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Ever start a book that throws you right into the deep end? And you have no idea what's going on? Basically has a bunch of its own rules initially unexplained, or tons of characters unexplained, or scientific/metaphysical metaphysics unexplained, or a complicated history unexplained, and you have to figure it out as you go along? I think those can be great, and a lot of fun to figure out! Let's share books which were initially confusing but eventually made complete sense and end up being awesome. I submit Übermensch, by Mathew Babaoye. Gutsy debut, really imaginative hard science fiction novel from the perspective of a biosynthetic post-human slave. But it starts as an unexplained diary of that slave waking up for the first time in a blank white room, then heading out into different scenes flashing by, like its teleporting around, before meeting multiple versions of a techno-god Master at strange dawn on the roof of a kilometers tall Tower. Crazy. A bunch of initially unexplained technology and futuristic shenanigans. The first chapters are more of the same, all of them like a series of crazy, fantastic, mysterious little slices of life - things appear and disappear, or change shape, and you are confused as to why things are happening. But slowly you get hints and pick things up until the world starts to make sense... and then suddenly these characters are in a fantasy world on a quest to kill a dragon! Yeah. Weird, but really cool once you figure it out. So what other books throw you right in the deep end? Neener fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Oct 15, 2015 |
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Oct 15, 2015 18:41
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I’m gonna say A Game of Thrones. There are so many characters and places and royal houses with a layered history that goes back thousands of years with multiple countries, wars, races of people and more. Really took me a while not to feel overwhelmed.
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Oct 15, 2015 18:52
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In case you were wondering what the name of this literary technique was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
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Oct 15, 2015 20:20
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Tale of Genji.
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Oct 15, 2015 21:14
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CJ Cherryh's science fiction is like this.
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Oct 16, 2015 15:56
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Swim Speed Strokes for Swimmers and Triathletes: Master Freestyle, Butterfly, Breaststroke and Backstroke for Your Fastest Swimming (Swim Speed Series)
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Oct 16, 2015 18:02
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Brothers Karamazov for yanks. Like, why does this character keep changing names between scenes?
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Oct 16, 2015 20:29
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It's fantasy again, but Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is kind of infamous for turning readers off that way. It starts in the middle of a complicated political situation and the plot goes to reveal and revise the world's history as well as actual events. The fact most of it is related by unreliable narrators doesn't help either. It's still an amazing series if you like epic fantasy, just takes a bit of effort to get into.
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Oct 16, 2015 23:07
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These epic fantasy books have a plot and characters, and it's almost too much to handle.
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Oct 16, 2015 23:35
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Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun certainly qualifies here. You can pretty much discern the conclusion of the plot from the first few chapters of The Shadow of the Torturer if you know what to look for, but you won't have any clue what's going on the first time you read it. There's a Gene Wolfe thread here but I'd recommend avoiding it until after reading it at least once, and entirely if you want to figure out what the hell is going on by yourself.
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Oct 17, 2015 00:45
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A human heart posted:These epic fantasy books have a plot and characters, and it's almost too much to handle. I made this joke in PHIZ you son of a bitch
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Oct 17, 2015 13:42
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CestMoi posted:I made this joke in PHIZ you son of a bitch Sorry OP, I'll cite my sources next time.
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Oct 18, 2015 02:46
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I was complaining about it in the space opera thread but Glen Cook's the dragon never sleeps is pretty aggressive in its refusal to explain what is going on or why, ever.
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Oct 18, 2015 08:00
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Michael Moorcock's Second Ether trilogy (Blood, Fabulous Harbours, The War Amongst the Angels). Exposition is for lesser mortals.
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Oct 19, 2015 00:36
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The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer probably qualifies... If you like piecing stories together yourself, Infinite Jest, and many of Borges' stories might be something to check out.
