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?
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Thank you!
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.
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.”
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 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.
Thank you! Its on my TBR.
“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;
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!
I liked Amber Diceless RPG. Never really got into the books tho.
“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.”
Thanks!
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.
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.
Anathem by Stephenson fits this bill. Cold open to a universe with no exposition and no viewpoint character that gets things explained to them. It’s pretty fucked up until you begin to piece together the clues and build the world logic for yourself.
The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson (not to be confused with that other Robert Wilson) deserves an honorable mention. The story is driven by the appearance of massive monument commemorating a military victory 20 years in the future. As the story progresses more of these future monuments appear as the story drives towards the conditions that will initiate the war.
Many of Stephensons books are like that. I like Snow Crash for the world building that obviously went into the writing, but you have to figure it out along the way.
I absolutely loved Anathem. Very underappreciated for a Stephenson book.
I started Anathem and threw it down after twenty pages of Stephenson being Stephenson.
Then someone told me it was worth slogging through the first 200 pages to get to the plot.
I ended up finishing it.
Loved the concept!
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
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
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!
The reason I loved The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that it’s in second person. It’s a conversation Hamid had with himself as a young Pakistani-American immigrant, torn between two worlds in post 9/11 America. It’s short but evocative.
I once saw in a book store a book called conversations with god 2 or something like that, I picked up thinking let’s see what kind of bullshit is in here, I read a random page and I thought, hey that wasn’t bad let’s see another page, oh this seems good. Then I bought it.
The book was a dialogue between the author and god, what surprised me the most is that it never felt religious and covered concepts I’ve seen on many other places decades later.
I ended liking the trilogy, and it played a big role on shaping my current beliefs (an odd mix of mostly atheism with a bit of faith on something that is actually irrelevant). I avoided looking the author up just in case he ended up creating a cult or something.
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.
Alan Lightman’s book Einstein’s Dreams. It uses stories to explore how time moves, or could move if the laws of the Universe were different.
Omg thats so awesome! Thank you!
