I'm linking up with That Artsy Reader Girl for another Top Ten Tuesday.
This week is a freebie! For the topic of my choosing, I'm sharing ten of the weirdest books I've ever read. Not all of them were bad weird per se, but they were definitely weird.
I know it's a classic or whatever and full of symbolism, but it's also just a weird book. All of the characters make choices that don't make any sense, the writing shifts drastically between character perspectives, and there's the well-known "My mother is a fish." chapter. (Yes, that's the entire chapter.)
This book has a cult following for a reason — it's creatively imagined and well written, and it's also super weird. The basic premise is that this couple has created their own circus freak show through experimenting with drugs and other chemicals during pregnancy and then putting their own children on display. The plot is bizarre though coherent and the story is depressing and disturbing though well constructed. Definitely unlike anything else I've read.
My review described this as "a Christian soap opera with a large side of someone's personal therapy sessions." The main character is supposed to be investigating someone else's relationship but ends up sexually assaulting both the woman in question and a totally different woman (acts portrayed as passionate in the one case and investigatory in the other), and then ends up with him getting psychoanalyzed by a monk who for some reason has some kind of psychic powers? It was bonkers, and I'm completely baffled by the following this series has.
It's been 15 years since I last read this book, so I'm going off some of the more detailed Goodreads reviews to remind me what was so weird about it. First, I remember Grendel having a weird relationship with his mother, who one reviewer describes as "some kind of void-filled slug monster." Another reviewer describes Grendel himself as "a cannibalistic English professor from the 1960s or a Beat poet who happened to occasionally go on murderous rampages." And then there's the unnecessary dense prose itself, such as "I am aware in my chest of tuberstirrings in the blacksweet duff of the forest overhead." Given that I read it for English classes in both high school and college, I'm sure it's chockfull of important symbolism and such, but I just remember being like, "What the heck am I reading?"
I know I'm missing the relevant context of Russian history and culture to fully appreciate this book's satire, so I could only absorb it on a surface level, which was a mostly bizarre plot involving larger-than-life characters (including the devil and a talking cat) acting in unexpected ways.
I found this to be a sharp critique of capitalist society, but it's also a weird story about a guy turning into a giant bug and being treated as a nuisance by his family.
In this anti-war satire, the main character gets unstuck in time, reliving parts of his life repeatedly and out of order, and also getting abducted by aliens and put in an alien zoo. Another classic that has a lot of deeping meaning and also is just a bananas reading experience.
This is not the Stuart Little of the 1990s kids' movie. This book doesn't have a narrative arc, nor did White bother to explain anything about the world he'd created, like why animals and humans can talk to each other, or whether Stuart is actually a mouse or just a human whose body is identical to that of a mouse, and also why his family still keeps a cat in their house with their son/mouse, and let's just pretend it's totally natural that this tiny mouse-boy would have a car his size that can turn invisible. Also there's a girl who's Stuart's size, but she's not a mouse or mouse-like, she's just the size of a mouse. (I'm not sure which is weirder??) Reading this book is just an adventure in going, "Wait, what?"
If you drop a bunch of hints and clues and symbols and mysterious plot threads, and by the end you tie them all together in a coherent way, you've made something clever and satisfactory to read. If you drop a bunch of hints and clues and symbols and mysterious plot threads and then never provide any answers, now you've just written a weird conglomeration of meaningless implications that leaves the reader more confused than anything. Thank God someone found a way to make this mess into a musical with an actual, coherent plot with clever wordplay and satisfactory plot twists.
Of all the books on this list, this is definitely the weirdest one that I've read. Besides being 600+ pages of sex, violence, and gore, I was epically confused the entire time reading it. What's real? What's a dream? What's a memory? What's a symbol? Why does the main character suddenly have a random mark on his cheek, and why are unknown women licking it? There are no answers, just more confusion the deeper you go.
What are the weirdest books you've read?
Looking back:
One year ago I was reading: Lovecraft Country, Jada Sly, Artist & Spy, and A Promised Land
Five years ago I was reading: Infinite Jest and A Piece of the World
Ten years ago I was reading: Fahrenheit 451
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