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?
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.
I learned of this book at a time during which I was unable to appreciate it. I’m currently tentatively unpacking my books and am hoping to find it, but also am kind of nervous to based on its reputation.
Thank you! Its on my TBR.
Reading House of Leaves feels like you’re looking at something you’re not supposed to be seeing.
It’s also a book that I don’t think could be adapted into anything. I’m not sure how you would even make it an eBook.
Watch a video on the Doom mod, My House. Pretty much the only way I can imagine it being adapted.
My House is brilliant, but I wouldn’t call it an adaptation exactly. I think you can make the same argument for Backrooms (especially the movie). Both draw heavily from HoL, but only in very limited ways. House of Leaves can only inspire, it can never be recreated.
I feel like it’s another piece of HoL media, adding to the HoL “documentation”.
I don’t think could be adapted into anything
A Doom wad, maybe.
Man, Doom really does run on anything.
Came looking for this recommendation. I’ve read a lot, but nothing else is quite like House of Leaves. It reads like something discovered rather than written. And something that perhaps shouldn’t have been discovered.
Yeah that was my first thought. Didn’t finish it because life, but it was really a weird, different experience reading that book. I liked it tho.
Halfway through reading HoL, I posted to my groupchat “This book is a war crime.”
12/10, cannot recommend it enough.
“I read it, but I’m not sure if I finished it.”
“Oh, you don’t recall whether you finished it or not?”
“I recall it perfectly.”
“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.”
These books are a 1-2 punch. First you read through it and smile when you solve the puzzle. Then you read it again and marvel at how much was hidden in plain sight.
For me, getting to those ends was discovering the book I just read was an entirely different story than the one I thought I was reading. Well done, Gene Wolfe, you crazy bastard.
Thanks!
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.
I got 200 pages into Gödel Escher Bach, meaning to pick it up again. And yet, still, it sits on my shelf daring me to read it.
It’s been 11 years.
We might be the same person. Started it, loved it, still have yet to finish it. I’ll probably finish this one before I finish Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s a fun read. Just dense.
Thank you!
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.
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!)
Thank you!
Anything I’ve read by NK Jemisin has left my brain utterly reworked in the most fantastic of ways!
Broken earth!
I think it did Something quite novel. I honestly didn’t absolutely love it while reading it but I also couldn’t stop thinking about it for awhile after. I feel that speaks some volume to what it does.
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.
I was thinking of mentioning Roadmarks. It is a fascinating book that bounces between two main characters and moves back and forth in time, which makes sense since the story revolves around a road that traverses time itself. One can get on the highway at one ramp and take an exit to a different time period.
I particularly like that it starts with a chapter labeled Two, followed by a chapter labeled One, followed by another Two. It just goes back and forth between One and Two. It took me a while to realize that the chapter headers were really referencing the timeline they followed and thus which of the two main characters were involved in that chapter. I would say more but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who chooses to read it.
While I loved the Amber books, the Corwin ones anyway, Roadmarks in one of my favorite Zelazny books behind only Lord of Light.
Btw, did you know that Roger Zelazny and George R. R. Martin were very close friends? Martin has even tried to get a Roadmarks series developed on HBO? In other Zelazny news, Stephen Colbert has been trying to get a Chroncles of Amber series made. Sadly, both of these stories are years old and nothing seems to be coming of them.
Thank you!
I liked Amber Diceless RPG. Never really got into the books tho.
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.
Wow! Gonna check it out! Thanks!
Beyond Good and Evil
Probably The Silmarillion. It reads like a fucking poem that goes on for hundreds of pages.
Gomna give it a try. Thank you!
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!
These are almost cheating, but I’ll go with Gravity’s Rainbow followed by Blood Meridian.
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 parts of it I read I thought very well of (from what I can remember), but every time I pick that book up it’s a slog. The only reason I persevere is because people keeps saying “If you loved [book I loved] you have to read Gravity’s Rainbow”. Now I want to finish it just to see if it ever clicks. I don’t know if I ever will. There are so many books that are more fun for me to read.
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
Krabat by Ottfried Preußler. It had quite the dark undertone. A constant present real threat and dagger hovering over every character. This dark tone is present from page 1 to the end. As a teen it quite formed me retrospectively. Worth a read for teens but also older. I do not want to spoiler anything. But im saying that murder, willful starvation and death are ever present topics even in lighter moments of the book.
The Kanguru book Series. Sooo much fun reading! The third book was not mine very much. Still want to read the new 5th book. Lots of satire and hilariouse. Read it on the train and i had to hold back laughter so often!
Then The Capital. I was suprised how scientificly analytical it is writen and worded. Planing to read my copy of The Critiques of Kant, lots of Leibnitz (but he wrote mostly in french so i have to learn french first), Hume, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Hegel, Lock, Hutcheson and Berkeley
But also some stuff about architecture like De Architecttura and Palladios Quattro Libri Dell’ Architectura
Thanks! Gonna give a try.
I only realised what the mill was milling when the man with the red feather came when I read Krabat as an adult. Then I looked a bit more into it and realised that this would actually happen in real life.
Yep. This book is quite dark for its target audience if you think about it
Flowers for Algernon
Read that book and it destroyed me.
Only book to make me cry.
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.
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.
I came to Children of Time via the path: A Fire upon the Deep -> A Deepness in the Sky -> Children of Time, which makes some kind of sense. The former two are by Vernor Vinge.
A Deepness in the Sky has some very obvious similarities - vast stretches of time, a specific kind of alien being, and certain kinds of encounters with them.
I read it first and I think I enjoyed it more, although both were very good. One weird little niggle I had with Children of Time was using the same name for characters across different generations. There was some in-text justification for it that I don’t remember and didn’t convince me.
Yeah, that name thing threw me for a loop for a while. The explanation was that >!memories are passed down through generations, so they kept names as well since they are kind of a continuation of the same person!<. I also read the second book, Children of Ruin, and it also plays around with similar names for different reasons. If the trend continues, I expect similar on the other books in the series.
I’ll need to read the other books you mentioned. They sound interesting! I’ve come to enjoy the books I’ve read with people living through long stretches of time. It’s a completely different genre, but Circe by Madeline Miller also deals with this.
I thought though that the original justification for the name re-use was not that? Maybe I have forgotten something though. But as I remember it the thing you’re referring to wasn’t actually mentioned at all until after the first name re-use so it would’ve been difficult to use it as a reason.
Children of Ruin is also a good read, and the stuff about language there was also reminiscent of some elements in A Deepness in the Sky.
One thing I found unsettling (and not necessarily in a positive way) in these books is how things were going to shit on some of these ships. I found it unnerving for some reason…
Thanks.
