Ask Lemmy

I answer with this a lot on Lemmy but House of Leaves. That fucking book. Everyone should read it once. If you read it multiple times you are a crazy person, and if you are not: trying to understand it will MAKE you a crazy person.

"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."

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

It's been a good many years since I had my nose in my copy, but I am glad I was able to read it at a time of my life that I could attain some appreciation and understanding of it. Right now, I don't think I could focus my attention long enough to get back into it.

I haven't sought out Hofstadter's other works, but if I could get that mindset back, I'd definitely consider it. I Am a Strange Loop is on my want-to-read list.

And if the surname seems familiar, a character in a popular TV show was given his surname on purpose by the writers.

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.

the Amber books by Zelazny

These are almost cheating, but I’ll go with Gravity’s Rainbow followed by Blood Meridian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity%27s_Rainbow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian

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!)

I'll throw Locked Tomb Trilogy.

It's a good mystery series that's well paced (for me) in that I had my moments of realisation only about a chapter before each reveal most of the time.

One of the books is written in second person, and it's about an unreliable narrator, so that's... fun? I spent a lot of my time, when not reading the book, wondering who the 'I' was to narrative's 'you', then not being able to answer how the 'I' knew the things the 'I' knew, so 'I' couldn't be the 'I' I think 'I' am. But no-one else makes sense, and the second guessing continues.

Also, doesn't do mystery through vague language much, which I dislike most of the time. The viewpoint characters are doing their best, you know what they know, it's just they don't know enough yet. You never really zoom out into an omnipotent narrator, to then not describe what's happening beyond vibes.

All the characters are unlikable though, the universe is unlikeable, it does unlikeable things to everyone, so their unlikability is undertandable at least. But, if you can't get past a purposefully unlikeable cast, that might be a barrier. I don't want to meet any of them (the ones I would be most willing to meet, I'm sure I just don't know well enough), but I'm content reading about their exploits, or rather how they're exploited.

Probably The Silmarillion. It reads like a fucking poem that goes on for hundreds of pages.

Flowers for Algernon

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Set in a post apocalyptic England where all of society has broken down, even language. Stick with it, your brain will adjust and you won’t notice after the first chapter or so.

Children of Time was an interesting concept that I thought came together well. It's a science fiction book with a split narrative where one half is about science experiments on a distant planet, and the other is about a colony ship that is searching for a new home. Because of the vastness of space, there are long stretches of time that are covered (I believe the book ultimately takes place over a thousand years). The two narratives overlap at different points.

Dungeon Crawler Carl may have one of the weirdest and fun plots I've read in a while. A guy named Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat named Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk are given the opportunity to be on the galaxy's favorite game show. The show is very similar to an RPG with fighting monsters, level ups, rare items, etc. Also, due to unfortunate timing, Carl is participating in the game without wearing any pants.

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.

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.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway.

The book Is set in a near future Britain where surveillance is omnipotent and the accused are interrogated by detectives who read their thoughts.

A suspect dies during an interrogation, highly unusual, so a detective is brought in to investigate the case. She begins to review the thoughts of the suspect and finds not just the suspects memories, but whole other persons whose lives intersect and intertwine created a tapestry narrative that runs counter to reality.

It’s a really Interesting read. I will fully acknowledge its overly long and needed a strong editing pass. But I first read it a decade ago and I still think about it regularly.

Beyond Good and Evil

"House of Leaves" made me throw it against the wall.

I did like "XX" a novel by Rian Hughes. Different characters 'speak' in different typefaces, and the story zips through time and space.

"The Iron Dream" by Norman Spinrad is a massive mindfuck. The forward explains that Adolph Hitler came to America in 1922 and managed to find work illustrating science fiction pulps. Eventually he felt confident enough to start writing in English. This book is his masterpiece.

"Flashman" by George Macdonald Fraser. The author follows the career of a successful Victorian gentleman, General Sir Harry Flashman, VC. Flashy is a slaver, rapist, murderer, liar, cheat, coward, and scoundrel who has decided to write his memoirs for posterity.

China Mieville's The City and the City would be my pick. I started with him on Kraken, and while I might prefer that book it's essentially his version of "Kitchen Sink" Urban Fantasy, where the moment you understand it's supposed to take place in a version of London where everyday magic is hiding in plain sight the rest of the book is easy enough to wrap your head around

Not as much with "The City," basically it takes place in a pair of micro-states that overlap each other and it's a murder mystery where the victim was a graduate student who was on the verge of uncovering the truth about the secret history of the double city. I went into it thinking that I understood how the world worked and soon realized that the whole point is it's not supposed to make sense

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.

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.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

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.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, by Oliver Sacks

Not me, but my spouse read House of Leaves

Maybe The Sybil, by Par Lagerkvist, a sort of parable.

https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-sibyl/

I really enjoyed The Raw Shark Texts. It's a weird page turner. Has a cat.

The Raw Shark Texts