Odd books

[orpheus]

"Of Walking in Ice
Munich - Paris 23 November - 14 December 1974" by Werner Herzog:
http://www.rampub.com/culture+theory/978-0-9796121-0-7


Codex Serafinianus by Luigi Serafini

[Gawdzilla]

Gormenghast.

[FBM]

Cosmic Bandito. Trust me on this. You won't regret reading it. I think Feck, most of all, would appreciate it...

[Bella Fortuna]

Where's Ashton with his Dullest Book Ever (TM) ?

[Rum]

Perfume - odd but amazing!

[Psychoserenity]

Gormenghast.

I read the first one, 'Titus Groan', and loved it because it was so different to anything else I've ever read. (mind you, I haven't read nearly as many books as I would have liked to). I keep intending to get the others at some point.

[Bella Fortuna]

Perfume - odd but amazing!

That's a great novel...I read it in the late '80s and I still remember having been oddly moved by it.

[Reverend Blair]

Small Engines and Basic Agricultural Mechanics. I have the 1926 or '28 edition (can't quite make out the type) and it's one of the oddest, and most informative reads ever. Likely the weirdest thing is that a small engine in the context of this book is pretty much anything not powered by steam, although I think that's likely a hold-over from earlier editions. It has a complete chapter about connecting wood and steel components, including the properties and suitabilities of various types of wood. It urges you to use a blacksmith instead of ferrier to make pistons for you, since ferriers are really only good at making horse shoes, and recommends that you buy piston rings from a reputable manufacturer.

If you really want a little bit of technological displacement, give this book a shot. It's kind of like Steam Punk meets James Herriot.

[Mephistopheles]

House of Leaves.

[virphen]

This was one of the weirder (but bloody good) novels I've read

http://www.amazon.com/Pornographers-Poe ... 1932360239

[Bella Fortuna]

Here's a bizarre book I own (though this is not my copy):

[JimC]

"Jonathon Livingstone Seagull"...

"In watermelon sugar"

[orpheus]

House of Leaves.

(the color, of course. "House" always in blue.)

[Feck]

Here's a bizarre book I own (though this is not my copy):

You just had to torment me didn't you Bella

[CookieJon]

"In watermelon sugar"

Sombrero Fallout was good too.

[orpheus]

Pretty much anything by Alain Robbe-Grillet. I'm particularly fond of La Maison de Rendez-Vous, an intrigue thriller set in Hong Kong, centering on the Lady Ava's "Blue Villa" - in which events recur multiple times, from differnet perspectives, and always slightly different. It subversively fractures spatial and temporal descriptions - and what's really disturbing is that try as you might, the pieces of the puzzle simply don't fit perfectly. You can try to trace a timeline and a map for the whole thing - but there will always be inconsistencies. Plus, the book is very sexy.

[orpheus]

Imagination Morte Imaginez by Samuel Beckett. SB's first draft of this novel of ran some 300 pages. He edited and edited - and the finished work is four pages long. It was published as a complete novel, because that's what it is. It really does read as the ultra-concentrated distillation of something that was powerful to begin with.

Even more extraordinary is that he made his own English translation (as Imagination Dead Imagine ) that is every bit as good as the original. (He did this with a lot of his works.)

It's rather hard these days to find a copy of the original printing. But it's easily available in collections (such as The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett - a very worthwhile book.

Full text of the English version here.

[Pappa]

Um... not sure how odd it is, depends on your point of view:

Shamanic Snuffs or Entheogenic Errhines by Jonathan Ott


How about this one too...

Tobacco and Shamanism in South America by Johannes Wilbert

[CookieJon]

A surprisingly good read...

[JimC]

"In watermelon sugar"

Sombrero Fallout was good too.

Remind me of the author's name...

A surprisingly good read...

Well I'll be buggered...

[CookieJon]

"In watermelon sugar"

Sombrero Fallout was good too.

Remind me of the author's name...

Richard Brautigan (I went through a "phase" when I was a lad and read everything of his I could get my hands on. They're all, well...odd!)

[Xamonas Chegwé]

There is only one truly odd book.

[AshtonBlack]

Anything by Robert Rankin.
Odd, but funny.

[JimC]

"In watermelon sugar"

Sombrero Fallout was good too.

Remind me of the author's name...

Richard Brautigan (I went through a "phase" when I was a lad and read everything of his I could get my hands on. They're all, well...odd!)

Thanks, mate, I should have remembered...

Definitely odd, and very much an expression of a time...

[orpheus]

The Book of Sand