Weirdest Books

"Weird" is one of the slipperiest words in book criticism. It can mean a haunted house, a novel without the letter E, or an encyclopedia of fake animals written in a language nobody can read. Most lists of the weirdest books ever pile these together. The page below sorts them by what kind of weird they are, because the joy of reading any of these is partly the joy of recognizing the shape of the trick.

Typographic and ergodic

These are books where the page itself is part of the story. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is the obvious one: text spirals, runs sideways, and shrinks to a single word per page when the characters crawl through a tunnel. His Only Revolutions asks you to physically rotate the book every eight pages to follow the second narrator. Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts hides a flipbook shark made of typed letters in the middle of the novel. Reading any of these is closer to navigating a maze than turning pages.

Constraint writing

The premise is simple and demented: write a book under a rule that almost guarantees failure, then finish it anyway. Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby in 1939 without using the letter E across 50,000 words, and reportedly tied the E-key down so he couldn't cheat. James Joyce spent 17 years on Finnegans Wake, building a dream-language of portmanteaus from more than 60 tongues, and ended the book on a sentence that loops back to the first line. Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler runs on another kind of constraint: every odd chapter is the opening of a different novel you never get to finish, and the second-person narrator is you, the reader, trying to find the rest.

Illustrated and unreadable-by-design

Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus is one of the strangest books published in the twentieth century, and it has the rare virtue of being unreadable on purpose. It looks like an illustrated encyclopedia of an alien planet, with couples melting into crocodiles and fruit that bleeds, and the captions are written in a script Serafini has said even he can no longer parse. You don't read it so much as wander it.

Cult and decadent

Some books are weird because nobody asked for them and nothing else is shaped like them. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760) is the original meta-novel: a black mourning page, a marbled page, blank chapters, and a narrator who can't manage to get himself born until volume three. Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature is mostly a man alone in a house with his perfumes, his books, and a tortoise he gilds with jewels until it dies. William Burroughs's Naked Lunch was cut up and reshuffled, and Burroughs claimed the chapters could be read in any order. Katherine Dunn's Geek Love is a family saga about carnival parents who breed their own freak-show children using radioisotopes, and somehow the book is also tender.

Pick the kind of weird that sounds most like the book-shaped hole you're trying to fill, and start there.