The weirdest books ever

What are the weirdest books you've ever seen?

For me, I'd have to say Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters. It's basically a turn-based RPG in book form, actually describing characters as having numbers appear over their heads when struck, status bars as appearing in mid-air, and so on. It has charts describing things in the book in extreme detail, that explain status effects, stats of characters, and so on. The dialog is incredibly bland, and the narrative is very much "this happened, then this happened".

An exact quote from the book:

Act 6: Answers revealed Scene 15: A sense-proof barrier May 29, 1999 at 9:17 UTC – 1 hour, 42 minutes remaining

A minute-long time lapse occurs where each second is 24 minutes. Knuckles remains inside his house at all times. The humans eat for a half second in bed then play Parcheesi and Uno on a table appearing in the house’s center. Three small, fancy, cushioned, yellow (FFF0D020) chairs are around the table 120* apart. Ivan takes the northwest chair, Tu the east, and Tyler the southwest. The two-feet-in-diameter table has a fancy frosted glass top. Parcheesi lasts for three seconds. Uno lasts five seconds where Tyler is once seen with almost 20 cards.

The humans read a book for 1.5 seconds and go to sleep. The light dims to 25 lumens, moving to the northwest corner and remains for 22 seconds. It returns to the center position and brightens to the original 1200 lumens. Breakfast is served, taking a half second, then the humans play Yahtzee for two seconds. Tyler plays a pinball game until lunch in the north center area using a pinball machine involving a cross-country driving theme. Ivan and Tu play checkers for one second and four chess games for three. They watch TV for six seconds then eat lunch for a half second. Tyler returns to his pinball game for four seconds. His last game takes two seconds where he gets an extreme score.

Ivan and Tu read their books for two seconds. They build a clone of the Eiffel Tower eight feet tall in seven seconds using the table as a stepping stool and small Legos only of the rectangular type. Odd sizes like 3×1, 5×2 are also used. When Tyler finishes his big game, scoring 17 billion points, he helps build. They watch three movies in 4.5 seconds, the second in grayscale (an old movie). Another game of Uno uses up the last 1.5 seconds.

Throughout this, Knuckles draws a main-event waveform once every two seconds and doesn’t move from his spot. They reach 31.8 dB for the amplitude slowly increasing linearly (by the number) and the scale is extends to 35 at the edge of the page at the start. The time is based on that at the end of the time lapse.

There really is nothing else like it. I ordered it off Amazon, briefly read some of it, but put it away to read other things. Maybe I'll look through it sometime when I'm bored. It's not an engaging story, and doesn't really read like a story either for that matter.

Anyway, what's the weirdest book you'd ever read? (And if possible, could you provide a quote from it?)

edited 18th Jan '11 9:19:15 AM by BonsaiForest

Go Mutants, I'd say, maybe Who Censored Roger Rabbit and Jasper Fforde's entire ouvre.

The Satyricon by Petronius, from about 50 AD. Part porn, part satire, compounded with the fact that parts of it are missing, make it really, really confusing.

What, does no one want to mention Finnegans Wake or House Of Leaves?

Or Exterminator!. Or The Story Of The Vivian Girls.

I'm frankly a bit disappointed.

House Of Leaves is Seinfeld Is Unfunny in this type of discussion. It's become part of the literary establishment, maaaayun.

(In other words, I was thinking of mentioning it here, but I thought I'd be laughed out of the house for being so 2005.)

I very much want to read The Story of the Vivian Girls (and the rest of Henry Darger's oeuvre), but bugger if I can find a text.

The book mentioned by the OP actually sounds pretty interesting.

edited 19th Jan '11 4:03:19 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

I'd appreciate it if you guys could describe why the books are so weird. I clicked the links to find out what they're like, and many of them are very out there! But for the benefit of other readers of this topic, how about a little description, or if possible, maybe even a direct quote?

Well, House of Leaves is well-known enough that Seinfeld Is Unfunny may be taking effect. But basically it involves multiple levels of narration, Footnote Fever, lots of ambiguity, hidden messages and High Octane Nightmare Fuel.

Finnegans Wake is...well, the page pretty much demonstrates what it's like.

Other candidates: Naked Lunch (basically a series of loosely-connected Mind Screw episodes with graphic sexuality and drug use), and Gravity's Rainbow which is pretty much the postmodern freak-out text par excellence. On a similar note, Dhalgren.

These are just ones I've read. There's a lot of weird stuff out there.

edited 15th Jul '11 6:17:33 PM by ImipolexG

There's also the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is such a crazy stew of postmodernism, science fiction, paranoia, and anarcho-capitalist author tracting that I'm to this day not sure how much of it was sincere and how much was a massive troll on the counterculture and the literary community.

If you want strangeness in the text itself, look at the works of the Oulipo movement, a group of writers who wrote using deliberate constraints on their style and in some cases used mathematical formulas to write their works. Highlights of the movement include Exercises in Style, which is one short scene written 99 times, each in a different literary or linguistic style (from "Cockney" to "logical proof"); A Void, a novel written entirely without the use of the letter "e"; the aptly named Grand Palindrome, a palindromic short story; and Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a book of sonnets styled after those books with the heads, bodies, and legs of different animals, allowing the readers to recombine different poems to create new ones. Italo Calvino was briefly a member of the movement, and his works are strange enough in their own right, but this post is long enough.