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Oct 19, 2015 14:54
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If your taste runs to sci-fi, I've gotten this experience from The Quantum Thief, Blindsight, and Neuromancer. The bonus is that they're all super kickass books.tonytheshoes posted:The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer probably qualifies... This definitely as well, and some of Mieville's stuff like Embassytown and The City & The City.
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Oct 19, 2015 19:43
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Dhalgren.
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Oct 20, 2015 21:43
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Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.
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Oct 21, 2015 02:59
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Great Expectations, by Kathy Acker. Not the one by Charles Dickens. Pussy King of the Pirates. Only one person wrote a book called "Pussy King of the Pirates" so I don't have to tell you her name (it was Kathy Acker).
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Oct 21, 2015 03:00
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coyo7e posted:Dhalgren. Literally, har har William Gaddis' JR is great for this - its an entire novel made up of dialogue (with occasional digressions into prose). Starts out in medias res with a conversation between three characters, leaving you to figure out who is saying what - like a stage play with the actors' names filed off. Despite this, its shockingly easy to get into and one of the funniest books ever written about big business, crony capitalism and the "American Dream." It's the tits.
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Oct 22, 2015 01:49
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Lots of amazing picks in this thread. Probably read 75% of them (the rest are on my list now) so clearly I have a type, haha. I've been reading Gravity's Rainbow recently and... yeah. In the deep end once again.
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Oct 28, 2015 01:02
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Pretty much all of Whitley Strieber's nf (open to interpretation) books. Real or not, they throw me into the deep end. Philosophically, spiritually, etc, I don't see many people talking about this author. I recently discovered him and I am very impressed with his writing, it's beautiful. Solving the Communion Enigma, The Key, Majestic, Communion. I think I broke my brain reading these all within a week's time.
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Dec 23, 2015 08:06
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Sound and the Fury? Especially since the first big section is from the point of view of a mentally handicapped guy.
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Dec 23, 2015 18:18
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Molybdenum posted:Especially since the first big section is from the point of view of a mentally handicapped guy.
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Dec 24, 2015 00:09
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A human heart posted:So are most of the posts in this forum, but they're pretty easy to understand. Hahahha
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Dec 24, 2015 01:46
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Naked Lunch. You can begin reading it at any point and have pretty much the same amount of understanding as someone who began reading at the beginning. Characters float in and out of the story. There are hints of vast conspiracies and unknowable wars constantly hovering on the edge of the narrative. Apparently important things are always revealed to not be so and most of the significant events have to do with characters shooting up huge amounts of drugs. The language is incessantly poetic and frequently drops into dreamlike combinatorics to describe whatever dick jokes or legitimate dick eroticism were going through the author's mind at the time.
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Jan 2, 2016 01:57
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Cobweb Heart posted:Naked Lunch. You can begin reading it at any point and have pretty much the same amount of understanding as someone who began reading at the beginning. The story is that while the book may or may not have been written in somewhat linear fashion, it ended up as a pile of papers strewn randomly around Burroughs floor and just sort of thrown together at random or "best guess" by Ginsberg and Kerouac.
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Jan 2, 2016 02:10
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Some of Italo Calvino's books are like this, such as If on a winter's night a traveler and Invisible CitiesanilEhilated posted:It's fantasy again, but Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is kind of infamous for turning readers off that way. It starts in the middle of a complicated political situation and the plot goes to reveal and revise the world's history as well as actual events. The fact most of it is related by unreliable narrators doesn't help either. I read the first several books of that series. Really enjoyed them at first, but as I went on, I just had less and less of an idea what was even happening any more so abandoned it.
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Jan 4, 2016 18:55
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Infinite Jest.
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Jan 5, 2016 23:20
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dogcrash truther posted:Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Nah. FW is obtuse for other reasons, and Ulysses has no action or alien concepts to throw you in the middle of. It's just some guys waking up and having breakfast in regular old Sandycove, Ireland, and then doing stuff the rest of the day, with some flashbacks thrown in. It might make you feel less dumb to have read a shitload of Aristotle and Aquinas beforehand, but you don't need a lot of background information on characters and events unless you're completely unfamiliar with modern Irish history and Catholicism.
