The weirdest part in a book you've ever come across

Awww! That's not weird, that's awesome!!!

yeah, I'm with lolchemist. I found that pretty cool - the analogy worked for me, because even though I'm not religious, I can get that it's an argument for having faith in the existence of heaven, with mum in the role of Jesus. I don't know if it fits into the rest of the book, but as an excerpt it didn't seem weird.

Definitely clever, but I don't know if I would go all the way to "weird."

The most shocking thing I've read is in Orson Scott Card's "Empire" where the main character is killed about 2/3 into the story.

The weirdest thing I can think of reading was in Breakfast of Champions, where the MC, Kilgore Trout I think it was, wrote something like:

"This is a butthole: *"

And then proceeded to detail absurd measurements for the size of his penis. I could, of course, have the order backward. I read it years ago and didn't reference it again before making this post. It's just how I recall it.

lolchemist said:

Awww! That's not weird, that's awesome!!!

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Agreed. I love that! I mean, it jumps back and forth a little more than nessesary, I got the point about half way through. But the idea behind it is awesome.

Though I could see it being weird if it were in the middle of a story and just didn't fit lol

JoBird said:

The weirdest thing I can think of reading was in Breakfast of Champions, where the MC, Kilgore Trout I think it was, wrote something like:

"This is a butthole: *"

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That's one of those lines that makes me go "I'll never be able to write that good."

I read Lies Inc. by Philip K. Dick.

At the half-way point, the protagonist gets hit by an LSD-tipped dart and has a large and exhaustively-described hallucination.

Somehow, when I read it, I didn't grasp that the protagonist had been drugged.

Which means that extended scene basically left me going, "WHAT IS HAPPENING? OMG, WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING? I THOUGHT HE WAS GOING TO THE COLONY."

That's actually a pretty cool analogy. It's a little weird, but since I'm a fantasy and science fiction fan, there's not much I find all that weird.

The weirdest thing I've ever read is probably NAKED LUNCH. I read it years ago, but if memory serves me right, there's a part where a character started talking to his butthole. And then his butthole got all lonely and depressed and whined about how no one would ever kiss it. I remember feeling sorry for it for about 5 seconds before I remembered IT IS AN ANUS.

Putputt said:

The weirdest thing I've ever read is probably NAKED LUNCH. I read it years ago, but if memory serves me right, there's a part where a character started talking to his butthole. And then his butthole got all lonely and depressed and whined about how no one would ever kiss it. I remember feeling sorry for it for about 5 seconds before I remembered IT IS AN ANUS.

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Okay, that is just awesome. Hilarious!

The weirdest book I ever read was Custody of the Eyes by Diamela Eltit. Here is an example: "My head of a DUM-DUM-DUM-My wants to flee the night and travel with Mama's hip into the dawn. But Mama's failure turned us into nocturnal creatures, scorned, scared. SHHHIIITT. AAAIIIE, the hatred." The whole book is like this. It was only 104 pages, but was the longest read of my life. (I had to read it for a class.)

I really like the baby's birth/afterlife analogy in the first example. Very clever.

One sentence that really struck me was in the James Bond novel 'Casino Royale' by Ian Fleming, and it was something like "In his mind, Bond fingered the necklace of the days to come". Err, come again?

'Breakfast of Champions' by Kurt Vonnegut is awesome from start to finish.

There's a passage in 'Cyptonomicon' (a novel about WW2, cryptography, the history of computing, and one of the greatest books of the last 50 years imo) by Neal Stephenson that's kinda an erotic story about furniture.

I'd go with The Naked Lunch as having more than it's fair share of weirdness -- but the book is so weird that it normalises it so you kinda go with the flow. Henry Miller has his moments, as does Gore Vidal; and Hanif Kureshi hasn't shied away from dropping stories about turd's and phalluses that, when read along with the rest of his collected short stories, seem a bit weird by virtue of having such a change in tone and content.

Phillip K is pretty out there, as is Vonnegut, Bukowski and Will Self -- but I think that's to be expected and so the WTF moments are reduced due to ones anticipation of them.

However, without a doubt the weirdest thing I ever read was in Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf (1927) where I was rather surprised to come across an early instance of a one-sided rap battle. So astounded was I that I do declare my eyebrows and jaw sought to distance themselves by a matter of feet.

Here's the quote of Mozart [via Hermann Hesse] giving Harry Haller something to think about.

Mozart (in Steppenwolf 1927) said:

Hey, my young man, you are biting your tongue, man, with a gripe in your lung, man? You think of your readers, those carrion-feeders, and all your typesetters, those wretched abetters, and sabre-whetters. You dragon, you make me laugh till I shake me and burst the stitches of my britches. O heart of a gull, with printer's ink dull, and soul sorrow-full. A candle I'll leave you, if that'll relieve you. Betittled, betattled, spectacled and shackled, and pitifully snagged and by the tail wagged, with shilly and shally no more shall you dally. For the devil, I pray, will bear you away and slice you and splice you till that shall suffice you for your writings and rotten plagiarizings ill-gotten.

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Nice, eh? Though not as old as ...

