“Wait, what do you mean by ‘Weird Literature’?”

When my friends come over, they often stand around my room gazing at the books stacked in every corner and shelf. I’ve kept almost every book I’ve read since the 7th grade, so the collection is varied and too many to contain. Almost every year I swear I will give away a few but fail to choose which ones, anyway, I digress. They often pick one and ask me for my opinion, which if favourable they take home to read. In my circle, I’m a book connoisseur. Occasionally, they pick a book that I have no words to describe. I’m usually clear minded when it comes to my book opinions but a few books leave me speechless and feeling a bit dumb. The kind of book that I do not totally understand, but I cannot blame the author instead I blame my own inferiority. When they ask me about such a book, I say, “Oh, I suppose that one is a little weird,” 

Another word which is overused my generation and therefore perhaps lost all meaning. Weird. My father used to complain when I was younger so a friend and I replaced it with strange. Weird. It required more explanation, and more depth. So when they ask, I say, “The plot is all over the place”, or “the character is morally grey,” or the worst, “I don’t think I understood the ending,” These explanations fail my thinking because they make them seem like bad books, which I decidedly don’t think they are. They’re just different, products of minds that are incomprehensible and otherworldly. Honestly, weird is the best way to describe it. I cannot go on without naming a few books. I want you to know, that I suggest you read these books wholeheartedly: 

1. My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

2. Bunny - Mona Awad

3. Cleopatra and Frankenstein - Coco Mellers  

4. 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami 

5. Breast and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami

All of these books have made the rounds on BookTok and Bookstagram, which is the primarily the place anyone my age gets book recommendations. Don’t judge, I think they get a bad rep unnecessarily because of a few bad eggs. Nevertheless, even online these books are known as a bit “out there”. The primary reason these books stand aside for me is after reading them the world felt askew. They are so brutally honest about their characters’ experiences that they leave you questioning your own. It feels as though the world you have returned to after the book is over is no longer the one you are used to. 

Let’s take ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’. The book is about a young women in new York City, who has a sizeable inheritance, decides to take prescription medicine in order to sleep for an entire year. She has to naturally keep increasing her dosage during this time which makes her narration less reliable, and more unsettling. She recounts her journeys to bodegas outside her apartment during the few hours she’s awake, which imprints a version of the city that feel off kilter, but probably familiar to so many. The premise itself is unique enough, but the prose is detailed and emotional which somehow achieves the feat of making one sympathise with the obviously off the rocker character. You can imagine how stunned I was when I finished the novel in tears about her condition. 

The similarity between these novels is all the characters themselves are not the usual morally grey, tough to understand trope. They are all enveloped in emotional turmoil, but the impression is that their feelings are not felt completely to the surface. The heartache, pain, and suffering is beyond grasp to the reader and therefore lost to them protagonists as well. Often, they are contrasted with other characters who come off as more “normal” and therefore in touch with their feelings. This contrast also acts to solidify the feeling that something is not quite right in the universe of the book’s primary characters. For example, in ‘Bunny’ the main character gets slowly sucked into the world of the her cult like classmates, which takes her from seemingly normal to a haunted persona. A moment in the book, without spoilers, pulls her out of this state in a drastic and sudden fashion which is also felt by us reading. There is a palpable shift in the prose and narration which allows the reader to be connected to the emotions of the protagonist. This is common with all the aforementioned books where the feeling of being weirded out comes from the author being able to transfer the character’s strange and un-identifiable emotions to the reader. This results in finishing the book with the worst case of book-hangover, and the not knowing how to proceed (in life or reading).

It is notable that some of the novels in this list are considered to be modern classics. Books that will dissected in literature classes, where every object becomes a symbol. That’s probably because the weirdness comes from the brave experimentation by the author. By experimentation, I include the direction of the prose, manner of writing, and the personalities of the characters. Each aspect is unique in a sense that nothing is predictable. It leaves the reader clueless about the consequences and intent of the book.The books also play with the usual rising action, climax, and resolution format. This preference of writers points to writing being less about what happens, and more about what the character feels. By carrying forward the stream of consciousness trend from the modernists, the books may include several chapters where seemingly nothing happens, but it builds towards an exploration of personality that is rarely seen elsewhere. Because of this, these books are role models for aspiring writers and a delight to tear apart for readers. They stand apart because they stand true to their rejection of the black and white. Weird, after all, is another word for individualistic fun.