Which books are told in the most interesting / creative/ mind bending ways? How does it add to the book overall?
My all time favourite is Ella Minnow Pea where the book is a series of letters. The characters have to think of more inventive ways to write their letters as an increasing number of letters are outlawed as the book progresses.
Honourable mentions include:
Maribou Stork Nightmares where the narrator is trying to suppress his dark past by allowing himself to slip into hallucinations of a whacky south African safari adventure.
Flowers for Algernon where the narrator becomes more articulate by taking part in a scientific experiment.
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson. The narrator’s gender is never disclosed.
I enjoy books written for adults from the POV of a child. Room by Emma Donoghue is a great one. A lesser known one that I love is When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale.
I remember House of Leaves for now. Have to re-read it. Beautiful book!
Requiem For a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr, which was adapted to film by Aronofsky… the author removes punctuation such as periods commas and quotation marks so that we don’t know if something is a thought spoken a narrative detail and where anything ends really it is really interesting it has a dissonant effect by doing this the author effectively puts the reader in the perspective of a heroin addict dissociating and confused with disconnected and interupted thoughts it is just as chilling reading as it is watching Daren Aronofsky’s directing effects i really recommend this book for anyone that was a fan of the film the book also gives more background to the scenes where it seems the film ended more abruptly i read this back in high school and loved how creative it was creepy and unsettling
The Book of Dave by Will Self has both the point of view of an increasingly mentally unstable, misogynistic taxi driver in London and the future post-apocalyptic society that has discovered his book of rantings and formed an entire religion out of it. The language is so twisted and internally referential it was hard to understand until you got the rhythm of it. I got halfway through before I realized there was an index that made it way easier to understand
Building Stories by Chris Ware. A graphic novel of fourteen separately bound books about people who live in an apartment building.
David Abrams “Brave Deeds” written in collective voice, “we”
The city of Dreaming books by Walter Moers is so cool
I enjoyed the very conversational, rambling style of Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. Yes it’s just first person, but it’s a unique take on first person.
Another interesting style was Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolfe. The narrator is a Greek or Roman soldier who had a severe traumatic brain injury and has anterograde amnesia, so every evening he writes down what has happened to him on a scroll and reads it back the next morning. Only sometimes the strolls get lost, or he isn’t able to write for a few days, and so there’s a lot of confusion and disjointedness. Throw in visions of gods and other supernatural elements, and it comes out to be quite an interesting read. At least, that’s what I remember from having read it many, many years ago.
In the manga series Gantz by Hiroya Oku, the author inserts discussions by people on chat message boards about the protagonists. Often these message boards deride or dismiss the protagonist’s actions which become growingly known worldwide. This further projects his feelings of isolation and foreshadow his character growth while also acting as a social commentary on modern culture.
Julian May had several chapters in Intervention and the Galactic Milieu trilogy which were supposed to be Telepathic conversations.
ttyl by Lauren Myracle (which came out back in 2004) was written entirely as an instant messaging conversation. I was definitely the target audience at the time, but I think it was still a very innovative form of storytelling (and the first of its kind).
The Book Thief
Death is the narrator but also acts as a character, which means you have a limited-omniscient first person narrative.
Death is eternal and has vast knoledge, but “his” knowledge and understanding of humans is restricted to “his” interacting with them during times of loss and destruction. As a result, Death is fascinated by us but suspects that we may not be worth his sympathy since all we do is kill one another, making “his” existence one of unending, demanding work.
The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow is narrated by another book, Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. So in addition to being a picaresque historical novel, it’s about the generative nature of books and writing.
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry is a bit like the Tuesday Next books. Here the protagonist’s brother has the ability to bring fictional characters into the real world, from which they don’t always want to leave and which sometimes alters them.
2666 by Bolano, total rollercoaster and entirely unique