Byron said:

Posterity will ne'er survey: A nobler grave than this: Here lie the bones of Castlereagh: Stop, traveller, and piss.

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... it was still pretty weird as it was so unexpected.

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare got weird for a little bit. Two characters get romantically involved until it's revealed that they have the same father. They try to fight their feelings, all the while I'm going 'eww, incest!' and hoping that there's a bazinga in there somewhere.

Luckily, it gets sorted out and they're not biologically related. Still, icky until it got sorted out.

When I was (years ago...:c) around 12 or 13, I found myself stuck during a super long layover for a flight from CA to NC. I finished the book I'd brought with me, and so I went to a little book kiosk and browsed around.

The selection was extremely limited. Romance and thrillers were the only choices and I wasn't really familiar with either one. I picked up a book called "Lady Moonlight" because it had a pretty picture of a white horse on the front.

Basically, the book was about a guy who visits Ireland (or something, I forget) and meets this woman who is cursed into turning into a white horse (either every full moon or UNTIL every full moon...I forget, again). My 13-year-old self could deal with it, though I blushed a lot while reading, until I got to this one part where the male MC starts feeling up "Lady Moonlight"...while she is a horse.

Lady Moonlight enjoyed it until she remembered that she was, in fact, a horse, and then got all bashful.

BUT THE DAMAGE WAS DONE. MY EYES. MY POOR, ADOLESCENT EYES.

Lol.

The life after birth passage I read somewhere (although I can not for the life of me remember where) only it was unborn twins talking rather than a single unborn talking with the mother.

The only bit that gets me is the line "no one has returned from there" -- that would imply that there were more than one unborn and one or more had been born that the current unborn(s) had known of leaving. I can't quite wrap my head around that.

Lidiya,

I don't think any of it's weird, I think it's amazing.

As a side note, you've posted an excerpt without crediting the author or naming the title of the book. Which book is this?

To the OP - I thought that was awesome!!! I agree with everyone else on that!

Some of that other stuff though...wow. I can't say I've ever read anything about someone talking to his asshole or feeling up unicorns. LOL

Weird...incest stuff really creeps me out. I'm more than halfway through the Game of Thrones series, and I love it, but I can't wrap my head around the love and passion Jamie feels for Ceresi. Yuck.

That scene in The Lovely Bones with Ray and 'Ruth.' Except... not Ruth. I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilers.

I had to read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a freshman in high school, without knowing anything about Joyce, modernism, or stream-of-consciousness writing beforehand. My 14-year-old self read that "Once upon a time there was a tuckoo" section (the very beginning of the book!) and...head a-splode.

I'm sure there's stranger stuff out there, what with all this talk of buttholes and erotic furniture, but at the time, I was not down with Joyce's particular type of oddness.

I dunno if it's a weird part as much as a weird book, but John Dies at the End by David Wong. He seemed to break every writing rule in the book, but somehow it all hung together and worked. The second book (This Book is Full of Spiders) is also highly enjoyable, but far more structured.

Lidiya said:

It's called '30 паунда' and it's by Мартин Ралчевски. Hehe, in Bulgarian. In English it's 30 Pounds by Martin Ralchevski. I don't think they print it in English though :/

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I loved it, too. I didn't find it weird, but rather, witty and bittersweet.

I don't remember any weird parts of books, because for me, if all the bits of a story fit together then none of it feels weird while I'm reading it. And if they don't fit together, then that's not weird, it's bad.

That said, I'd say the weirdest book I've ever read in the sense of being oddly written, oddly constructed, and making me feel like I was being taken on a very strange ride I knew not whence, was the 18th century classic The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne, my personal favorite novel. It includes:

• hand-drawn diagrams of its own plot line;
• a black page of mourning for the vividly described, tragic death of a character who does not die in the book;
• a blank page on which readers may draw or pin a picture of their own ideal of feminine beauty to represent a certain character because beauty is in the eye of the beholder;
• chapters out of order because they were misplaced by the fictional author when he fictionally sent in sets for publication (it was originally published in serial volumes), and when he found them, he included them in the next or later set;
• a long digression chapter about a guy with a fake nose presented in facing page English and Latin that goes on for 30 pages in my edition;
• other chapters that are one sentence long, or maybe less;
• dialogue between the fictional author and the readers;

Among other things.

In the sense of weird as being something that makes me feel like I might be losing it or that losing it might be an appropriate response to the skewed view of life I've just been treated to, I'd say the weirdest thing I've read are the short stories of Edogawa Rampo, sometimes called the Japanese Edgar Allen Poe (which is completely appropriate since his pen name, pronounced properly in Japanese, comes out sounding like Edgar Allen Poe, on purpose). He wrote mind-wringing stories about relationships ruined by trauma and resentment, about insanity driving people to extreme self-destructions, about obsession, etc. In one story, a man obsessed with mirrors seals himself inside a specially built, perfectly spherical, one-piece mirror, reflective on the inside, of course. We are left to break our brains imagining what he saw and what happened to him. In another, a famous woman writer relaxes in her favorite armchair, which is a gift from a fan, and reads a letter from a fan who tells her a story that makes her and us not want to be in that chair or any chair anymore. It's great stuff.