You Are Here

An Article by Nora B. Peevy

It is my job to share weird, wide, webby topics with you. If you’re here, maybe you’re looking for some new reading material. Stay with me. This isn’t just any recommended book list. Today’s list are stories told in the most inventive weird ways possible or books printed on very odd mediums for you to read. Bored? I’ve got you covered. HAHA.

Up late last night with another bout of rousing circus insomnia, I started riding the turbulent corners of the web looking for a new span fangled glittery topic to blog about, but not too hot because I don’t want to burn you, my readers and send you panicking to the emergency room and not with too much glitter because we all know glitter is that gift that never leaves. EVER. With my sleep deprived owl eyes, I spied a theme in my weird web search, an unintentional, but not out of the ordinary theme for a bookworm. Books. But not just any books. Books that are so strange they can’t be found in any library and cost more than I can afford on my salary and books that are affordable, but are stories told in very unconventional ways. So, without wasting your precious time … give me a dead skeleton hand drumroll please … I give you …

The Weird Wide Web Book List of Oddities and Entertainment

Ship of Theseus by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst is a book, but it’s a treasure hunt with the two characters leaving notes in the margins as they solve the mystery. There are inserts included, which make the book an interactive experience. The gamer in me just wept a little because this book sounds like a wild creature of beauty.

If you like auction catalogs, you might want to read this novel staged as a catalog. All the items for sale are items left from the couple’s relationship. I admit one of the reasons I love estate sale hunting is because the writer in me loves good stories. There are probably a few here:  Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry 1st Edition by Leanne Shapton.

Gadsby is a 50k novel written without using the letter “E”. Challenge accepted Ernest Vincent Wright. Let’s see what you do here.

Nox by Anne Carson is a poetry book about a boy who passed away, told entirely on a box of photographs, notes on scraps of paper, etc. that the reader must put together to figure out the story.

Alphabetical Africa (New Directions Books): Abish, Walter: 9780811205337: Amazon.com: Books is a diabolical mathematical plot against artists where every sentence in the first chapter begins with “A” and then the second “B,” etc., adding the letters to his chapters as he writes. When you reach 26 letters, he starts taking one letter away per chapter. This sounds like a headache to write but a beautiful piece of art to read. Walter Abish must be a magician.

JR by Willliam Gaddis is over 700 pages of dialogue and not ONCE are you the reader ever told who is speaking. Have fun figuring this one out. Sounds like a good challenge.

If you’re looking for books even more artsy and that you can’t bring home with you, try the Celebrating books… with pages made of glass  by artist, Olafur Eliasson. In 2013 Ivory Press worked with the Icelandic-Dutch artist to create the books that light reflects on and through as you read them.

You can also buy for $451 a copy of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury that you can only read if it’s almost set on fire, which seems like a steep price for novelty, for the rest of us that don’t have $451 to spend on books, but color me intrigued.

There is 20 Slices, This Book Of Cheese Is Literally Made Out Of Slices Of Cheese – (mikeshouts.com), the world’s first book made out of twenty slices of plastic-wrapped Kraft singles, a book of 192 one dollar bills, 20 Sweetners, made of 20 Splenda packets, and Mary Anne Mohanrj’s Aqua Erotica is waterproof and made from polypropylene, able to be read anywhere in any situation without being destroyed.

Then there is the artist, Basia Irland – Ice Book Projects– Book shaped ice-sculpture with frozen seeds and other plants. The books are dropped off by rivers and reseed local climate with new life and bring awareness to climate disruption. A clever idea.

If this doesn’t interest you, there are books you can craft yourself from vinyl records, milk carton caps, egg cartons, and other recycled materials or you can purchase some lovely furniture from recycled books or try your hand at making your own.

The coolest book I found, though, was a crowdfunded comic called: Meandering Realms, an unconventional materials comics anthology! by Filipa Estrela (crowdfundr.com) from unconventional materials like clay, paper, glitter, painted canvas, and digital photographs, etc. It is over 100 pages and was created by different artists.

Maybe, this will inspire you to go on a crafting and recycling craze late in the middle of the night? Or at least, I entertained you for a few minutes while you ate a snack. Either way, happy booking, crafting, or reading from The Weird Wide Web Crew.

AUTHOR BIO:

Nora B. Peevy is a cat trapped in a human’s body. Please send help or tuna. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Degree with a Concentration in Creative Writing from Cardinal Stritch University and is an Olympic champion sleeper, toiling away for JournalStone/Trepidatio Publishing as a submissions reader and a reviewer for Hellnotes. She is also reading screenplays for the Lovecraft Film Festival again this year. Her first novelette, For the Sake of Brigid was released in May of 2024 and her first novel, Flesh Eating Turtles! will be coming out later this year. Her quirky stories are published in Eighth Tower Press, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Obsidian Butterfly, and other presses. You can find her on Facebook (as Onyx Brightwing), her blog, She Writes Fast | A blog for writers and readers (wordpress.com), and on Slasher as @Sekhautet. She naps in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.