Riot Recommendation: 60 of Your Favorite Strange and Compelling Books!

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  • August 24, 2020

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t watch that ball drop on NYE 2019 and think to myself, “Know what? This year we’re gonna stay inside a lot, fight over science, and debate the necessity of the USPS!” Alas, 2020 had other plans. While longing for a future in which the weirdest plot twists are in the pages of my book and not just my Twitter feed, I asked you all to share the strangest, most compelling books you’ve ever read—and over 400 of you replied! I distilled those responses down to a manageable size to share with all of your fellow weirdos. Without further ado, here are 60 of the strangest books you’ve ever read!

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

The All of It by Jeannette Haien

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Bloodchild by Octavia Butler

The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

Boy Toy by Barry Lyga

The City and the City by China Mieville

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

The Color Of Bee Larkham’s Murder by Sarah J. Harris

A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill

The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund

Ducks Newburyport by Lucy Ellman

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Eye of Cat by Roger Zelazny

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

Jerusalem by Alan Moore

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Kangaroo Notebook by Kōbō Abe

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

The Last days of Paris by China Mieville

The Library on Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Lullaby by Chuck Palaniuk

The Magus by John Fowles

A Medicine for Melancholy by Ray Bradbury

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill

Night by Elie Wiesel

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Prologos by Jonathan Bayliss

Reincarnation Blue by Michael Poore

The Revisionaries by A.R. Moxon

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt

The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

Suffer the Children by Craig Dilouie

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

Source : Riot Recommendation: 60 of Your Favorite Strange and Compelling Books!