From mysterious ancient scrolls with weird images and encrypted texts to non-linear stories
that might make you afraid of your own house, today we look at the Most Bizarre Books in
the World!
Number 11.
Gadsby Some letters in the English alphabet are more
important than others.
Normally it would go without saying that the vowels are pretty essential, especially if
you’re writing a book.
In 1939, Ernest Vincent Wright challenged this conventional wisdom by reviving an Ancient
Greek writing prompt called a lipogram - a piece of writing that deliberately excludes
certain words or letters.
In this case, Wright wrote the 50,000-word novel Gadsby with the letter “E” appearing
in less than five words.
Widely marketed as the “Novel Without the Letter ‘E,’” the story focuses on the
decline and subsequent rebirth of a fictional American city, which is saved by the titular
male protagonist and a band of adolescents.
As Gadsby stumbles through major American historical episodes a la Forrest Gump, Wright
punctuates the narrative experience by forcing the reader to miss the absence of a letter
in the alphabet the way many of us miss details of childhood or our hometowns.
Number 10.
The Voynich Manuscript Named after the rare book collector who discovered
it in 1912, the Voynich Manuscript is a world-famous Medieval artifact believed to have originated
in 15th Century Italy.
In addition to its debatably indecipherable coded text, the manuscript features sporadic
illustrations of female figures, mutated plants and odd astrological charts.
In early September 2017, Nicholas Gibbs, a researcher for The Times Literary Supplement,
claimed to have solved the handwritten code using an algorithm and operating under the
assumption that most of the words in the text were actually representative of abbreviations.
He concluded the text was an instructional guide for Renaissance-era doctors regarding
women’s health.
While the academic consensus aligns with Gibbs’s view of the book being health-related, his
findings are still being heavily scrutinized and debated among historians and codebreakers.
Number 9.
Finnegans Wake James Joyce’s work profoundly influenced
contemporaries and future admirers like Samuel Beckett, Bret Easton Ellis, Michael Cunningham,
and many more.
Often cited as one of the most difficult books to read in the English language, Joyce’s
novel Finnegans Wake has been baffling readers ever since its initial publication in 1939.
The text appears as an amalgamation of multiple iterations of English, with accompanying phrases
and puns taken from other languages and dialects.
On top of the interconnected word usage, this story about an Irish family on the decline
is conveyed to the reader through an unending, sometimes incoherent stream-of-consciousness.
Forever infuriating and unexpectedly insightful, Finnegans Wake is objectively one of the weirdest
masterpieces ever committed to the page.
Number 8.
House of Leaves In 1990, author Mark Z.
Danielewski boarded a bus in New York bound for Los Angeles to visit his ailing father.
In order to quell his anxiety and busied thoughts, Danielewski began feverishly writing in a
cheap notebook.
The story he began during that sleepless trip across the United States eventually became
House of Leaves, a book that most committed readers point to as one of the most taxing
and frightening novels ever written.
The book is a piece of ergodic literature, a genre defined by the approach of challenging
readers by forcing them to pursue non-traditional means of consuming the information on the
page.
In House of Leaves, multiple narrators, represented by different typefaces and fonts, are followed
throughout the story.
Several of the footnotes have their own footnotes.
On more than a few pages, the text is arranged into different shapes, puzzles and codes.
Most critics would describe the book as an intense and disturbing experimental horror
novel.
Stephen King said it gave him nightmares.
Some readers have reported sensations of increased paranoia, claustrophobia and agoraphobia as
a result of reading House of Leaves, mainly due to the plot’s detailed exploration of
a house that keeps changing its structure into maze-like configurations.
Others would call it an epic, sweeping love story.
Many consider it to be a pointed and humorous satire of academic criticism.
Regardless of which camp you end up in, it’s undeniable that House of Leaves falls into
a bizarre category of books you should dive into with an open mind, a willingness to re-read
certain chapters, and always, with the lights on.
Number 7.
The Ripley Scroll With only 21 copies in existence, the Ripley
Scroll is a profoundly rare piece of literary history.
Its authorship is widely attributed to transcendentalist thinker George Ripley, despite the fact that
it first appeared roughly twenty years after his life ended.
This is because the bulk of the original manuscript consists of Ripley’s verses on the science
and philosophy that inspired the Medieval concept of Alchemy.
But Ripley had no proven role in the ornate series of illustrations depicting sweeping
alchemical processes, as they were provided by one or more unknown artists in the decades
following his passing.
These canvasses depict the speculative science and thought behind the Philosopher’s Stone
- a mythical object capable of transforming ordinary metals into gold and bestowing eternal
life.
The scroll’s largest iterations extend to 18 and 1/2 feet long and 23 inches wide.
They feature immensely detailed scenes that depict impossible interactions between man
and nature, including a sentient sun showering liquid light down upon a crowned man-bird
hybrid following the opening of a mystical egg by the Egyptian god of healing.
