Oddest book you've ever read?

[Eclipse1]

When I was a child, the oddest book I ever took on was The Unauthorized Biography by Lemony Snicket. It contains letters, news articles, black-and-white photographs and notes. Together, it seems to tell the often incoherent story of the personal life of the fictional biographer who attempts to document the lives of the Baudelaires (a small family from A Series of Unfortunate Events). I found it difficult to understand the last time I read it many years ago, but I'm considering giving it a try again.

[Corran Orreaux]

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri - It was originally released in 1320


Utopia - Sir Thomas More - 1516


Those books got weird.

[lightstone]

when i was 12 i "read" this one book with just images, and the images had things like blood and worse, but it was basicly about this guy getting murdered and how, i still dont know why i "read" it

[Naval]

  Hmmm well the oldest book I’ve ever read when I used to be a book worm was “The Wind in the Willows.” Sure it was the 1980 version but. It was one of my favorites.

[Corran Orreaux]

Narnia by C.S Lewis, I do not understand that book, it just seemed like there was something wrong with it.

Jesus allegory lion?

[Brisky]

The oldest books I've ever genuinly read were "the call of the wild" from 1903, and "white fang", from 1906.

Although, I'm not shure if it counts, since the actual, physical book I've read them from was a Dutch translation of both books in one, made in 1939, but that's still a long time ago...


I didn't have any trouble with reading the book, even despite the incredibly old fashioned use of language. Despite the percieved continuety errors, it was still a good book, if not really depressing.

[anoni]

Haha Brisky it's "oddest" not "oldest"

The oddest book I've read was "So you've turned into a zombie", it was a book in the style of a self-help pamphlet in a fictional world where zombies exist and are treated as second class citizens in society, it was pretty funny!

[Brisky]

Well, I guess in that way, white fang is a pretty odd book, aswell, as it's a book written in 1906, wich personifies canines.
The original writer got a lot of hate for that, in the time that he was alive, because it would be "unnatural" to think that dogs and / or wolfs had feelings and emotions...

[Trixsie Vixen]

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski


It was almost unreadably weird in some places.  I can't think of anything else I've read which I would categorise as ergodic literature (where non-trivial effort is required to traverse the text). There are so many footnotes and the text layout is sometimes sideways or slanted or upside down and it seems to reference actual (and obscure) real world things but actually "references" fictional versions of those things.


Oh and the font colour is a device in its own right...


It is like a found footage film but it's a book which makes for three different narrators who interact in weird ways.  The simplest description is that this is a book about a book about a film about a house that is a labyrinth.


I found it more disturbing than any horror novel and technically it could be considered a horror novel but that doesn't seem to really capture it.


The main plot (or what seemed to be the main plot) is the film part, which is home video by a guy who is moving into a house with his family and in the process discovers that one hallway is 1 inch longer on the inside of the house than the outside of the house.


I don't know why but the way this is handled is so real and unnerving where in another context it would just be some mysterious phenomenon side gimmick.


I've read plenty of books I couldn't put down because they were so exciting etc, but I've never read a book that I couldn't put down because it felt like I had no choice.


Seriously, even the wikipedia article about it is confusing


I don't know who I would recommend this book to, it's definitely not for everyone, but I really want to recommend it!

[L. Jay Echoes]

Good Lord, where do I start?


Amie Bender is a weird author to begin with; her novel "Lemon Cake" is about a girl who can taste the emotions of other people through the food they cook; Robert Asprin's "Mythology" series is an oddly edutaining sci-fi series with a style comparable to Captain Furry... Haruki Murakami writes Kafka as a series of non-sequiters involving raining fish and talking cats... Then there's Insect Dreams, written by a guy named Mark Ishmael or something. It Chronicles the career of salesman-turned-cockroach Gregor Samsa as he attempts to talk Wilson (or was it Truman?) out of nuking Hiroshima... read it half a decade ago, I don't really remember.


Speaking of Lemony Snicket, has anyone read All the Wrong Questions?

[Wander]

I also have to go with house of leaves, for all the reasons Trixsie described above, But honestly it makes that book one of my absolute favorites!

[L. Jay Echoes]

Just browsed my shelves and rediscovered a few gems: Patricia Highsmith's "Beastly Murders" which is all about pets and livestock's murdering their abusive owners; James Clarke's "Man is the Prey" which is pretty much the same, only non-fiction and not specific to pets; and Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan" which shows you how to come to terms with the limits of your knowledge, wisdom and experience.

[L. Jay Echoes]

I forgot to mention a few old-time oddities; back in the late 17^th century there was a Duchess by the name of Margaret Cavendish; Her most well-known work (at least to me) is a utopian novel called “The Blazing World” wherein this young lady is kidnapped by pirates, then spirited away into the world of neofurryism where a bunch of furries exalt her as queen and present her with their intellectual endeavors. It’s basically Alice in Wonderland, only more ham-fisted but still entertaining. Speaking of AiW, I suppose nobody’s brought it up because it’s pretty much the codifier for weird reading.
Can’t leave out Hans Christian Anderson, either. Just about every one of his stories is a series of non-sequiters, almost as though he wrote more to show off his vocabulary than anything else (which is what I used to do). The Steadfast Tin Soldier, for example, has the Jack-in-the-box be the only sapient toy, who knocks the soldier out of the window, where he has a trip down the sewer, gets randomly rescued, then is randomly thrown into the fire by some careless pre-kindergartener.
Anybody read James Joyce’s “Ulysses”? That thing is a freakshow of weird writing… And the plot is the most mundane thing you can imagine. Two guys go out, one gets subjected to slapstick all day while his wife cheats on him, the other threatens his academic competitors to write the ultimate English epic, but the writing style changes from chapter to chapter; you’ve got interrogations, theatrical scripts, run-on sentences, the wonders never cease.
I see a lot of books on here I want to read… the Divine Comedy (even though that one sounds kind of gross. I heard it described on the podcast “Fiction.” Lotta naked asses in that one), House of Leaves, White Fang… 
Btw, Insect Dreams’ author is Mark Estrin.

[L. Jay Echoes]

I recently read a few short stories that struck me as rather odd; there's this collection of "Spies and Agents" short stories edited by one Martin Edwards; I've only read three, but each one of them is very odd; "Spooks," wherein a woman who's turned invisible spies on a murderer, and "Empathy Bomb," wherein a man shoots people with "Empathy Darts" in order to make them more charitable.