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?
“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.”
EDIT: I just saw that the current Humble Bundle Deal for ebooks has 38 Gene Wolfe books (for $20 for the whole set). This includes “The Book of the New Sun” (3 books).
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!
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.
I liked Amber Diceless RPG. Never really got into the books tho.
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
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.
Thank you!
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.
Loved the concept!
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.
I absolutely loved Anathem. Very underappreciated for a Stephenson book.
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.
Whats your favorite book of each writer mentioned?
These are almost cheating, but I’ll go with Gravity’s Rainbow followed by Blood Meridian.
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
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.
Flowers for Algernon
Read that book and it destroyed me.
Only book to make me cry.
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.
Thank you!
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.
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.
LMAAAAAAO. I have ADHD and thats why i love unique books. The different format makes focus because of novity.
Beyond Good and Evil
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.
“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
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.
Murikami has a beautiful prose.
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!
