I'm casting my vote for Ulysses, too. I can't believe I muddled through 700+ pages, most of the time with only a faint idea of what was going on. Still, the last section somehow made things well worth it. It all sort of came together in a weird way. I guess rereading it and knowing what was going on the whole time would be fun, right?
for me, it's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I know it's a really popular book, but I'm more of a straightforward story kind of guy, so I was constantly trying to figure out if there was something I just wasn't getting. anyway, maybe i'll read it again sometime...
"Life is full of the comic, and is only majestic in its inner sense"
-Dostoevsky
I take it that 'weird' can be meant in a good sense?
Every play and novel by Beckett I have read, every story by Kafka I have read, and "Crime and Punishment". I love all of these, especially "CaP". This last one had the weirdest scenes, really powerful stuff too. Petrovich's interrogation of Raskolnikov, in a sarcastic and almost hateful tone, is weird and sublime.
The Naked Lunch
And Finnegan's Wake, although I never got through more than 5 pages.
"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro was very strange to me.
The atmosphere in that book was so eerie it was ridiculous.
Also any of the Chuck Palahniuk novels are quite strange.
I gotta say anything by Richard Brautigan. In Watermelon Sugar is about a town where everything is made of Watermelon Sugar. Trout Fishing in America was quite strange as well as the title of the book is both a passtime and the name of a character.
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
Ok, so it's not as weird as lovecraft, poe, or joyce...but it's the weirdest thing I've read that was written in the last ten years.
i was going to come in here and write that one. so great.Originally Posted by linz
Anything by Kafka, really...and Ulysses by James Joyce
"All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours." -Aldous Huxley
"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." -William Blake
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. Definitely not as wierd as some books out there, but <sarcasm>as I have an odd, inexplicable attraction to books that are halfway normal</sarcasm> I thought it was pretty strange.
"Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity." -- G.K. Chesterton
"The road that stretches before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it tests the strength of his legs." -- St. Thomas Aquinas
"Brevity is the soul of wit" -- Shakespeare
"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it." -- Thucydides
House of Leaves by Danielewski. Every time "house" is printed, it's blue. It's about a guy who one day discovers his house is bigger on the inside than on the outside--literally. It gets pretty scary and strange. Go into a bookstore and flip through this book. It's hardly a traditional novel--text goes everywhere on the page, and sometimes you only read one line through the middle of the page, sometimes only one corner. Really and truly used the "novel" medium to it's fullest potential. Bizarre and enthralling.
"Memory believes before knowing remembers."
--Faulkner
I have to say one called Geek Love. It is one of the most bizarre books that I've ever read. It made me really uncomfortable, but I still couldn't stop reading. You know that car wreck that you just can't look away from? That is sort of what Geek Love is like. It is pretty well written, but the plot is disconcerting.
Djuna Barnes: Nightwood
Witty quotation here! Witty quotation here!
It may seem an odd choice, but Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais what came after him could hardly be called a movement as he already moved it.
I've been thinking about Nightwood a lot for a couple of days now. I read it for my Modern American Lit coursework eight years ago. Very weird book indeed.
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
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