At one point in my life I read voraciously (and wrote, too). This seems long ago; majoring in English lit did something to stomp the fascination with fiction out of me. There remain a stable of established, canonical works that I will always love (Ulysses, Sound and the Fury, Rainbow, yadda blah blah) of varying degrees of experimentalism, but there are also a number of books (of varying degrees of plain mentalism) that I read prior to college that I have a fondness for that didn't get the kind of critical attention I would have expected (well they probably did but you know).

I owe my discovery of most of these to library book sales and the Walden Books remainder tables.

Weird novels I read b/w the ages of 14 and 21 that I continue to harbour affection for:

1. The Wanting Seed: Anthony Burgess. I actually still own a large number of Burgess books, and I think I only ever finished this, M/F, and A Clockwork Orange, and Clockwork Orange is probably the least weird of the three. Burgess's fiction just seems so incredibly dense and odd to me now that I don't think any of this stuff would get published in this day and age.

2. Kleinzeit: Russel Hoban. I've tried to finish numerous other non-childrens' Hoban books since and none of them do as much for me as this one, which I loved when I was 13. With characters such as Hospital, Bed, and, er, other inanimate objects, dealing with a sick protagonist, this caused a lasting paranoia in me about pissing in two divergent streams. Tom Robbins always seemed like a sad copy of this book to me.

3. Crome Yellow: Aldus Huxley. I've read many other more famous Huxley books but none of them had dwarves in them like this did. Or did it? Honestly can't remember.

4. Fabrications: Adam Mars Jones. I see he has a new novel out. I haven't been interested in any of his other writings but the short stories in this are strange, or were to me when I was 13. Hoosh Mi. ? This was the type of Granta fiction which I devoured as a pretentious teenager. I think I had more patience then for this sort of thing, or maybe I just had more time.

5. Wearing Dad's Head: Barry Yourgrau. This was a moderately successful book of short stories and Yourgrau went on to do some stuff for NPR, maybe? He's probably still writing, I have no idea. I remember I read this around the same time as Girl with the Curious Hair and preferred this. Strange that DFW is now so established. (actually I now see that Yourgrau also has a blog that he just updated after two years of blank-ness!)

6. Conducting Bodies: Claude Simone. I read the english translation which was probably not very accurate. It was incredibly weird though and inspired an attempt to also write a piece where every sentence could be read three different ways. I made it two pages in. So that's probably why Simone won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I occasionally update a shitty blog.

Labels: books