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Jan 6, 2016 04:20
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at the date posted:Nah. FW is obtuse for other reasons, and Ulysses has no action or alien concepts to throw you in the middle of. It's just some guys waking up and having breakfast in regular old Sandycove, Ireland, and then doing stuff the rest of the day, with some flashbacks thrown in. It might make you feel less dumb to have read a shitload of Aristotle and Aquinas beforehand, but you don't need a lot of background information on characters and events unless you're completely unfamiliar with modern Irish history and Catholicism. I grew up in a somewhat secular Jewish household in California so when I first started reading Joyce (I started with Portrait) it really did feel like a lot of alien concepts, as I had not read anything quite so steeped in Catholicism before. But by the time I got to Ulysses I had done more research. That said there is an argument to be made that Ulysses throws you in "the middle" simply because the earlier life of Stephen had already been covered in Portrait. I don't think Joyce is intentionally throwing anyone in "the deep end" so much as he was assuming his readers knew what it was like to live in Dublin in the early 20th century and used a lot of shorthand and references that they would immediately get, but which is more confusing or alien to modern, non-Irish readers. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 06:23
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Anything by Dorothy Dunnett
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Jan 7, 2016 04:13
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Ulysses isn't the unpenetrable, Herculean read that it's often presented to be, but it can be more challenging read than most, and certain chapters in particular can be pretty baffling at first. Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, is definitely one of those "throw you in the deep end" types of experimental novels.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:26
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Finnegans Wake isn't in any way a "figure it out as you go along" book, though. It throws you so far in the deep end that there's not really any point in categorizing it with other books that simply don't explain things to you; kind of the whole point is that you need a guide or analysis for the entirety.
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Jan 7, 2016 23:53
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Ulysses isn't impenetrable, but if you aren't an Irish Catholic from the early 1900s - or someone who happens to do a lot of research on that place and period I guess - then I would say there is a hell of a lot of the book you are likely to miss without reading a guide of some sort, or reading it in a class.
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Jan 8, 2016 02:31
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Earwicker posted:Ulysses isn't impenetrable, but if you aren't an Irish Catholic from the early 1900s - or someone who happens to do a lot of research on that place and period I guess - then I would say there is a hell of a lot of the book you are likely to miss without reading a guide of some sort, or reading it in a class. I was reading Machado de Assis and first there was a bit where the local priest was promoted to, like, Protonotary Apothecary and im like, ok, it's something important, he's almost a notary and then a few pages later they're carrying a Sacharist to a sick woman's house and they needed four Trenoticulars to hold the canopy under which the bishop marched with the Nonuterian Escapole and im like jesus loving christ speak english if you go to museums in Portugal or Spain you're likely to come across absurdly ornamental golden devices which look like a sun, through which you're supposed to look at the eucharist in some medieval ritual (???). I can't be hosed to google what they're called Catholicism ftw
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Jan 9, 2016 15:28
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Flann O'Brien's "The Third Policeman." It's a metaphysical murder mystery. It's worth sticking it out. Transistor Rhythm fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Feb 1, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 17:22
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Transistor Rhythm posted:Flann O'Brien's "The Third Policeman." It's a metaphysical murder mystery. Is the narrator dead or alive? What? I'd spoil-tag that because one of those options is not supposed to occur to the reader until the reveal.
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Jan 29, 2016 17:28
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The City & The City by China Miéville. It doesn't drop you in the deep end as far as the plot goes, but definitely does with respect to how the cities function.
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Jan 31, 2016 07:01
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mdemone posted:I'd spoil-tag that because one of those options is not supposed to occur to the reader until the reveal. Could've sworn it's on the jacket of the one I have, but all good. Edited!
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Feb 1, 2016 22:17
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