Over the past few years, some of my favorite books and pieces have been those that are of a broken, disorganized, and/or meandering quality. These are certainly not the only kinds of books I like, but they always manage to strike a particular chord with me, even if I don’t particularly *love* them by the end. More so, they were always a surprise to come across, since I could never look to find them in the same way one could search for many other genres (mostly because they often defy genres entirely). Though after further delving into a number of similar, recent books, I was determined to catalog a document of such books for both myself and others who enjoyed such works. Said works include:
\-Fragmented novels like *Weather* (Jenny Offill), *No One Is Talking About This* (Patricia Lockhart), *Flights* (Olga Tokarczuk), and *How It Is* (Samuel Beckett)
\-Disconnected works without an apparent plot or subject, like *Agua Viva* (Clarice Lispector), *The Pillow Book* (Sei Shonagon), and *The Man Without Qualities* (Robert Musil)
\-Erratic works that either fuse and/or divide genres; *Invisible Cities* (Calvino), *Bluets* (Maggie Nelson), *Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years* (Goethe), *Cane* (Jean Toomer)
\-Aphoristic, meditative works: Nietzsche, Cioran, *The Book of Disquiet* (Fernando Pessoa), *Minima Moralia* (Theodor Adorno), *The Cloud of Unknowing*
\-Works that wander and digress: *Tristram Shandy,* Montaigne’s *Essais*, *Steps* (Jerzy Kosinski), Pascal Quignard’s works
This is all just a small selection of ranging, yet similar works that I’ve collected, and have surprisingly found a lot of (I’d post the whole list here, but it’s too long and I unfortunately can’t link the doc). And while the sampling above represents a good look of the works I’m looking for, I wanted to share the full list of what I have so far, both because I’ve seen others searching for similar works and that I’ve managed to find more works by looking around here. I certainly haven’t read all the books on my document (yet!) but I’ve at the least looked into them a bit to see if they fit at least one of the similar veins.
I’d love to talk about any of the works above or any works people would find fitting for such a catalog. Thank you very much for any help!
by EmeryyRS
3 Comments
House of Leaves (tbh the only reason I’m in this thread is to randomly suggest this book
Bc it’s my fave of all time and not well known enough… but it sooo works here)
I’m no expert and have yet to read many of the authors you’ve mentioned, but I have read a few things recently you might like
Robert Walser – can be really digressive and is always rather odd, but in a way that ends up being charming a lot of the time. I’ve only read his novel *Jakob Van Gunten* (which was admired by Kafka) and a couple of NYRB collections of his short pieces, but they all fit the bill.
For something more recent I liked, *Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River* by Jung Young-Moon. Filled with digression and redundancy, also containing various trivia about things in Texas and various visions from the narrator’s brain. Described in its own words as “a mixture of the stream of consciousness technique, the paralysis of consciousness technique, and the derangement of consciousness technique.”
also I feel like recommending Borges and Bruno Schulz, even if they aren’t exactly like anything else in the list, they’re amazing and unique and shouldn’t be missed
You may like:
* The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
* To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf