Books

I'll say Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle. It's a non-linear story about a disfigured suicide attempt survivor undergoing litigation because he created an immersive fantasy game and two kids took it too seriously.

....Wow. Trying to boil it down to one sentence does not do it justice. But fundamentally it's a book about loneliness and how that can affect people in surprising and different ways. The loose, jumping timeline makes it feel like you're watching a car crash video after reading a news story about it: you already know exactly how it's going to end, but watching it happen kicks so viscerally.

And on the topic of John Darnielle, I also love Universal Harvester. It's the least horrific horror novel I've ever read. It's hard to point to anything particularly bad that happens in the story, but the mood is so intense and overbearing that you start to feel trapped, boxed in. There's a trick the author pulls about halfway through that was so subtle but so good: with just one word, the entire story got blown apart in a way that terrified me.

Flowers for Algernon.

I would say "The Possibility of an Island" by Houellebecq. I don't recall much about the novel, but I remember that I was confused while reading it. It's a strange book.

Here's a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Possibility_of_an_Island

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad as in weird unique, not a book I'd read again though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Darkness?wprov=sfla1

of course I knew of Conrad but i decided to read it because I loved Tom Neil's book An Island to Oneself (I've read that three times), non fiction. He was enamoured of Conrad.

https://archive.org/details/islandtooneself0000tomn

I picked up a copy of a book called Raft by Stephen Baxter a few years back, knowing nothing about it. It was a bizarre story involving a group of humans getting stuck in a universe where gravity is significantly stronger than our own. I remember there was this strange flesh planet made of dead bodies. Interesting concepts but not sure I'd recommend it!

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson has probably the most imaginative plot of any book I’ve read in recent memory.

House of Leaves

Last year I read "The Fifth Season" by NK Jemison. It's a trilogy, but this is the name if the first book. Very interesting story, very weird and kind of depressing. However, what makes me suggest it here is that it's written in second person, so it's like the reader is the main character and the narrator is telling you your own story that you forgot. "You picked up your things and went out the door." I've never read a novel written that way before and it was really cool.

Structure-wise, probably House of Leaves. It uses appendices and several categories of footnotes extensively, to the point that the footnotes begin to dominate the pages (putting it lightly). There's so much flipping back and forth that an onlooker would assume you're reading a choose-your-own-adventure book.

Content-wise, it's hard to choose. I'll say The Illuminatus Trilogy, which is a semi-absurdist study of authority and human nature, through the lens of a labyrinthine web of conspiracy theories, jumping between at least a dozen character perspectives.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Embassytown by China Mieville, absolutely incredible, almost everything about it is unique. He’s become one of my favorite authors and everything I’ve read by him is original in concept. Embassytown takes the cake though. The aliens are so strange, it’s the most alien feeling I’ve ever had. My brain and thinking is still affected by what I read over a year ago.

_Blindsight_by Peter Watts is also great with original concepts and delivery.

House or Leaves for the reasons already mentioned by others.

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer. It's not exactly a story but a collection of artifacts: some short stories, poems, comics, an encyclopedia full of footnotes etc. that come together to build a world. Some of it is hard to read but the end result is worth it.

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin. Again a collection instead of a story. In each chapter a different world is described with its people and culture. And Le Guin is great at building worlds. I found this format very relaxing to read.

Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I haven't read all books (there's too many of them) but if you like satire through fiction you'll find a lot of it here on a variety of topics.

And I think I'll stop here before this becomes a huge list.

Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin. It is a fictional ethnography written from the far future about a culture in the near future after life after some apocalyptic event in the very near future. Maybe 1/6th of it is like a traditional narrative about a girl who grows up stuck between two cultures. Her mother is a member of the Kesh which is the culture the book studies and her father is of a different culture called the Condor. Their cultures are dramatically different. The Kesh are anarchic, egalitarian, matriarchal and peaceful. The Condor are capitalist, patriarchal and war like. The rest of the book goes into detail about the Kesh. It tells some of their legends, fairy tales. It describes their performance art. It describes their creation myth. It talks about their holidays and their relationships.

Le Guin is my favorite author ever. The Dispossessed and the Left Hand of Darkness are such incredible books. Le Guin is a very strong anarchist and she uses this book and many of her other works to criticize capitalism. But none of them do so in a way as unique and artistic as Always Coming Home. It's moving, it's touching. It really takes you to another world and culture and helps you to see some of the assumptions you have just because you live in this world. This book is a work of absolute genius. I don't think any other work of art I've ever read has really conveyed something ideological as so personal and moving.

It's a slow burn and parts of it will baffle and confuse you. But the totality of it is so incredibly unique and artistic that I think it's worth suffering through the rougher edges.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is mindblowingly impressive and cool, and I think well predicts a lot in it current culture and society, including technologically. Best part beyond the story is he’s just one of the most talented writers who ever lived.

Blood Meridian (McCarthy) is the only book I finished, turned to the first page and read again immediately because I didn't feel like I got it the first time.

Confederacy of Dunces (Toole) has some of the most unique characters I've ever read. The story of how it got published and won a Pulitzer is almost as crazy as the plot.

There is no Antimemetics division (qntm) is rather derivative of the "SCP Foundation" weblore, but it drills down so hard on the idea of creatures that consume, steal, or are powered by human memory that the plot will bend your mind and delight your imagination. Best science fiction I read in forever.

Slaughterhouse Five deserves a mention.

Quarantine by Greg Egan.

It's a really tough read. Simultaneous quantum multiverse tough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(Egan_novel)

Easily house of leaves. I've never seen another book play with formatting like that. It has you reading upside down, backwards, all over the place.

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. A challenge (and a little silly?) to be sure, but vivid and mind bending.

Self-Reference Engine by Toh Enjoe takes the most unique approach to story structure of anything I've ever read.

Not a book but a comic. I remember being incredibly down that summer and getting recommended Zot! by Scott McCloud and it up my mood. I think that it’s one of the best comic ever written

I realise I have read nowhere near enough books to answer this definitively.

I'd say war and peace is actually the stand out, but then I know other Russian authors like dostoevsky did similar books. War and place's u illness is that tolstoy writes like a kid who doesn't realise that curtailment/limitation is a core facets of book writing - he tries and succeeds in writing the lives of many people over the course of many years; it's big. You see it and go "oh that's it? I could read that, actually." But when you sit down to read it, you're hit eith another big Ness- it's detail. Tolstoy is in no rush to get the story off it's feet. He wants you feel everything and note every detail. Live through the soiree, the mundanity, and the trauma as well as the glory at the end of the book. That's war and peace.

At the moment I'm reading Chaucer's Canterbury tales and even though it's one of the very oldest "classics" of English literature, (beaten out by beowulf and maybe something else) I think people still "sleep upon it." There's something really special about how sequenced and ordered it is, and the novel is a scherezade (a story is told within a story being told within a story). Also portrays medieval culture through the lens of medieval contempories, and it's surprisingly close to the stereotype - there's lots of crude and physical humour, adultery and the threat of physical reprisal for all manner of things. Great - maybe even essential -for learning how to effectively write medieval settings.

My standard response is still Ridley Walker, though there are many other contenders ;)

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić.

It’s a novel written in the form of three (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) interwoven but mutually-contradictory encyclopedias, with events and characters spanning over a thousand years of history.