Here is a list of 10 strange books I've yet to read. Obviously, this list is never-ending as new books get published and therefore there will be more lists like these in the future. It is a bit difficult to find odd books as they do not belong to any specific genre (though I have seen people calling them ergodic books) so I have to do a bit of a hunt to find out if a book has any strange elements to its design or formatting. Once I find one, I feel accomplished, though!
1. S. by J.J. Abrams
After House of Leaves, S. is probably the book everyone talks about being odd. The design is excellent, and this is probably the most beautiful book I own. It has a sleeve and the book itself is made to look like a library copy filled with extra documents, postcards, letters and even a napkin! The story itself is mysterious as there are two sides to it: the story itself, Ship of Theseus by Straka, and the annotations two college students, Jennifer and Eric write back and forth in the margins of the text. The reader can choose how to read the book: start with the story by Straka and go back to read the margin notes or read the whole thing at once. Whichever way he chooses it is bound to be a reading experience unlike any other!
Synopsis:
One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace, and
desire.
A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his
margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its
mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the
stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the
unknown.
THE BOOK: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by
a prolific but enigmatic writer named V. M. Straka, in which a man with no past
is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a
disorienting and perilous journey.
THE WRITER: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the
world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing
apart from the words he wrote and the rumours that swirl around him.
THE READERS: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad
student, are both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might
become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their
passions, hurts, and fears.
S., conceived by filmmaker J. J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist
Doug Dorst is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins
of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they
don’t understand. It is also Abrams and Dorst’s love letter to the written word.
2. Cloud
Atlas by David Mitchell
Synopsis:
A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David
Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye
for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific
speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K.
Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful.
Now in his new novel, David Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental
questions of reality and identity.
Cloud Atlas begins
in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to
his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr.
Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite...
Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a
disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an
infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter... From there we
jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey,
who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim
her life... And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day
England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run
amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of
history.
But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back
through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its
starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters
connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like
clouds across the sky.
As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force
that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to
become a worldwide phenomenon.
3.
Ulysses by James Joyce
Synopsis:
Literature, as Joyce tells us through the character of Stephen Dedalus, 'is
the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written over a seven-year
period, from 1914 to 1921, Ulysses has
survived bowderlization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed
modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly
wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the
human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction Ulysses is 'An endlessly open book of utopian
epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16
June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might
be made over in terms of those utopian moments.'
4. Illuminae (The
Illuminae Files, #1) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Synopsis:
This morning, Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the hardest thing
she’d have to do. This afternoon, her planet was invaded.
The year is 2575, and two rival mega-corporations are at war over a planet
that’s little more than a speck at the edge of the universe. Now with enemy
fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra — who are barely even talking to each
other—are forced to evacuate with a hostile warship in hot pursuit.
But their problems are just getting started. A plague has broken out and is
mutating with terrifying results; the fleet’s AI may actually be their enemy, and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on. As Kady hacks into a web
of data to find the truth, it’s clear the only person who can help her is the
ex-boyfriend she swore she’d never speak to again.
Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents — including emails,
maps, files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more — Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping
trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of
everyday heroes.
5. Kafka on the
Shore by Haruki Murakami
Synopsis:
Kafka on the Shore, a tour de
force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a
teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome
oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an
ageing simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction
and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities
of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is
to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats
and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting
prostitute, a forest harbours soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and
rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder,
with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle—yet this, along with
everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of
Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and
the other given a fresh start on his own.
6. Bats of the
Republic: An Illuminated Novel by Zachary Thomas Dodson
Synopsis:
Bats of the Republic features
original artwork and an immaculate design to create a unique novel of adventure
and science fiction, of political intrigue and future dystopian struggles, and,
at its riveting core, of love.
In 1843 Chicago, fragile naturalist Zadock Thomas falls in love with the
high society daughter of Joseph Gray, a prominent ornithologist. Mr. Gray sets
an impossible condition for their marriage — Zadock must deliver a sealed and
highly secretive letter to General Irion, fighting one thousand miles
southwest, deep within the embattled and newly independent Republic of Texas.
The fate of the Union lies within the mysterious contents of that sealed
letter, but that is only the beginning ...
Three hundred years later, in the dystopian city-state of the Texas Republic,
Zeke Thomas has just received news of the death of his grandfather, an esteemed
Chicago senator. The world has crumbled. Paper documents are banned, citizens
are watched, and dissenters are thrown over the walls into "the rot."
When Zeke inherits—and then loses—a very old, sealed letter from his grandfather,
Zeke finds himself and the women he loves at the heart of a conspiracy whose
secrets he must unravel, if it doesn't destroy his relationship, his family
legacy, and the entire republic first.
The two propulsive narratives converge through a wildly creative assortment of
documents, books within books, maps, notes, illustrations, and more. Zach
Dodson has created a gorgeous work of art and an eye-popping commercial
adventure for the 21st century.
7. One Rainy Day in
May (The Familiar #1) by Mark Z. Danielewski
Synopsis:
From the author of the international best seller House of Leaves and National Book
Award–nominated Only Revolutions comes a
monumental new novel as dazzling as it is riveting. The Familiar (Volume 1) ranges from Mexico to
Southeast Asia, from Venice, Italy, to Venice, California, with nine lives
hanging in the balance, each called upon to make a terrifying choice. They
include a therapist-in-training grappling with daughters as demanding as her
patients; an ambitious East L.A. gang member contracted for violence; two
scientists in Marfa, Texas, on the run from an organization powerful beyond
imagining; plus a recovering addict in Singapore summoned at midnight by a
desperate billionaire; and a programmer near Silicon Beach whose game engine
might unleash consequences far exceeding the entertainment he intends. At the
very heart, though, is a twelve-year-old girl named Xanther who one rainy day
in May sets out with her father to get a dog, only to end up trying to save a
creature as fragile as it is dangerous . . . which will change not only her
life and the lives of those she has yet to encounter, but this world, too—or at
least the world we think we know and the future we take for granted.
8. The People of
Paper by Salvador Plascencia
Synopsis:
The People of Paper reveals the ever-elusive prophesies of the Shandean
Baby Nostradamus and the approximate temperature and incendiary potential of
halos. Herein disillusioned and AWOL saints reclaim their crowns and fight
purses, while a gang of flower pickers go off to war, led by a lonely man who
can not help but wet his bed in sadness. Part memoir, part lies, this is a
story about loving a woman made of paper.
9. Life: A User's
Manual by Georges Perec
Synopsis:
Life: A User's Manual is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling
compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Perec's
spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement
of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled,
an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that
are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the
confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a
young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist,
from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an
eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a
manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and
despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around
the world.
But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of fiction; it is a
closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one
hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is
peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics,
problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are
there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.
The cover of this book is very interesting: two flaps that you open up and then immediately the story starts. No copyright page in the beginning, no title page, no page numbers. You literally open the book and start reading. There aren't any pull-outs or documents but there are images and boy, oh boy are they strange. The story itself is very whimsical, as is usual with Murakami and it almost feels like reading a modern fairytale.
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