I’ll start, so as a teen I stumbled across a book called," Someone comes to town, someone leaves town." The synopsis caught me as it’s about a man with a mountain as a fathera washing machine as a mother and one brother that is dead and trying to harm him. I’ll admit some of the technical terms were too much for my developing mind but it has stuck with me all these years.
What is the wackiest / craziest book you’ve read and did you enjoy the ride?
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, still one of my all-time favorite reads. A beautiful, crazy dream/nightmare story about the absurdity of human existence.
The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is also way up there. I might place his other work, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, slightly ahead of it.
A few more “crazy” books to check out:
oh have you read “Heaven and Hell” by Audous Huxley? it talks about similar Ideas as Hard-boiled wonderland.
It feels like HArd-boiled is kind of Murakami’s own take on Philip K Dick’s Ubik.
I’m a huge HHGTTG fan, even have the green planet as a tattoo, but the Dirk Gently books were definitely a bit more irreverent imo.
Vurt was a wild ride.
A really wild read, one of my favorites. Do you think Zembla was a real place? Was Kimbote an actual person or someone’s alter ego?
I agree about Dirk Gently’s, I love both series.
I really enjoyed the first book. I love the absurdity of the book, but I felt it lost steam by the end of the second book, so I didn’t continue with the series.
I love absurdity in stories. Things that, when you’re high, make you go, “WTF is going on right now? This makes no sense, it’s giving me a panic attack because I have no clue what is happening.” And the first HGttG book gave that to me.
Dungeon Crawler Carl has kinda scratched that itch for me, in a completely different way, and same with Discworld, but I can’t find other series that really handle that Dan Harmon style of absurdity meshed with sci-fi or fantasy.
I came to say 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Two moons! Little people! It’s nuts.
Sirens is a brilliant book and criminally underrated among Vonnegut’s catalog. It’s my favorite book of his.
Nice to see Hard Boiled Wonderland represented. Usually Murakami recommendations are Wind Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore. Which are both awesome, but have a conspicuous lack of unicorns.
Totally came here to say Kafka On The Shore but I’m giving you a big ol’ head nod for this.
Another example of a really great idea that got watered down in the second half of the book.
Read it last week and I was eager for it to end throughout the second half or well, even the last two thirds of the book. It’s rather short as a novel but felt drawn-out nonetheless. Probably something that would have worked much better in the novella format.
Interestingly, this is something I’d say about every Calvino book I’ve read so far. He tends to milk whichever idea he comes up with until it’s drier than dirt.
I’m a simple man, I see Italo Calvino, I upvote
Nice list, I should give The Master and Margarita another try. I’ve bounced off it twice now, even though it seems like something I’d like.
I’m a huge Italo Calvino fan and I love The Master and Margarita. Maybe look for a different translation?