[ SECRET POST #2601 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2601 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 098 secrets from Secret Submission Post #372.
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

Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[loracarol]

What's the weirdest awesome book you've read? Or, just a weird book that had a hella awesome scene in it where you just sat there reading it like "I don't even know what I'm reading but it's awesome"?

For me it was this book Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, and I'm gonna talk about it in the next comment, because it's going to have spoilers. :D

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[case]

I love Meg! The Trench was also great!

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[loracarol]

I need to get that one from my library, if they have it; I did really enjoy this first one.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[kaijinscendre]

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Would recommend 100%!

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[sarillia]

That was one of those books that I loved reading and it inspired me to write more too because I wanted to write something like it.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[loracarol]

I haven't read that one either! I'll need to look into it. :D

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[lynx]

So much love for that novel <3

spoilers & little bit of gore?

[loracarol]

So, this book, okay, I picked up this book as a joke, because it had a picture of a giant shark fighting a t-rex on the front and who can resist that kind of cover? (Hint: not me.)

And this book. Holy this this book. It has all these cliches that I hate, so I should hate the book, but somehow it worked in this context.

The main plot is that there are giant sharks (megaladons/"Megs") living in the Marinas Trench, surviving on giant squid, and the warmth of the geothermal vents, but trapped by the 6 mile layer of cold water above it. And then people accidentally let a 60 foot shark out of that area, and it starts eating whales. And people. And boats.

Also it's pregnant.

Climax of the story? The hero rocket propels a submersible into the meg's mouth, and down it's stomach where he manages to get out of the rocket and not get digested, slice open the meg's stomach, get to the heart, and kill the meg- not with a knife, though; that would be far too mundane. No, he does all of this with a fossilized megaladon tooth.

Then he hops back into the submersible, and gets back to the surface.

And that was the point where all I could do was stare at the book befuddled because holy shit. It opened with a giant ass shark eating a t-rex and ended with a guy standing up in the thoracic cavity of a giant shark and cutting it's heart open with a fossilized tooth. What do you say to that?

AND DID I MENTION THAT THE SHARK GLOWS The shark glows.

(It was funny because they keep calling it a "Meg"/"Megs" which was hella weird because that's my godmother's name. >_>)

It did have the creepy "girl who had a high school crush on hero ends up being his lover" subplot which I normally loathe, but I managed to tolerate this one because, while she had a crush on him in high school, they met once, and then they didn't see each other/contact each other for seven years, at which point the girl (Terry) did not actually immediately revert to her high school crush, but it was still a little disconcerting.

But yeah, it was a book about a giant (60 ft) shark eating people. I'm not going to complain too much.

Re: spoilers & little bit of gore?

[case]

If it helps, Terry actually gets pretty badass in the sequel (there are already hints of it in the first novel, with her wanting to go down herself in the Abyss Glider and everything, she's not passive about anything if she can help it) and becomes her own character. And it's NOT portrayed as some fairytale romance (them having marital problems is what kickstarts the plot of The Trench), so it ends up being really not creepy at all.

Re: spoilers & little bit of gore?

[caecilia]

omg I want this

all I saw was "eating whales. Also it's pregnant." and I decided I wanted this.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[sarillia]

If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino is one of my favorites. I love the use of second person and the first chapter is just such a great tribute to people who love books. His short story collection Numbers in the Dark has some strange ones too and I love it.

Nabokov has a couple strange ones. Invitation to a Beheading was fun and I love the use of the unreliable narrator in Despair.

Kobo Abe is one of my favorite strange authors. The Face of Another was probably my favorite but Kangaroo Notebook was really fun and I will never stop loving the summary on the back of the book.

I had my mom read The Lathe of Heaven and she kept commenting on how strange it was. That was a fun one too.

I spent most of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled wondering what was going on because a lot of it was very dreamlike.

Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing was one of the weirder ones I've read too. I think the main character might have been a god-alien-thing, maybe?

I picked up Hygiene and the Assassin because the title made it seem weird and it did not disappoint. I also love it because I love things that make me feel strong emotion and nothing can make me feel that same kind of fascinated disgust as that book.

Then there's Julio Cortázar's short stories and Luigi Pirandello's plays and Orhan Pamuk and Georges Perec and of course Kafka and Haruki Murakami.

Sorry for babbling but I just love weird books.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[loracarol]

I need to finish If on a Winter's Night. Haven't yet, but it's on my list! And I'll see if I can get the rest of these books from the library too; they sound intriguing. :D

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[dreemyweird]

As regards Kafka, ever since I first read "Metamorphosis" I was pretty sure that what he was trying to describe was a real, actual transformation of a living human being into a giant insect (as opposed to a psychological/mental transformation). I thought that the point was in Kafka's morbid fascination with the absurdness and randomness of life. Like, he was genuinely afraid that one day he might wake up and find himself a giant bug.

