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weird books

Recently I read a very weird book, which I really enjoyed and which got me thinking about weird books as a category.[1] Here are a handful of books that make the cut.

certified weird books

Nox
(Anne Carson)

I've already talked about Nox, but it bears repeating: this book is weird. It's an art book for one, the only one I own, but even if it were reproduced as plain text, it would remain weird. It's a sort of weirdness of which I am horrifically jealous because it's personal poetry that consists not insignificantly of a commentary on a Latin poem. Like, there are dictionary definitions involved. I want desperately to create something this weird one day.

Notes on the Sonnets
(Luke Kennard)

Probably my favorite weird book of all time. It's responses to Shakespeare's sonnets but it's prose poems set at a shitty house party and there's a talking horse. Star Trek is involved, and math, and a talking horse. Honestly, the truest proof of its weirdness is that by the time the horse gets there, you're just like yeah sure. A sad horse. Why not.

Mrs. Caliban
(Rachel Ingalls)

This book bears a striking resemblance to The Shape of Water, except it somehow manages to be weirder. I know this sounds insane, but I am correct, and the friends I have convinced to read the book agree with me. As my friend Fractal puts it, The Shape of Water "isn't surreal, it's completely internally logical". Mrs. Caliban, on the other hand, can be read either as a fantasy novel or a record of a woman's mental breakdown.

Young Ovid
(Diane Middlebrook)

This one is weird because it self-consciously plays with the boundaries between biography and historical fiction, which reminds me of certain ideas about historiography. It's also unfinished at the time of the author's death, and you can feel the way it reaches for something she didn't have time to create. It's the sort of biography Ovid deserves.

Honorable mentions

  1. Axiom's End (Lindsay Ellis): This is certainly a weird book, but it loses style points because it gets so tantalizingly close to being positively bizarre and visibly flinches away.
  2. The Kingdom of Little Wounds (Susann Cokal): Let me be clear: I intensely regret having read this book. I do not recommend this book. Do not read it. However, it is impossible for a fantasy novel about syphilis that involves detailed descriptions of a guy who sewed gemstones into his dick not to make the list.
  3. Antigonick (Sophocles trans. Anne Carson): This is the only Anne Carson work I have ever disliked.[2] It's certainly weird, though—Hegel is involved.
  1. Also, my book club (not the NYPL one, the weirdo classicist one) got talking about classical reception (tl;dr: works from the post-classical period that make use of ancient Mediterranean culture in some way, e.g. when Shakespeare takes inspiration from Ovid's Metamorphoses) and I said that I would rather a piece of reception be weird than good; this was greeted with enthusiastic approval.^
  2. It's been a hot minute since I read it, though; I really should give it another try.^
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