I want to see what people on Lemmy are reading. Can be unique in terms of lore, concept or even the cover. Mine are invisible monsters, battle royale and horrorstor. What about yours?
These are almost cheating, but I’ll go with Gravity’s Rainbow followed by Blood Meridian.
Blood meridian is a masterpiece!
Oh, you’re into that genre?
-American Psycho (gotta love that urinal cake that Patrick dipped in Godiva chocolate and wrapped it as a present for Evelyn.)
-WOOM (that rug scene made my chest tight)
-Dead Inside (just…wow. Rip Abigail Turpentine)
-Exquisite corpse
-tender is the flesh
Tender is the flesh is on my tbr for a while and thank you so much for those recommendations.
Pleasure to help. I love horror lit and can give you some good ones
Someone handed me Gravity’s Rainbow after finding out I’d read Blood Meridian. He said the words, “only you” after handing me the book as he was leaving the country.
I tried. Fuck me I goddam tried.
“The Book of the New Sun” by Gene Wolfe.
Its a cold open without exposition into an unknown world. Is it fantasy? Is it sci-fi? There’s possible hints of both. The protagonist is the narrator and the character tells the story. Since the character already knows this world, he doesn’t both explaining what is happening very often. The style of speech the character uses including the vocabulary isn’t quite common. The storytelling is unforgiving because the protagonist has no frame of reference from our world to explain. There’s even more to the difficulty in following the story than this, but some of that speaks to the plot points, so I won’t explain further.
If you want a hard, but eventually rewarding read, go into it cold without reading any synopsis or reviews.
Here’s the opening paragraph from the first page:
“It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer’s apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.”
EDIT: I just saw that the current Humble Bundle Deal for ebooks has 38 Gene Wolfe books (for $20 for the whole set). This includes “The Book of the New Sun” (3 books).
Thanks!
NK Jemisin’s trilogy, that starts with The Fifth Season.
(I can never remember if the proper title of the trilogy is Broken Earth or Shattered Earth!)
Anything I’ve read by NK Jemisin has left my brain utterly reworked in the most fantastic of ways!
Thank you!
Martian Time-Slip by Philip K Dick - PKD is always pretty weird, but I found this one especially so. Time travel experiments by unlikable characters that involves abusing schizophrenic and autistic children.
Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie - First of the Imperial Radch series. Told from the perspective of an intelligence that’s truly different than ours (even though it is ostensibly human). It made a lot of waves for having genderless characters, but that only scratches the surface of how strangely the narrator relates to the humans they’re dealing with.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer - First of the Southern Reach series. A group of 4 unnamed individuals go to investigate a reality distorting phenomenon and reality gets heavily distorted. This one declares right up front that it’s going to get strange and does exactly that.
Did you read all books from the Annihilation series? I think i should give Annihilation another try.
I have read the original trilogy. They’re very different from Annihilation and it can be a little jarring. I really enjoyed them, and would easily recommend the whole series.
I feel like I need to reread the trilogy to try the fourth book.
There is a fourth book? Damn, i didnt expect that.
Flowers for Algernon
Read that book and it destroyed me.
Only book to make me cry.
the Amber books by Zelazny
I liked Amber, but it’s not one that I would have picked from Zelazny as being particularly unique. What about, say, Roadmarks? That’s one of my favorites.
Thank you!
Beyond Good and Evil
From my review:
"This is one of those rare books that changes what I think a book can be.
“A beautiful meditation on the human condition as coupled to the — so-called — “Overwatch Effect.” It took me a while to catch the rhythm of the book, but once I was in, I was in.”
I read it just after it won the Booker Prize. But, I didnt know it had won the Booker Prize when I read it.
Thank you!
My ADHD always made it really hard to read an entire book, but one of the last books I read that was cool was Goosebumps: Beware Of The Purple Peanut Butter. I loved that I could choose what to do in a book, it felt like a video game.
LMAAAAAAO. I have ADHD and thats why i love unique books. The different format makes focus because of novity.
I really enjoyed The Raw Shark Texts. It’s a weird page turner. Has a cat.
Get yourself a bit of Christopher Moore or some Neal Stephenson.
Tim Dorsey was great up until the end although there was a lot of same-ness about much of his work.
Work your way through Cory Doctrow’s catalog of unique fiction.
I love almost everything by Dean Koontz - he is a magical phrase turner.
You can always sell me on a Kaiju novel.
Whats your favorite book of each writer mentioned?
I just picked up the book “Vanished” written by Anna Hays and Illustrated by Mary Kate McDevitt. It’s a historical non-fiction that explores the life and lost legacies of seven different female magicians during the Golden Age of Magic.
I’m not very deep into the book yet but thus far it has been a super fun read, and the beautiful illustration just add to the uniqueness of it for me!
Those arts are really beautiful!
I know! I keep meaning to look up the artist to see if she has prints!
Runny Babbit by Shel Silverstein
The whole thing is written in spoonerisms, and it can tret gicky to lead out roud ko a tid. Honestly, not his best, but certainly the most unique.
I lucking fove Runny Babbit. Any time there’s a rabbit around I’ll be calling it Runny Babbit and nobody understands me
Gonna check it out! Thanks.
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murikami. It’s not just the story but also the writing style that I found captivating. But it’s the story too. It flirts between the real and the surreal.
I also have ADHD and find reading really hard. I hate it because I really like learning.
Murikami has a beautiful prose.
Library at Mount Char is bonkers. I loved it. It made me realize I like stories that dare to go big.
Thanks! Its on my TBR
