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?
Library at Mount Char is bonkers. I loved it. It made me realize I like stories that dare to go big.
How many times are you AI bots going to ask this question?
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.
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.
I don’t think could be adapted into anything
A Doom wad, maybe.
Man, Doom really does run on anything.
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 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.”
Halfway through reading HoL, I posted to my groupchat “This book is a war crime.”
12/10, cannot recommend it enough.
Thank you! Its on my TBR.
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.
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.
“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.
Thank you for your recomendations! Gonn check them out!
Enjoy
Not me, but my spouse read House of Leaves
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!
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 liked Amber Diceless RPG. Never really got into the books tho.
Thank you!
“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!
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!)
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.
Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Really weird, abstract and interesting. Anyone labeling it as Dark Academia or a magic school book is both completely correct and dead wrong at the same time.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar both have very interesting concepts and great executions.
When it comes to interesting concepts in fantasy/sci-fi, Adrian Tchaikovsky has some bangers. Elder Race, Children of Time, or Alien Clay are some random example recs.
China Mieville’s New Crobuzon trilogy is really out there too. 2nd book is the best and can be read independently but does spoil some things from the first.
Flowers for Algernon
Only book to make me cry.
Read that book and it destroyed me.
Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera is one of the most different stories I’ve read. Just so much different about it that it’s hard to even describe. Plus a twist end that actually had me going “no fuckin way” out loud.
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!
City of Glass by Paul Auster is one of my favorites. A novelist gets a phone call from someone who misdialed them, trying to reach a private detective. The novelist decides to wing it and pretends to be the detective, getting hired to tail someone the client suspects will attempt murder.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but it gets very weird and metatextual. It’s a very surprising and sorrowful mystery novel.
And if comics are more your taste, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli did a very good adaptation of the novel back in 1994. Looks like it’s been out of print for a while, but if you can find it, the ways Mazzuchelli renders the story are absolute magic.
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
I the city and loved it. It took a while for me to start enjoy the reading but it was worth it.
Mieville has so many fantastic books, he singlehandedly got be back into reading a couple years ago.
