WTF Did I Just Read?

There are some books that need to be discussed to be fully appreciated. House of Leaves (HoL) by Mark Z. Danielewski is a book that, upon its release in March of 2000, almost immediately spawned online forums as readers dissected its many layers. Five years ago several of us wanted to read HoL and the 'WTF Did I Just Read? Book Club' was born. We read and discussed the book over three monthly meetings and just scratched the surface, it remains the 'gold standard' WTF book in our minds.

Since then, we've read a wide variety of titles for the club and below is a list of titles we feel best represent our created genre. The club meets at Page 158 monthly on the 3rd Wednesday at 6:30pm.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

The design of the book is probably the first thing you notice about HoL; there are some pages with one printed word, some with mirror text, and for some reason the word 'house' is always printed in blue ink (including in Penguin Random House on the copyright page!). And there are so many footnotes. The story is written by Johnny about a found book written by a blind man about a movie that may or may not exist, which is about a house that is larger on the inside than is physically possible based on its outside measurements. So it's a book about a book about a movie about a house; makes perfect sense right?

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue, they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces features one of the most memorable protagonists in American literature. Ignatius J. Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubbed “slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one.” Set in New Orleans with a wild cast of characters including Ignatius and his mother; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levi Pants; inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso; Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry; and Jones, the jivecat in space-age dark glasses, the novel serves as an outlandish but believable tribute to a city defined by its parade of eccentric denizens.

Oh God, the Sun Goes by David Connor

The sun has disappeared from the sky. No one can explain where it has gone, but one wayward traveler is determined to try. As our unnamed narrator begins his odyssey across the parched landscapes of the American Southwest, he is drawn into a web of illusion and mystery, a shifting astral mindscape that shimmers with the aftermath of loss—and the promise of redemption.

Oh God, the Sun Goes is a hallucinatory and deadpan picaresque that suddenly swerves into a love story of soaring poignance. Truly “the stuff that dreams are made of” – or maybe nightmares?

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

The Vorrh by Brian Catling

In the tradition of China Miéville, Michael Moorcock and Alasdair Gray, B. Catling's The Vorrh is literary dark fantasy, which wilfully ignores boundaries, crossing over into surrealism, magic-realism, horror and steampunk.

In B. Catling's twisting, poetic narrative, Bakelite robots lie broken - their hard shells cracked by human desire - and an inquisitive Cyclops waits for his keeper and guardian, growing in all directions. Beyond the colonial city of Essenwald lies the Vorrh, the forest which sucks souls and wipes minds. There, a writer heads out on a giddy mission to experience otherness, fallen angels observe humanity from afar, and two hunters--one carrying a bow carved from his lover, the other a charmed Lee-Enfield rifle--fight to the end.

Thousands of miles away, famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge attempts to capture the ultimate truth, as rifle heiress Sarah Winchester erects a house to protect her from the spirits of her gun's victims.

Maxwell's Demon by Steven Hall

Thomas Quinn is having a hard time. A failed novelist, he’s stuck writing short stories and audio scripts for other people’s characters. His wife, Imogen, is working on a remote island halfway around the world, and talking to her over the webcam isn’t the same. The bills are piling up, the dirty dishes are stacking in the sink, and the whole world seems to be hurtling towards entropic collapse. Then he gets a voicemail from his father, who has been dead for seven years.

Thomas’s relationship with Stanley Quinn—a world-famous writer and erstwhile absent father—was always shaky, not least because Stanley always seemed to prefer his enigmatic assistant and protégé Andrew Black to his own son. Yet after Black published his first book, Cupid’s Engine, which went on to sell over a million copies, he disappeared completely. Now strange things are happening to Thomas, and he can’t help but wonder if Black is tugging at the seams of his world behind the scenes.

Absurdly brilliant, wildly entertaining, and utterly mind-bending, Maxwell’s Demon triumphantly excavates the ways we construct meaning in a world where chaotic collapse looms closer every day.

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden.

Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth—all the Earths.