Biblioracle: Looking for something weird to read? Our 8 suggestions
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Because I want to make sure that the person to whom I’m recommending a book will at least like the book, I often shy away from recommending “weird” books.
By weird, I mean books where people might hear the premise and wonder where the heck such a book came from, or perhaps a book that doesn’t seem so strange in concept, but in execution, things get very weird indeed.
Recommending a weird book comes with the risk that a reader will be totally turned off. By sticking primarily to the un-weird, I give myself a bit of a safety net in terms of the ultimate response.
But I often like a good, weird book that throws convention to the wind and takes me to unexpected places.
I trust that I’m not alone. Here are some books for those in search of the weird.
There is probably no writer more delightfully weird than Italo Calvino. His collection, “The Complete Cosmicomics,” gathers stories spanning his entire career that are a mix of philosophical investigation, astrophysical speculation, and straight-up fabulation — truly a one-of-a-kind artist.
On the surface, Rachel Ingalls’ little wonder of a novel, “Mrs. Caliban” is the story of a disaffected housewife being swept away in an unexpected romance. The thing is, the object of Mrs. Caliban’s affection is a swamp creature that escaped from a government lab. Writing in The New Yorker, Lidija Haas calls Ingalls’ style “hallucinatory realism,” which is another way of saying “weird.”
Authors have been writing experimental novels for many years, and perhaps the weirdest of the bunch is Laurence Sterne’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” published in installments between 1759 and 1767. Modeled after “Don Quixote” (a pretty weird book itself), “Shandy” is told in a non-chronological order, and involves narrative asides from both the titular character and its author, all of which involve the reader in the task of puzzling through this very odd book.
In “Temporary” by Hilary Leichter, our narrator experiences a series of literal temp jobs, from swabbing the deck of a pirate ship to being corporate chairman of the board and even being an assassin’s assistant. This absurdist premise quickly begins to feel quite real as Leichter explores the nature of work and belonging and how we try to find meaning as we make our way in the world.
On its surface, Kiese Laymon’s “Long Division” is a fish-out-of-water, coming of age story set against a backdrop of systemic racism in America about young City Coldson, a city kid sent to live with his country relatives, but mix in a cross-temporal doppelgänger, time travel and a laptop heist and you have an original stew unlike any book I’ve read in recent years.
Chris Bachelder isn’t a household name — though his 2016 book, “The Throwback Special” was a National Book Award finalist — but he is perhaps our most consistent purveyor of the weird. “The Throwback Special” concerns a group of men who gather annually to recreate the moment Joe Theismann had his leg snapped on “Monday Night Football.” “Bear v. Shark” is about a pay-per-view contest between the two creatures in the title. But his weirdest is “U.S.!” which imagines muckraker and author Upton Sinclair (“The Jungle”) as an immortal being, repeatedly brought back to life by the political left, after he is murdered (sometimes in very elaborate ways) by the political right.
Looking at my list, I suddenly realize that what I like about these weird books is how much they tell me about the world because they insist on departing from reality.
In weirdness, there is truth.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
2. “Daisy Jones & The Six” by Taylor Jenkins Reid
3. “Someone Else’s Shoes” by Jojo Moyes
4. “The Shore” by Katie Runde
5. “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens
— Melissa B., Naperville
Lily King’s “Writers & Lovers” is the book that broke my pandemic reading slump a few years back now, and for that I will be always grateful, and also eager to recommend it when a good candidate comes along.
1. “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare
2. “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
3. “The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller
4. “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
5. “Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett
— Brianna P., Chicago
So, I have to try to get at least one weird book into the recommendations, and that’s going to be here, a classic novel that’s also quite weird, “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner.
1. “The Night Fire” by Michael Connelly
2. “The Well of Ascension” by Brandon Sanderson
3. “Providence” by Max Barry
4. “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer
5. “The Razor’s Edge” by W. Somerset Maugham
— Rylan T., Queens, New York
Those last two books concern the search for truth and meaning in life, so I’m going to lean into that impulse and suggest a classic novel about exactly that, “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com
