What's the most unique/different book you ever read?

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!)

Flowers for Algernon

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

Let me look through my growing library-called-a-room:

It might be considered a "safe," or "of course it is," pick, but "Love Me For Who I Am," would be my answer. It is a series that helped me understand myself a lot, and I credit it for helping me understand the complicated feelings I had inside when searching for who I really was and how to engage with the world around me. On the heels of that, "Is Love The Answer?" is a one-shot that is a phenomenal read exploring the spectrum of Aromanticism. Imagine that recommendation coming from me cough bio cough, but seriously, those two reads I think can safely be called cornerstones of my reading journey. I have read many amazing series(SAO:Progressive the LN(not the fake other ones), Drugstore In Another World, When Will Ayumu Make His Move? and otherwise), but those two really helped lay out in print what I could not put into words, and showed that there was an answer.

All of the ones I mentioned I would recommend, but those first two would be my genuine answers to your question.

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.

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.

Astonished to see no mention of FEERSUM ENDJINN by Iain M Banks. It's one of his few standalone SF novels and its... Weird. Oh boy is it weird. Multiple parallel interweaving narratives that connect up in truly bizarre ways, a story that takes place across different planes of existence/reality, and parts of narrated entirely in phonetic block capitals like the title. And that's before even getting into how mind-bending the setting is. It's weird, it's brilliant, it's easily the strangest book from an already strange writer. Absolutely recommended, though it's not unlikely you'll get to the end and think "What the fuck did I just read?"

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/

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.

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

The Raw Shark Texts

Beyond Good and Evil

i just started battle royale, they're still on the bus. i've seen the film of course so interested to see how it compares. filth by irvine welsh and under the skin by michel faber are my other favourite books with film adaptations, i've high hopes for this

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.

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

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.

Library at Mount Char is bonkers. I loved it. It made me realize I like stories that dare to go big.

It was unique and different, and a nightmare to read: Dhalgren

Aware by Anthony De Mello stands out as a book that's not quite written like a book.

This might be stretching the definition of "read" but I love skimming the Voynich Manuscript every once in a while. It reminds me of Tolkien's Tengwar

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.

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

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 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!

Just finished reading Playground by Richard Powers. Apart from the continuation errors and semi-incomprehensible structure where half the time you don't know which character or time you're in, I'm starting to wonder if the whole book wasn't a commentary on AI hallucinations.

I like "life at reset" series. Basically guy is playing mmo and on top of leader boards. He gets betrayed by his "friend" ends up as a goblin and can't log out. Through the books explores concepts like rights of a true Ai, dealing with emotions of betrayal, advancements in technology, sacrifice for family, purpose of your life and more. It's 6 books so not a quick read but interesting and thought provoking.

How many times are you AI bots going to ask this question?

Edit: This is the fourth time I've seen this exact post.