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Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, by Oliver Sacks. The writing style isn't weird, just the man's autobiography. Not that I didn't enjoy it, but you sure can't make up fiction stories any stranger than people's real lives! First line: "Many of my childhood memories are of metals: these seemed to exert a power on me from the start." Part of back blurb: "We meet Sack's extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his "Uncle Tungsten," whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets aobut passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes--in his own home laboratory..." It reminded me a little of The Snowflake Man, biography of Wilson A. Bentley, by Duncan C. Blanchard, about a man in Vermont who spent most of his life photographing snowflakes in the shed. |
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The wierdest book I've ever read was "Coldheart Canyon" by Clive Barker. It had old Hollywood ghosts, medieval lords, hunters and ordinary folks. |
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I'll see your "Coldheart Canyon" (very strange in the classic Barker tradition) and raise you Hal Duncan's "Vellum." Leave it to a Scotsman to reinvent wierd. |
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I had no idea Sacks had written his autobio - thank you! |
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I've got Scream for Jeeves, which is a Jeeves and Wooster/H.P. Lovecraft crossover parody. There's also The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a lovely little alphabet book of children's deaths by Edward Gorey. "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/B is for Basil assaulted by bears..." I'm not even going to get into Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. |
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Hands down: Thomas McGuane's PANAMA.
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Sticking with Clive Barker, I loved his Abarat books. Very weird. |
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A Wodehouse/Lovecraft crossover? That's the most intriguing premise I've heard in a long time. Must check it out. |
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Scream for Jeeves isn't actually quite as funny as I think it could have been, but something about turning "Charles Dexter Ward" into "The Rummy Affair of Young Charlie" cracks me up every time. |
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Edward Gorey is awesome. :) |
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Secret Dead Men, by Duane Swierczynski, was pretty bizarre. But I'm thinking I really have to look up the Wodehouse/Lovecraft book. |
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So are these books being mentioned like the literary equivalent of the movie Eraserhead? Probably the most inexplicable books I've read were the ones for my genius & madnss philosophy class; Hunger by Knut Hamsun and The Piano Teacher by ElfriedeJelinek. Didn't reallty enjoy either of those. But I love Edward Gorey, my calendar is all Gorey art, and my favorite story of his is "the Beastly Baby". |
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Uncle Tungsten is one of my favorite books... but then, I'm a chemist. |
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