This post is inspired by a tweet I saw a few weeks ago, but can’t find right now, in which a reader decided to share the strangest books they’d read during the year. They wanted a change from all the “best of” lists and give a shout out to books that didn’t get enough attention. This post is my second to their motion. Here are the oddest, weirdest, strangest books—that I also liked—that I read during 2019, in no particular order:
- Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir—Y’all, necromancers in space! This book has gotten a lot of buzz, but I had such a good time reading this weird book that I want to tell everyone about it.
- Metropolitan Stories, by Christine Coulson—A charming collection of stories about what happens in a museum when no one is watching.
- The Future of Another Timeline, by Annalee Newitz—Time travel as Wikipedia edit war.
- The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, by Ayşe Papatka Bucak—A collection of brilliantly connected stories that skip around in history and art.
- The Fox and Dr. Shimamura, by Christine Wunnicke—A beautifully written novel about mental illness through different cultural lenses.
- Princess Bari, by Hwang Sok-yong—This story of a young girl going on a mythic journey got me hooked on tales based on Korean and East Asian legends.
Gideon the 9th I picked up but then put back down, thinking i’d get back into it – still want to give it a try