What were the most bizarre books you have ever read?

Mordion, I think. And yes. o_O I didn't discover Diana Wynne Jones as a child, but it was still more than bit surprising to read right after Dark Lord of Derkholm.

I did read them as a child, and the sentence about the Reigner washing his hands after whatever he did to the girl terrified the hell out of me.

Did you ever read Homeward Bounders? That was a similarly weird book, although not as odd as Hexwood.

I read Dark Lord of Derkholm again just recently. I don't think I grasped as a child just how terrible Querida was. Plus... Shona totally got sexually assaulted by those soldiers and nothing was ever said of it again?

Yeah Hexwood was weird, so was Archer's Goon for that matter, even a lot of the Chrestomanci books, but at least most of the view point characters exist, and don't have their future selves walking around much?

Although it's not an especially hard read, every time I read Wise Blood, I find myself leaving with more questions than I entered with, even if every single old question gets answered.

"Murus" by Martina Wildner. If you leave out the bizarro stuff (basically George Spencer-Brown's "Laws of Form" on ketamin) it's your run-of-the-mill youth fantasy book. But you ruin the book if you do that... If non-belletristic examples are allowed (and crackpot works are excluded from these), I vote for anything by Raymond Smullyan.

• 1 on Harkaway, BTW.

Hands down, Aura by Carlos Fuentes.

I've never read anything extremly bizarre but I guess Betwixt counts, especially the second half: A lot of the things that happened weren't really explained, everything was weird (this could be the author's intention, lack of explanation or simply me being stupid) and then came the weirdest part, which was the ending. It ended somewhere in the middle of the story, as if the author simply had lost interest - all of it just seemed like a build-up to something bigger that never came, or a prequel of some sort. Also, half of the things that happened still didn't have any explanation.

I think I may have been a little too young when I read it (I'm sure I read it between grade 6 and 8, so I was at least 12, but I'm not precisely sure of the intended age range) but The Westing Game left me scratching my head going "what the hell just happened?" more than once. I did thoroughly enjoy the book though, so it wasn't all that bad.

edited 16th Sep '14 10:49:46 AM by Sisi

@Sisi Yeah I think it's a kid's book but I'm not sure, it might be Young Adult, it was rather odd with all the plots going on at once, and all the gambits Westing had.

There was also not a whole lot of explaining, which I was used to , being a 12 year old addicted to Nancy Drew novels and getting started on Christie. Like when Turtle figures out her sister is the bomber, I was left going "Wait what?" because there was nothing leading up to it, no explanation of how Turtle came to that conclusion, it was just dropped on you like a bird crapping on your head. Stuff like that just coming poof out of nowhere and the disjointed nature of the Where Are They Now narratives and the book in general confused the hell out of me when I first read it as a kid.

edited 16th Sep '14 11:23:24 AM by Sisi

I don't know if the Xanth series by Piers Anthony has been mentioned, but the plots of the later books are constructed almost entirely to facilitate puns, most of which are sent in by his fans. It's the weirdest thing ever, and most of it reads like bad fanfic.

Try reading The Giver when you're 9. And most of your literary diet to this point has been Garfield.

@Sisi Oh yeah that would be confusing, if you expected it to read like a mystery, where the detective says how it ended. Or a straight forward mystery at all really.

@Twentington Yes it's mostly something read at 11 or 12 isn't it? And not just with Garfield as background. Seems a tad complicated for 9, and the death might be upsetting.

edited 21st Sep '14 4:02:51 PM by phantom1

Maradonia Saga.

I win.

*Reads author's bio*

Damn, she's the female Christopher Paolini, only even less self-aware and more pokefunable -_-

still good for her for getting her book published. I'm not about to hate on her for getting published on mummy and daddy's dime. Writing a novel is an achievement at any age, even with grotesque displays of nepotist at your disposal.

edited 18th Oct '14 6:46:37 AM by joeyjojo

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. It's a great read, and it's also batshit insane and completely random. When the actual plot kicks in a few hundred pages in it's almost a disappointment. I would gladly read a whole book just exploring the bizarre confines of the city of New Crobuzon.

Oh yeah I read that...

The setting is strange but it's otherwise a conventional novel. Cool book.

For me, probably Starbright and the Dream Eater. It was weird how the dialog was really bad but the characters' emotions were very convincing. The "Dream Eater" in question is actually a space alien that slowly kills people through their dreams, by draining the energy and life out of them.

When Starbright kills the Dream Eater, it retcons what happened, causing everyone who got sick from the Dream Eater to instead have actually been sick from some pesticide.

Starbright is an odd name for a heroine, but IIRC the name was given by her mentally disabled mother.

Another odd thing is that it takes place in the US, despite having been written in New Zealand, though there's no real need for it to be set in the US.

@Twentington: Ha! Ha! I say. Try reading Ayn Rand when you're eleven.

What kind of experience was it to read Ayn Rand at the age of 11? Did you understand what she was talking about?

I just read Dungeons And Drag Queens a couple days ago. It was . . . not very good. The premise is that a drag queen gets pulled into a magical world. The name is amazing, and the premise is cool. But the book is utter shit, trying way too hard to be funny, and relying entirely too much on gross-out humour and randomness. Example: At one point, the drag queen asks a guy if he's an elf. The guy reaches down his own throat, pulls out a fish, and slaps it against the ground. I'm not sure why we're supposed to laugh at that. That's not even a fucking joke! It's throwing in something completely random and stupid for no fucking reason at all.

Could've been a brilliant bizarre book. Instead, it's a really, really lame bizarre book.

Not really. Marketing.

Christie Golden's "Arthas, Rise of the Lich King".

it was not bizarre in a good way.

"The Speed of the Dark" by Alex Shearer about a boy called Christopher and his Mad Scientist guardian who shrunk the boy's father and a random lady... Shortly after the guardian adopted Chris as his own... The tiny two were put into a snow-globe on the guardian's desk. I'm still looking for that story.

edited 10th Jan '15 6:46:42 PM by sabrina_diamond

I would have to say to say Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones." Oh, and it was not lovely, and I did not enjoy it.