what are your favorite weird books?

I love this, too. There’s been an animated cartoon made of it, and it “inspired” an episode of the original Outer Limits. There have been a number of sequels and imitators, of which I recommend two:

Sphereland (don’t recall author) takes this to the realm of General Relativity, introducing the idea of the Expansion of the Universe, made somewhat more comprehensible by showing the expansion of the Flatland universe as an expanding sphere.

The Planiverse by A.K. Dewdney, one-time columnisst for Scientific American. Dewdney apparently ran a newsletter about the Planiverse for years (Martin Gardner reported on it in his SA column), and he distilled the best bits into this one story. The Planiverse is a Flatland with an actual working physics, chemistry, and biology. It’s not just geometric characters inhabiting a plane with vaguely defined gravity – Dewdney’s Planiverse creatures live on discs with 2-D gravity and have a well-worked-out biology and anatomy. Some of the conclusions and ramifications are pretty interesting, but it’s all consistent. (How do you fight a war in a Planiverse? At most, two combatants can see each other at a time, so it comes down to a series of individual combats. How can planiversian circulatory and respiratory systems work without cutting the creatures in half? etc.)
Other random weird books:

** Rats, Lice, and History: The Biography of a Disease** – The bio of Typhus, rendered in a weird way. Interesting footnotes. I’m convinced that Diamond stole the form of this title for his own “Guns, Germs, and Steel”.

The Knowledge Web and The Pinball Effect by James Burke – The author/host of Connections and The Day the Universe Changed strikes again. A lot of the stuff in these books showed up in his later Connectionsd series on cable, but these books are written differently from the earlier companion volumes – no color pictures (although some black and white ones), but there are numbers directing you, not to footnotes or end notes, but to other places in the book. It’s sort of the print equivalent of hyperlinks. It makes for a non-linear reading experience.

web of Magic (forgot the author) – a stranfge book, part fiction, part personal memoir, exploring the practice of magic by fakirs abnd magicians in India. The author’s description of his own hardships in making his way to and meeting with practitioners is as strange as the fictional chapters where he describes people learning to use magic.
** Cultural Materialism** by Marvin Harris. Cultural Anthropologist Marvin Harris has written a number of popular books explaining his theory of Cultural Materialism that I find irresistable. He tries to account for the taboo on cows in India, on eating pig among a number of people in Africa and Asia, and for Cargo Cults, among a great many other things. But this is a more technical book explaining and defending his turf, his theory, against all other comers. Deciphering his descriptions is a challenge for an outsider like me (“etic” vs. “emic” distinctions), but it’s worth it to watch him lace into competing theories, like Structuralism. Watching anthropologists duke it out is as much fun as watching theologians battle.

One of my all-time favorite books ever. Great choice. A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami is almost as surreal.

Another vote for Hardboiled Wonderland, a great weird book!

May I also suggest:

Flan by Stephen Tunney. A post-apocolyptic Candide. It somehow manages to combine a sweetly innocent tone with some of the most horrifying images I’ve ever seen committed to the pages of a novel.

The Codex Seriphinianus by Luigi Serifini. A massive illustrated encyclopedia of a bizarre fantasy world. Written entirely in an (untranslated) language and script of the author’s own design.

Although the Illuminatus!, Historical Illuminatus and Schroedinger’s Cat trilogies, together with Masks of the Illuminati (and nearly everything else that Wilson wrote) are without peer…

…I highly recommend Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.

Or anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

And Finnegans Wake, of course, which continues to drive me out of my mind.

Can you Dopers help me find a Weird Book?

many thanks!

Cruel Shoes, by Steve Martin is pretty weird. It’s great, though.

**Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates ** by Tom Robbins. Holy shit. Hang on to your hat, my friends. This is one strange book. But faaaabulous.

Yup. Just mind blowingly bizarre. Own it, like it, still don’t understand it.
And right next to it on the shelf: The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle. Also mindblowingly bizarre, but in a much more fun, laughing so hard you fall off the couch way. Any book with an entire chapter made up of the word “dorky” and very little else is bound for literary greatness.

The book that sprang to mind when I read the thread title was Not to Mention Camels. Wonderful book. I think it broke my brain.

And Calvino rocks.

Re Cruel Shoes

There are two versions of this book. One contains only the story The Cruel Shoes spaced out at a few sentences a page. The other contains numerous tales including How To Fold Soup, Wrong Number, The Dynamite King, and Shuckin The Jive.
Back To The OP

The Complete Works Of Edward Leedskalnin

These scientific writings explain how you can achiev perpetual motion with magnets. They get stranger from there.

Charles Fort Lo!, and The Book Of The Damned

Fort collected and retold tales of strange happenings. He wrote of rains of frogs, strange objects seen in the night sky and such in an almost unreadabl prose.

The Melancholy Death Of Oysterboy

Tim Burton tells fairytales

Speaking of Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs And All is weird and wonderful. You’ll never look at a can o’ beans the same way. Still Life With Woodpecker is pretty good, too.

Oh, yeah, the classic Portnoy’s Complaint. Some people identify with the main character in The Catcher In The Rye. I identify with Portnoy.

How about weird comics? Like anything by Michael Kupperman. the Excel Saga manga, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Zap Comics and the like.

I got Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas yesterday. Read it in bed. Couldn’t put it down. Lost a complete night of sleep. Bastard.
Is the other one (Fear and Loathing on the Campain Trail) as good? Is it also about excessive drug use?

Yes, and yes. Hunter continues pretty much where he left off, following on the campaign trail of McGovern. He does a great job of showing just what goes on behind the scenes, the manipulation and how the candidates are presented to the media and the country. I loved it. What’s scaring me is how history has such a nasty habit of repeating…

Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey is very weird…like nothing else I’ve ever read.

Also, last weekend I read Neil Gaiman’s Coraline —that’s a “children’s book” but it’s weird and scary.

You sick little monkeys may enjoy the following:

13 Steps to Mentalism, reputedly the best of its kind. Straightforward magician’s-magician guide to all kinds of mindreading tricks.

The Full Facts Books of Cold Reading, a vast and comprehensive guide to making people think you’ve guessed their birthday. That sort of thing. Fascinating. Randi-endorsed. Not to be used to take over the world, or Randi will be onto you like a whippet on a bunny.