Later I read about the accepted interpretation and thought that it was cool and made a lot of sense, but I'm still of two minds about it.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[(Anonymous)]

Seconding Lathe of Heaven do NOT be put off by any synopsis or spoilers you might read, the book is actually really easy to follow, even when you think it shouldn't be. (Has anyone figured out how LeGuin managed to do it, yet?)

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[kryptoncat]

House of Stairs. Do a google search of the book's cover and you'll see children dancing strangely around a glowing object, and they're surrounded by hundreds of staircases. And that's basically the book. It was an amazing read, and I will forever be fascinated and disturbed by it.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[dreemyweird]

There was this really profound psychological novel about a little boy who is travelling in the lands of his own inner world, encountering such creatures as the Shadow, the Minder, and the Amazine. Except for that part where the target audience was supposed to be 4-14 yrs old, hence the simplified language and some weird fairytale tropes. Also, it had a character called "Iyouhe", he was supposed to be responsible for interpersonal relationships and empathy... I'm still a little wtf about the whole thing...

Another weird book told me the story of another weird little boy who flew on his rocket chair and eventually ended up shooting a dragon from the legs of said chair. His teacher was a fairy, which is why it happened. On his way to the dragon he visited a land where lemon-faced people ate soil as a sign of respect towards their friends.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[(Anonymous)]

What was the title of that first one? Is it in English or German, or translated into either of those languages? Because I'd be interested in reading it.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[(Anonymous)]

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[(Anonymous)]

Solaris. Always Solaris. (Stanislaw Lem) Neither of the movies do it justice, but the first movie comes close. A satellite/space station orbiting a sentient planet planet with a sentient sea, and the astronauts/caretaker(s) are slowly going insane. Or are they? Better than my lousy description makes it sound! Very atmospheric.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[(Anonymous)]

Un Lun Dun! What an incredible amount of wordplay and subverted stereotypes and clever formatting that book has. I definitely read it with a lot of "I'm not sure what just happened but it was awesome!" Umbrellas to unbrellas to rebrellas, vicious carnivorous giraffes, bookaneers...amazing amazing book. China Mieville is a fascinating writer, although i didn't like his other books quite as much (but dat dystopic scifi sociolinguistic thriller tho)

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[(Anonymous)]

Youth by Isaac Asimov is the first one that pops into my head.

I suppose Hitchhiker's Guide is pretty weird, too. But I love both of those.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[gondremark]

"Once on a Winter's Night a Traveller" is bizarre as all get out, almost impossible to make sense of, and really REALLY good.

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[leikomgwtfbbq]

Everything China Mieville's ever written, I think :P

Good stuff though!

Re: Weirdest Awesome books you've read? (Possible spoilers)

[(Anonymous)]

I've talked about him before in weird book threads on here, but it's definitely something by RA Lafferty. The two weirdest things I've read by him are The Reefs Of Earth and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney.

The Reefs of Earth is about the Dulanty family, an extended family of goblin-like aliens, the Puca (or maybe gobliny fairies; it might be most accurate to call them goblin fairies who come from another planet) living in a small mining town in Oklahoma. One of the adult Puca gets killed, two of them get sick, and the fourth gets framed on charges of murdering one of the corrupt bosses of the town, so the seven kids (one of whom is already dead) set off on a quest to murder everyone. I mean, everyone in the world. That's their goal. They attempt to do this by using killing spells made up of doggerel rhymes and hanging out with Indians and ghosts and stealing a riverboat and sailing it down the river and having adventures. Simultaneously the adult Puca escapes and goes on the run from the other corrupt bosses who framed him and are looking for him before an eventual confrontation. It's an absolutely strange book and I'm probably making it sound more normal than it is; highly recommended. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney is about a man who writes operas about World War I and II, and thereby prevents them from happening; the third armageddon of the title is World War III, which he's trying to prevent by similar means. Also much stranger than I'm making it sound.

I'm reading another book by Lafferty right now which might end up being even stranger when it's done (unfortunately, its publication history was extremely spotty, so it might be years till I actually read the whole thing). It's called The Devil Is Dead and it begins with a man named Finnegan and a millionaire named Saxon X. Seaworthy coming to outside a bar one morning after a night of drinking that neither can remember (in fact, Finnegan can't remember the several months before it). And then Seaworthy decides to sail around the world in his yacht, and offers Finnegan a spot on the crew, which he takes. However, also on the yacht is Mr. Papadiabolous (Papa Devil), who may or may not be the devil, and who Finnegan slowly begins to remember killing with Seaworthy on the night he can't remember. And a third time I tell you it's even stranger than that.

Man, do I love Lafferty.