You might also want to look at some surrealist novels (I use the word loosely—the surrealists hated the idea of the novel), particularly those written automatically. The most famous ones are Andre Breton's Nadja, Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant, and the proto-surrealist Comte de Lautreamont's Maldoror.

edited 19th Jan '11 10:29:54 AM by merton

Italo Calvino was briefly a member of the movement, and his works are strange enough in their own right, but this post is long enough.

No post is ever long enough! We need more essays!

Anyway, what do you mean by "written automatically"? I know there was a book, Atlanta Nights, which used a machine to generate an entire chapter, but that was created entirely as a joke and a way to troll PublishAmerica, and call them out on their lack of standards.

But what kind of surrealist novels were written automatically, and how?

I think the weirdest work I've personally read is After Dark by Haruki Murakami. Many of the events in the story make logical sense and proceed from each other (albeit not in the sense of forming a proper plot), but every once in a while something's described that makes no sense, that nobody notices, and that's never explained—for instance, a girl walks away from a mirror, and her reflection stays still, silently watching. It's like everybody's not quite awake and not quite dreaming—appropriate, given that it's after dark.

Automatic writing, surrealist-style (more accurately, Dada-style) was to cut up words from a newspaper and pull them out of a bag randomly. Oddly, I can find the original instructions, but none of the original poems (I don't know how many were actually written).

Calvino, I find, is more dull and pretentious than odd. Similarly for other surrealist novels; Andre Breton's Nadja immediately came to mind, but it isn't really that odd, particularly in excerpts.

edited 19th Jan '11 12:02:33 PM by jewelleddragon

I've read some Calvino. I liked Invisible Cities but I thought if on a winter's night a traveler was a meandering piece of tedium.

The book mentioned in the first post sounds...fascinating, although maybe not in a good way. I mean, even the Pushing Daisies narrator doesn't describe time with such Ludicrous Precision. It sounds like it would make an interesting liveblog at the very least.

Dan Brown. Just.. gaah.

Cut-ups, while they were something the surrealists and dadists (and William S. Burroughs, previously mentioned in this thread) did, aren't really the same as automatic writing. Automatic writing in its purest sense is an undiluted stream of consciousness, with the goal being the write completely free of rational limits on expression. A lot of the aforementioned Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake were written like this.

And I'm a big Calvino fanboy. If you're big into plot, he might not be the best choice—If on a winter's night a traveller is perhaps his most plot-heavy work—but his prose is some of the most beautiful stuff I've ever read and his ideas are indescribably unique.

I nominate Kafka. Murakami is probably second but his storylines feel like they should make sense. At least I feel like they should...

edited 19th Jan '11 1:57:01 PM by myrdschaem

@Feotakahari: That sounds like pretty regular Magic Realism to me.

Dan Brown. Just.. gaah.

Wrong thread. There's nothing weird about Dan Brown's work.

I just remembered another. Flatland. It's the story of a square who lives on a 2D plane, tells us a bit about his life, and has dreams about visiting a 1-dimensional world called Lineland and a 0-dimensional world called Pointland. Eventually, a sphere from Spaceland, the 3-dimensional world, visits him and gives him a ride into the sky, allowing him to see his entire world as a 2D plane for the first time in his life. A. Square (that's the hero's actual name) suggests to the sphere that a 4-dimensional world might exist, which the sphere flatly denies, and he drops A. Square off back in his world, where he is arrested for his knowledge of the hidden third dimension.

Yes, that's the entire plot. How awesome is that?

There was a book that zerky read as a child that was a catalogue for various fantastical magical devices and asked the reader to pay in blood or flea tears or something.

Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty. It hurt my head at times but man, what a ride.

Report on Probability “A” by Brian Aldiss is probably the only thing that comes close to out-doing it. I’d basically describe it as “a series of people spying on other people for reasons that are never adequately explained” and yet somehow, it remains compelling. Not everyone agrees with me on that last point.

I suppose Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany probably qualifies, what with the two lines of parallel text in the final third of the book and all. I kind of had the same reaction to reading that book as I did watching Apocalypse Now: “Wow, what an incredibly intense experience! I’m glad I never have to do it again!”

Some of Roger Zelazny’s stuff probably applies; Creatures of Light and Darkness especially. Though at least there there was a logical explanation.

edited 6th Feb '11 10:57:25 PM by Bananaquit

Oh man; I wish I could remember the name of that one book. It had the heroine (a Chosen One, of course) being visited by a person from the future who was to be her mentor, and teach her all about how Society is bad and people are screwing up the world and her magic is supposed to make the world primal again or... something. I do remember it being a rather Family-Unfriendly Aesop. And this was presented sympathetically. And I feel like she had this imp who talked to her before future man came. And he could see things or something? It was so odd.

Alice In Wonderland, full stop.

Life Of Pi. I'm reading it in school. I think this book is the biggest Mind Screw ever. The whole book had me going WTF?

It's not that WTF...