Ask Lemmy

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

The Raw Shark Texts

Maybe The Sybil, by Par Lagerkvist, a sort of parable.

https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-sibyl/

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

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.

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.

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?"

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

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!

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.