Number 6.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age One day, an elderly Czech man named Rake walks
around outside in a public place, stumbles upon a group of people lounging beside a fountain
and proceeds to tell them the story of his complicated life and past loves.
The experiences he recounts both comically and tragically mirror major events in Czech
history.
This plot may not seem complex at first, but it becomes infinitely more layered upon the
discovery that the entire story is told in one continuous sentence.
Memorable and controversial in equal measure, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is
a revolutionary statement about the complicated relationship between a man the country he
calls home.
Number 5.
Hopscotch Have you ever opened a book that contained
specific instructions on how to read it?
If you ever pick up Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel Hopscotch, you’ll find that the author
provides two diverging options on how to process the book and its secrets.
Of the novel’s seemingly unrelated 155 chapters, the latter 99 are initially dismissed as being
unimportant to the overall story.
This is stated at the very beginning.
So one option available to the reader is to read chapters 1-56 as a standalone work.
The second option is to read each chapter through to the end in a unique pattern determined
by Cortázar himself.
An unwritten third option allows for the reader to choose their own approach when consuming
the flow of information that the book has to offer.
As a flash point of the counterculture movement, Hopscotch is a deeply involved artistic reaction
to the perpetual conflict between organized society and chaotic disorder that defined
the 20th Century.
Number 4.
The Codex Seraphinianus Most adults have had the experience of being
unable to understand something they’re reading, but very few can say it about a picture book.
The Codex Seraphinianus is no ordinary picture book; it is a sprawling, two-volume, over
300-page-long encyclopedia of Bosch-like illustrations ranging from the humorously satirical to the
heavily surreal.
You’d think this would be enough to set it apart from other works, but in addition
to its unique imagery, whatever story or statement the book has within its text is either coded,
encrypted or intentionally misleading.
And did we mention the text is made to appear handwritten?
The Codex was composed by Italian architect-turned-visual artist Luigi Serafini over a six-year period
in the 1970s.
Originally published in 1981, it continues to fascinate and perplex readers with its
mixture of existing and made-up languages, its singular stylized text, and its sometimes
shocking, subversive illustrations.
As can be seen in this image, Serafini mixes the anatomy of a horse with that of a caterpillar
on wheels, intentionally muddling the distinction between that which is possible in nature with
the fantastical or ridiculous.
The accompanying text at the bottom of the page imitates the formality of an old-fashioned
medical textbook, highlighting the author’s preoccupation with frivolous subjects being
communicated through formal means.
Number 3.
The Story of the Vivian Girls When the contents of hospital janitor Henry
Darger’s small Chicago apartment were being sorted in the wake of his passing in April
of 1973, his landlords discovered a massive collection of writings and illustrations.
In the ensuing months, various artists and experts painstakingly pieced together the
manuscript and its accompanying watercolor imagery into the story Darger intended it
to be.
Its full official title is The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms
of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
That doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so it makes sense that the title is often
shortened.
The full multi-volume text is over 15,000 pages single-spaced, and punctuated by original,
hand-painted scenes ranging in size from a small canvas to huge 30-foot-tall pieces of
mixed media.
It is not clear when Darger began working on the story, though there are many indications
that it took him decades to complete it.
In addition to being a challenging account of the trials of childhood, The Story of the
Vivian Girls is one of the few books you can find that comes with its own museum exhibit.
Number 2.
The Smithfield Decretals Originating in early 14th Century France,
the manuscript now known as The Smithfield Decretals changed considerably over the course
of 40 years.
The text began as a recording of Pope Gregory IX’s thoughts on Catholic doctrine, stemming
from his attempt to exact his own authority over the spread of Christianity.
Eventually ending up in Southern England by the mid-1300s, the volume soon became an elongated
snapshot of Medieval life and lore.
Its wild illustrations include impossible structures, militant rabbits and knights battling
giant snails, all of which were added over time by numerous artists and scribes.
Because of The Smithfield Decretals’ odd mixture of religious and secular imagery,
as well as the eccentricities of the scenes it depicts, the manuscript’s content is
still turning heads to this day.
Number 1.
The Rohonc Codex First appearing in early-19th Century Hungary,
the Rohonc Codex is a volume named after the now-renamed city of Rohonc, where it was housed
in a library for many years.
Originally mistaken for a prayer book, the text has never ceased to confound researchers
and historians due to both its unknown author and mysteriously coded text, which has yet
to be translated.
In addition to the symbols that guard its secret meaning, the 450-page-long item features
90 rough illustrations of indeterminate relationship to the text.
As if the intrigue didn’t end there, the experts have also been stumped by whether
the pages of the Rohonc Codex are meant to be read left to right or right to left.
Theories that the whole thing may be an elaborate hoax are as old as the book itself.
We’ll leave you to decide.
Who knows - maybe you even stand a chance of cracking this supposedly uncrackable code
on your next day off.