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!

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

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.

Beyond Good and Evil

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!)

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?”

Flowers for Algernon

These are almost cheating, but I’ll go with Gravity’s Rainbow followed by Blood Meridian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian

“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.”

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.

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.

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

The Raw Shark Texts

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.

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.

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.