7 Truly Bizarre Books that Changed My Life

Any book that starts with a political analysis of Nazis and ends with a theological analysis of angels is gonna be strange.

I’m obsessed with listicles, but one of my pet peeves, as a lifelong reader, is reading a million book listicles that all have the same generic classics in it. We get it, Heathcliff is your fictional crush. You relate to Jane Eyre. You managed to get all the way through Moby Dick.

I want to share 7 weird books with you. Books no one talks about. These are books that disturbed me, but changed the way I look at the world. Enjoy!

#1: American Psycho- Bret Easton Ellis

American Psycho is a first-person account of Patrick Bateman, an investment banker/ serial killer. Apparently, it is so disturbing that Australia refuses to sell it to minors. The plot alternates between Bateman obsessing over designer clothing brands and violently murdering his coworkers.

How it Changed My Life: I loved reading when I was a kid, but like many tweens, I grew out of the habit in middle school. Teachers try (and usually fail) to rope teens into reading, because there is a huge disconnect between what teens are interested in and what teachers think they are interested in. When I was a teen, I. LOVED. SHOCK VALUE. My desire to read shocking things led me to this book, and I had to persevere through the lengthy descriptions of silk skinny ties to get to the heart racing scenes. American Psycho taught me the value of patience. And patience is the trait I needed to start reading again.

Strangest Passage: “I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal’s handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No… one… would… care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”

Life Lesson: Developing new habits takes patience. (Always return video tapes on time.)

#2: The Orange Eats Creeps- Grace Krilanovich

Like American Psycho, I read this book because it was supposed to be disturbing, but it ended up being a pretty difficult stream-of-consciousness text. It’s a book about hobo vampire junkies. It’s like Trainspotting for the Twilight generation. A lot of the passages were beautiful and although it also had shock value, I would not have been prepared for it if American Psycho didn’t already instill me with readerly patience.

How it Changed My Life: Surprisingly, reading this acid trip of a book, prepared me for a lot of the difficult reading I’d have to do in my college courses. It taught me to look beyond the prose, towards the meaning behind the words.

Strangest Passage: “Everything satisfies precisely. Engorge sticky pricks. Enrage secret processes. Endure sexy pretense. Emerge surrounded parasitically. Energy sufficiently pulverized. Erection scoff prevention. Endorphin scream passage. Ecstatic speed patriarch. Embers slash plastic. Embalm severe parents. Epidemic seduction procedure. Escape seemed possible. Enormous secretion property.”

Life Lesson: You never know what lessons you’re learning until after the fact. Style over substance is fun sometimes. Meth: not even once.

#3: The Truth in Painting- Jacques Derrida

This book asks about the difference between paintings and the objects paintings represent. How is Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes different than a pair of shoes? What’s the relationship between images and truth? How can truth be represented? Via images? Via words?

It is a hard hitting philosophy book, full of strange abstract art sketches. That would be strange and difficult on its own, but to top it off, it is also written in a stream of consciousness style hitting on everything from tattoos, to pen ink, to Christic phalluses in a single paragraph. Each paragraph creates framing devices within framing devices, as sentences are meant to mirror the structure of abstract art.

How it Changed My Life: The difficult profundity of this book inspired me to study philosophy full time. It also taught me to write philosophy experimentally. I actually wrote a play as my final paper in the aesthetics course based on this book.

Strangest Passage: “How to evaluate the economy of the means, the constraints of a deadline (so many days, but things are more complicated than that, I’m proceeding from an accumulation that is difficult to measure), of a format (so many signs, but I ply and multiply the tropes, overdetermine the codes, impregnate languages and margins, capitalize ellipses, up to a certain point which concerns me [qui me regarde] but which I can’t see very clearly)…”

Life Lessons: Difficult things are often worth it. Substance over Style is necessary sometimes. Painting: once is enough.

#4: S/Z- Roland Barthes

This book is a structural analysis of Balzac’s story Saussarine. Sounds pretty normal right? Except that Barthes provides an in-depth analysis of the text sentence-by-sentence. So he wrote a 200 page book on a 20 page story.

He did this by applying 5 “codes” to each of the sentences: a cultural references code, a symbolic code, a resonances code, a narrative code, and a hermeneutic code (which included undisclosed mysteries in the text). These codes, like computer code, each contained rules about precisely how to analyze the text. It creates a jump-cut effect for readers and makes you fundamentally rethink what the activity of reading is.

How it Changed My Life: It taught me that reading should be as active of a process as writing. If you treat reading like you treat writing, then you can get ten times more out of your reading. People always ask me how I don’t get sleepy when I read: this book is the answer. Reading is a form of wrestling for me.

Strangest Passage: “What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. (S/Z: 4)”

Life Lesson: Reading should be a very active process. You can write a 200 page book on a 20 page story without being boring or sounding like you’re trying to meet a word count. You probably shouldn’t, though.

#5: Fear and Trembling- Soren Kierkegaard

This book is a reworking of the biblical Abraham and Isaac story from multiple perspectives. It asks questions about the nature of faith: was Isaac’s faith tested? What if Abraham got to the mountain too early or too late? Would the sacrificial animal still have been there? What does it mean that in fulfilling his duty to God, Abraham failed to fulfill his duties as a father?

Strangest Passage: “If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.”

How it Changed My Life: This is the book I read in college that made me think about theology more seriously. I was a casual atheist for most of high school. When I read this book in college, the Bible as a philosophical text opened up to me once again. The Bible is a source of rich analogies and allegories and one could spend a lifetime thinking about all of the stories it contains.

Life Lesson: Doubt is central to faith. There are always multiple, contradictory perspectives. Being on time is important.

#6: Philosophical Investigations- Ludwig Wittgenstein

This book is a series of short paragraphs, sometimes related, sometimes unrelated, on the topic of language. It begins from very agreeable premises- a square has four sides. I have a conception of red. I have a conception of pain. It uses these very agreeable premises to shake the very foundations of language and question how we communicate and what the limits of communication are.

Strangest Passage: “So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.”

How it Changed My Life: It taught me to pay attention to language. It also taught me that the context in which language is used is the most important part about it. It was also the first book I read in German, only adding to the sense of strangeness. Its a fun philosophy book that anyone can read.

Life Lesson: We are all totally reliant upon language and have no idea what it is or how it is possible. We don’t really have a communicable concept of red. German is confusing.

#7: The Kingdom and the Glory- Giorgio Agamben

This is a book forcefully arguing that all of the early church fathers are secretly making political points disguised as theological points. Any book that starts with an analysis of nazi philosophers and ends with an exposition on the political function of angels is going to be very strange. The bibliography makes this both a strange and challenging read but it has so many implications for politics and religion.

Strangest Passage: “The economy of glory can only function if it is perfectly symmetrical and reciprocal. All economy must become glory, and all glory must become economy.”

How it changed my Life: I read this in my first semester as a graduate student and the timing was perfect. I read Agamben’s argument about how the law is not based on a set of norms but about setting up a series of exceptions to those norms during the 2020 presidential election. That’s what I call proof by example. This book is still so new to me that it is hard to measure the impact it will have on my, but I think about it so often and Agamben left me with a hell of a reading list, so I’m excited to see where it will take me.

Life Lesson: To effectively criticize something, you have to know it really well. Religion is political and politics is religious. I’m not as well read as I thought.

These books shook me to my core, spooked me, and challenged my mostly deeply held convictions. Yet each of these books made me a better, more intelligent, and more interesting person for that reason. So if you ever want to embark on a linguistic adventure, give one of these a try!

Have you ever read a bizarre book that completely changed you? Let me know in the comments!