What were the most bizarre books you have ever read?

I saw the movie based on that.

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. Bizarre characters on improbable quests that lead nowhere and border on "Shaggy Dog" Story. Mind you, I was younger at the time and it was a translation, so maybe I missed important clues.

Berthold Brecht's In the Jungle of the Cities. It was a required read when I was in college, and I could never understand anything about the characters or the plot. On the other hand, this is apparently intentional.

By the way, my definition of "bizarre book" is "book making me wonder what is it I am reading, and, if I manage to finish it, will leave me dumbfounded as to what exactly this was about".

Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho.

James Joyce's Ulysses. Holy fuck, Batman!

I love books with all sorts of bizarre shit going on all over the place and where reality just tends to make no sense. And that book defeated me.

This one book called 'Pardon Me, You're Stepping On My Eyeball' or something. It was actually about two maladjusted teenagers. I think. One had a pet racoon. There was a trick haunted house, a wild teen party gone horribly wrong, and at the end letting off a home-made rocket. Also I think the racoon died. I could be remembering all this totally wrong, I just remember it being weird.

"Tender Morsels" is definitely the weirdest book I've read. It's based on the story of Snow White and Rose Red but changed to be significantly more horrifying and confusing.

Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany. I just remembered I read that one. It's madder than an entire box of chocolate frogs.

The Soft Machine by William Burroughs. And not even weird in a good way; it was kinda boring, and eventually all the anal rape and heroin use just got to be a grind. The same cannot be said of Naked Lunch, which is a fantastic book. Looks like Burroughs just used the cut-up technique a little too much, in The Soft Machine, in my opinion.

Naked Lunch. I read the Ulysses once a year and I found Naked Lunch totally absurd and boring. I only grasped it was about drugs.

I'm thinking of buying that book. Is it good?

@Editerguy, I would recommend to borrow it from a friend or a library first (as I did). I personally found it hard to read and understand, and definitely not enjoyable. Situations and characters are surreal, coarse, nightmare-like, and it is deliberately left unclear if they actually exist/ happen, or they are drug-induced delirium of the narrator (or both). Of course it is only my opinion; my brother, who recommended it to me, likes this book a lot and compares it to A Clockwork Orange. But, just in case, I would suggest you to get it from the library prior to spend money on it.

edited 11th Jun '15 6:33:27 AM by Brynhild.Svanhvit

As I Lay Dying was wonderfully insane. I need to read more Faulkner. The Sound And The Fury is on my to-read list.

Thanks, from what I read about it elsewhere I didn't really get much of a sense of what it was like other than that it has a lot of mythological references and is kind of experimental.

The problem is, no library near me has it. Maybe if they ask them they'll bring it in from another library that has it.

Indeed it is! Faulkner's one of my faves; As I Lay Dying, along with Sartoris, are two of my favorite novels. I'd recommend Light in August, as well. I've still got a lot by him to read

edited 11th Jun '15 10:56:50 PM by JohnWalrus

@Editerguy: you should try and ask. Usually libraries have an inter-borrowing service, so they can temporary bring a book from another library in the city, area or region. But also ask if there is a charge for that. A few days ago I was surprised to learn, from a friend living in Barcelona, that a small fee applies to books that are borrowed from outside Barcelona itself. Where I live the service is totally free. So far.

@His Infernal Majesty, @John Walrus: I have read The Sound And The Fury and some short stories by Faulkner, but As I Lay Dying is still pending. I liked The Sound And The Fury but I was left with the feeling that I had missed something. I also need to read more Faulkner.

edited 12th Jun '15 12:26:26 AM by Brynhild.Svanhvit

I don't think it's available in English, but the Spanish title is "Los Electrocutados" which translates to "the electrocuted" (plural, not singular). It's about a professor who is trying to discover the phrase the solar system is saying. It has stuff like proving how cats are creatures colonized by aliens and an explanation of how humanity actually evolved from birds that followed the Simurgh on it's journey.

Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers is quite odd. Weirder than Ulysses for sure.

I don't remember the title but I think it was "Don't laugh at me" or something. It's about a fly who laughs so a mouse eats him and then bigger and bigger animals eat each other as they start laughing after eating the previous eater, and in the end the tiger throws up and out the aligator that was inside him throws up and so on and in the end everyone is thrown up from their eater, and then they laugh all the way home. What.

Lol, that's... interesting.

I've been liveblogging a strange book for a bit, Samantha Stone and the Mermaid's Quest. The liveblog starts here.

Sadly, liveblogs are broken in the sense that I can't add a new installment, and the management seems uninterested in fixing the problem.

Please Don't Kill the Freshman by Zoe Trope.

The novel I found hardest to get my head around was The Quantum Thief. Well written, but I still have no clue what it was about.

I haven't actually read it (YET) but I've come across a book that possessed the rather elegant title of "How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?"

Ah yeah. Back when I had more spare time than good taste, I read that whole thing all the way through.

N.D. Wilson's One Hundred Cupboards series, the last book in particular.

The premise was pretty standard kid fare, but by the end, the protagonist had become king of plant-land via a square chestnut (don't ask) and defeated an immortal witch-queen with a magical baseball that was somehow also a dandelion (double don't ask). It was certainly inventive, if truly weird.