a pirate historian travels to a plane without any history.

The man was a genius, and all his books are pretty weird one way or the other, and fantastic.

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

Bit obvious, but Stranger in a Strange Land. (Heinlein) Although...that's not as "weird" as it was viewed, back when it was written. Also The Lathe of Heaven (LeGuin) for brain-bendy goodness. (Do NOT, I implore you, watch ANY of the movie adaptations of that novel. They ALL suck.) Also Cat's Cradle and Galapagos (both by Vonnegut). I have read Cat's Cradle a dozen times over the years, but Galapagos still sits unfinished, mocking me. (Guess which one is the ebook.) :-P

PKD (AKA Philip K. Dick) is your beginner-level go-to for "weird." His short stories are really much better than his longer works (I was not a fan of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in that case, the movie really IS better), but VALIS and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are readable enough, with just the right balance of plot to weird ratios. Pynchon (Thomas) is intermediate-level weird (Which reminds me, I've picked up The Crying of Lot 49 a half-dozen times, but just can't get it started.), but let me recommend to you Borges, sarillia. Jorge Luis Borges is your straight-up source for top-level fills-all-your-needs-for-the-weird-that-you-never-knew-existed.

Need an example? Exhibit A: http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/texts/babylon.html

Thought I'd list some of my own favorites

[sarillia]

I love Italo Calvino, especially If on a winter's night a traveler. It alternates between 2nd person where "you" are trying to read a book and excerpts of other books you come across while you search for this book.

Vladimir Nabokov had a weird one called Invitation to a Beheading that kind of makes me think of Kafka's The Trial if it was set in Wonderland.

Speaking of which, I love Kafka too. I think I've read all of his available work.

I also like Kobo Abe. Sometimes I just enjoy reading the summaries that come with them. Like the one for Kangaroo Notebook that starts "The narrator of Kangaroo Notebook wakes on morning to discover that his legs are growing radish sprouts, an ailment that repulses his doctor but provides the patient with the unusual ability to snack on himself."

Kazuo Ishiguro has one I read that was very subtley strange called The Unconsoled. It was almost like the main character had lost his memory but it wasn't really addressed. The book would introduce a character as though he had never met them before and then it would turn out that it was his girlfriend or something. Had kind of a dreamlike feel.

I bought the book Hygiene and the Assassin by Amelie Nothomb purely for the title and it got kind of weird, as I expected. A woman goes to interview a writer who turns out to be a terrible person and he reveals some disturbing secrets about his past.

Jose Saramago has some interesting premises too. I love Death With Interruptions, where death decides to stop killing people.

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sure I've recced it here before because it's one of my favorite books, but The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex. The alien invasion, as told in essay format by a preteen girl who inadvertently befriended one of the aliens and ended up on a cross-country road trip with him. It's pretty normal stylistically, except for the parts where J.Lo (the alien in question) takes over to explain thinks about his planet in comic-book form, but the writing voice and the plot itself are just delightfully odd.

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

"Ship of Theseus" is incredible. It's a novel written by a fictional author whose circumstances and life outweigh his writing, and the bulk of the story is in the notes written into the margins by two students sharing the book. It has various relevant odds and ends stuffed into the pages, too, so it's almost like you're unraveling the mystery of the author with the students as you go. There's even a radio station you can listen to! I can't say enough about it; definitely get your hands on it if you can!

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

The Castle Perilous series by John DeChancie. They're sort of a lightweight comedic take on a similar premise to Zelazny's Amber Chronicles.

It's been a long time since I've read them, but I'll never forget Thaxton and Dalton golfing their way through Hell. "Lava hazard!"

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

Anything by Tom Holt. That guy is a fucking oddball.

Also American Gods has a man being unborn (Eaten whole by a vagina. Not like a giant vagina, a vagina on the underside of a normal sized woman. it's a head trip when you first read it.

Re: Weird Books

[lynx]

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño is definitively weird and awesome. It's also quite artsy and a real doorstopper, so give it a go if loooooooong books are your thing! ^^ I quite love it.

Re: Weird Books

[(Anonymous)]

Latawnya the Naughty Horse Learns to Say No to Drugs