i say ditto on the hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. also, the first couple of books in the cs lewis space trilogy (have not read the third), out of the silent planet, and perelandra, were sorta "out there."
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i say ditto on the hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. also, the first couple of books in the cs lewis space trilogy (have not read the third), out of the silent planet, and perelandra, were sorta "out there."
Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
I felt like squirming the whole time I was reading it. Interesting...but weird.
gravity rainbow:
Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master,
but you can tickle his creatures.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.
Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, ****ing idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
\m/
I'd also say Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It was a fascinating read but I can't really explain why. It was fantastical and impossible and engaging.
The Blood Of Angels by Stephen Gregory is the strangest book I have ever read. It starts off extremely slow. However, if you can get past the first 120 pages you will not want to stop reading it until the end.
I won't tell you what happens in it in case you decide to read it. But it just begins as the rather normal man's obsession with a woman. From there it gets weird, & then just more & more strange until the end of the book. By then you are thinking "What the [beep]???"
I find it terrible when a gifted author put you in the shoes of a derange mind,like say Nabokov with Lolita or more recently read Andrei Makine The crime of Olga arbelina.You actualy understand and feel the processe going through,and it is not something agreable.
On another scale any of Hubert Selby jr book are very unsettling,and yes,weirds.The willow tre,the demon,are some reads!
Also Rainer Maria Rilke-the notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge was a very strange book and one that i could not grasp enterly.It clearly made me feel my limitation.I shall go back to it and maybe another read would help get more out of it.
I agree. You find yourself identifying, or even empathizing with the deranged minds. After reading Lolita I thought it was such a powerful love story. Yet if I heard about some pedophile who was preying on a 12 year old girl, I would be prone to find it disgusting and unacceptable... usually such books cast me into a dejected mood, one in which I start absorbing or picking up certain emotions, characteristics, or moods of the main character...Quote:
Originally Posted by thomas212
Cohen's Beautiful Losers, considered the gem of Canadian Literature, was next to impossible to read. Postmodernism has its limits...:D
The Castle by Kafka is certainly up there... Strange, but also difficult and b-o-r-i-n-g. Nobody has mentioned Amerika, I wonder if that's because nobody has read it or because it's more accessible than other works by Kafka?
And Steppenwolf, loved the beginning but the rest is certainly 'out there'.
I think it was the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini. It’s a sort of illustrated survey on a fictitious surrealistic world, and it is written in an invented language which hasn’t been deciphered yet (maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all, but who knows?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus
I ordered this book; it arrived last week, now I’m looking forward to it a wee bit more. I will have to pay a bit more attention, thanks for the heads up.Quote:
Originally Posted by thomas212
For me, Kafka is weird. The Metamorphosis and The Trial, I just don’t seem to grasp him at all. I read him, and wonder, why? I don’t think of him as so much a genius as I do insane.
Good luck.Quote:
Originally Posted by grotto
This is not antinomic.Quote:
For me, Kafka is weird. The Metamorphosis and The Trial, I just don’t seem to grasp him at all. I read him, and wonder, why? I don’t think of him as so much a genius as I do insane.
Lots of genius were a bit insane and some of the mads have touch of genius.
The Metamorphosis, Young Goodman Brown or Diary by Chuck Palahniuk. All of those were just...weird.
Naked Lunch
I'd have to say that Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland...