Chaos Reading discussion
Bookshelf Nominations
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Bookshelf Nominations: Unusual Perspectives
Please Ignore Vera DietzIn addition to the traditional first person narration by Vera Dietz, POVs also include her dead friend and a pagoda
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I feel like I should be able to think of some of these but nothing's ringing a bell. I have a whole shelf for books told from multiple people's perspectives, but I can't think of a single book narrated from this type of unusual perspective right now. Hmmm.
Well The Book Thief is one of MY favourites :P
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No worries. It just didn't sound like you'd read the second one: Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed.
I'm struggling with this topic too, Riona. And I really thought I had heaps of these!
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On A Pale Horse (the whole series is from the POV of Immortals)
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Ahem, sorry. That was my cat. I wish she'd teach me how to make those symbols.
Skinny Legs and All is partly told from the POV of inanimate objects. It's also a very humorous and sexy book in general.
Ooh! I thought of one. One section of Ghostwritten is narrated by a sort of parasitic noncorporeal entity.
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Riona - Nice! Your review makes me more determined to read my copy of Cloud Atlas!
Hey has anyone read & would recommend War Horse (above)? I just want to make sure we're putting up books at least some people in the group would recommend. Good find, Anna.
Cloud Atlas is one of my faves. I really need to read more David Mitchell.Sorry, haven't read War Horse. I knew there was a play and a movie, but never knew it was based on a book!
Riona wrote: "Cloud Atlas is one of my faves. I really need to read more David Mitchell.Sorry, haven't read War Horse. I knew there was a play and a movie, but never knew it was based on a book!"
Actually, it is a Scholastic book. Funny story. When I introduced it to my students as I put it on the class bookshelf, one quite aghast young boy said, Ms. Zink, why would you put a book about prostitutes on your shelf. He thought I had said "whores." Ah, youth!
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Ruby wrote: "Now I have a mental image of Mr. Ed saying, "Where's my money, bitch?!""Hilarious! Great book, that! Should win awards then! :)
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In all seriousness, the floating pageant was quite an amazing thing to watch. British royal events are so...... democratic! It's really cool to see an event like this where the public are such a big part of the occasion. I hadn't planned on watching on it, but my partner put it on, and I couldn't look away... and then it was 3am.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...
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As I recall, there are other alien points of view in the book as well. Now I want to reread it and see if it’s as mind bendingly good as I remember it.
I'm also adding "The Book Thief" to my TBR list, thanks for the recommendation.
Second for A Fire Upon the Deep.I've recommended it elsewhere in this group, but Latro in the Mist is written from the point of view of someone with severe anterograde amnesia.
Also recommend The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or The Speed of Dark, which have autistic protagonists.
And of course there's Jonathan Livingston Seagull which is, IIRC, from the POV of a seagull, if an extremely anthropomorphized one. People tend to either love that book or hate it, though.
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BTW, the tv coverage of this is STILL going (it's Day5) on ABC. Nuts!
Dean Koontz's Demon Seed: One of the POVs is from a dog. Dean Koontz's The Bad Place: One of the POVs is from a man who has Down Syndrome. (Not sure if that counts, being human, but it is an interesting and unusual point of view.)
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides has parts of the story told through the point of view of a manic depressive off of lithium. (Again, not sure if this counts...)
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Are you aware of some of the.... controversy.... around that author?
http://cuddlebuggery.com/blog/2012/06...
She seems to have gone to some great lengths to get certain posts about the book taken off of GR too.
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She seems to have gone to some great lengths to get certain posts about the book taken off of GR too.
..."
Almost all of the four and five star reviews are from other Goodreads authors. Apparently there's a bit of an incestuous relationship amongst them...
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Ruby wrote: "Adam wrote: "Dance Of The Goblins would fit into this one as it's largely written from a sympathetic view for the goblins and gives some great insight into their world."Are you aware of some of t..."
Oh, good ole Jaq. Every time I see her post in a group, I just grab the popcorn and sit back. Her hissyfits can be extremely entertaining.
The Sound and the Fury has a curious POV, of course. I do love The Book Thief, but if I remember correctly, except for a few ironic asides, the POV might as well be third-person omniscienct.
John Crowley's beautiful, lyrical Engine Summer has a unique POV character. I think everyone should read this gentle, sweet, insightful, marvelous book. (It's hard to find the short novel in print in standalone form; it's best to get Crowley's Three Novels.)
The POV in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is unique. If you know the movie but haven't yet read the great book upon which it's based, you're in for a surprising treat.
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The POV in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is unique. If you know the movie but haven't yet read the great book upon which it's based, you're in for a surprising treat. ..."
Wow - Engine Summer looks pretty special. All the PA discussion threads I've participated in, and I've never even heard of this one before. Definitely TBRd.
I love Cuckoo's Nest. Just unpacked it about an hour ago actually, and it's gone straight to my "Favourites" shelf. The real-life one.
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I whole heartedly second Engine Summer. And a couple great short stories with unique narrators are Born Of Man And Woman and Bright Segment. The story Bright Segment can also be found in the collection Caviar.
Riddley Walker is one of my all time favorite books. It was the inspiration for the middle section of Cloud Atlas with it's post-apocalyptic narrator and unique slang.
Ruby wrote: "Wow - Engine Summer looks pretty special. All the PA discussion threads I've participated in, and I've never even heard of this one before. Definitely TBRd."Yeah. Even if we don't read it as a group, you've got to check it out. It's extraordinary. I'd love to talk about it with someone who is experiencing it for the first time.
Shin put it on her with list without realizing we had a copy here at home. So if I can move some of the BDSM-group reading aside, maybe I can get her to take a look. [smile]
Sean wrote: "Second for A Fire Upon the Deep.I've recommended it elsewhere in this group, but Latro in the Mist is written from the point of view of someone with severe anterograde amnesia.
Also recommend T..."
Latro in the Mist looks cool. It has that sort of Twilight Zone feel to it; will check it out!
Also - this is one of my favourite books - the narrator is a bowl:
And another, where the narrator is a shopping trolley. This one is utterly hilarious.
Helen wrote: "How about a story told from the POV of a tortoise? Yes it is for adults!
And here's a list of books with animal narrators:
http://www.helenjbe..."
Kind of tacky to promote your own books outside of the self-promotion section that Ruby has so thoughtfully provided for authors in the group.
The other books you've mentioned sound interesting, though.
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Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. good old Qfwfq. whatever he is, beside unreliable.Except the Queen by Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder All sorts of the -- ehem -- Good Folk -- some in epistolatory POV.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern Some of the points of view here aren't even explain who the character is until the end of the book.
Archelon Ranch -- This book starts with the POV of Bernard, who happens to be a hat just then. So that's definitely an unusual perspective, right? Yeah, it's kind of a weird story. But I liked it. Kenneth Oppel's Silverwing series have a bat as their protagonist.
There's Tomorrow's Sphinx, which is from the POV of a black/melanistic cheetah who has a mental link to another black cheetah in the past who was owned by the pharaoh Tutankhamen, so that's really like two unusual points of view. I loved this book, as well as Clare Bell's Ratha series, from the point of view of intelligent cats in prehistoric times.
Blindness is in third person, and the main POV is of one person who is left with sight among those who have been blinded in a mysterious epidemic, but the perspectives of the blinded characters are expressed as well, as they try to navigate without their sight.
Cold Tom - Tom, half-human and half-elf, is cast out, and seeks refuge among humans. Been a while since I read it, but I know I enjoyed it at the time.
Dermaphoria -- From the POV of Eric, who wakes up in jail with no memories of how he got there but the name Desiree, is bailed out, and holes up in a cheap hotel room taking increasing amounts of a new hallucinogen which brings forth vivid flashbacks of the events leading up to this point. Hell of a ride.
Dhalgren - Kidd is also an amnesiac; but that's not really the main focus, he just is occasionally puzzled by his inability to remember much of his life before he entered Bellona, a city best described as "post-apocalyptic." Kidd's a bit of a headcase, but that works all right amidst the general anarchy there. There's also some weird stylistic and metafictional type things going on, especially near the end, so "unusual" definitely fits.
Dogsbody -- POV of a dog...well, kind of. I am really bad at explaining--just click the link, read the summary, I guess. One of my favorites when I was younger, and I've been meaning to re-read it sometime.
Doppelganger - A young doppelganger must leave the isolated cabin he's been raised in and venture into human society, where he'll kill a young man and take his place.
Downsiders - Set in a society of people who live in the tunnels and sewers beneath New York; the protagonist is Talon, a young 'Downsider.'
And I know it sounds a lot like Engine Summer, but Feersum Endjinn - A few different points of view in an odd post-apocalyptic world as well as in the Crypt, which is a sort of virtual afterlife. One of the characters, a boy named Bascule, is kind of an annoying POV since his sections are phonetically spelled (though I think a 'translated' version is included), but I liked the book, and I'd say there are some unusual perspectives there.
Many of Christopher Moore's books: Fool (narrated by King Lear's court Fool), Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (narrated, yes, by 'Biff, Christ's childhood pal'); and A Dirty Job (whose main character unwillingly becomes Death).
Oooh, just remembered: Surrender--it's been a while since I read it, so it's hard to really explain it well, but I do remember the narration was fairly unusual.
Going Bovine--a hallucinatory trip through the disintegrating mind of a high-school boy who has contracted mad cow disease.
One more (for now...): Johnny Got His Gun -- A young man whose arms and legs have been amputated and who is also unable to speak, hear, or see due to combat wounds. Pretty effed up, but definitely worth reading.
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The GR link to this is lame, so I'll add this one to the actual story: http://web.archive.org/web/2005120518...
I, Pencil: My Family Tree As Told to Leonard E. Read by Leonard E. ReadAs the title says, told by a pencil.
Raising Stony Mayhall - The protagonist is born a zombie, found and raised in secret by a human family. Eventually the point of view actually gets a bit weirder, believe it or not.The Vorrh - One of the main characters/perspectives is a young cyclops raised by some kind of androids.
Satan Burger - The narrator at least part of the time sees his body from a third-person perspective.
C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series--Bren Cameron is the paidhi-aiji, translator, diplomat, and liaison between the island colony of Mospheira--a human settlement descended from the colonists on a lost starship--and the mainland, inhabited by the native sentient race, the atevi. So the protagonist, Bren, is often the lone human among the atevi, who have their similarities physically and psychologically to humans, but are also intrinsically different. Also, starting around the 9th book, I think, there are shifts between Bren's POV and the perspective of Cajieri, a young ateva. That makes for two interesting perspectives, and a very good series.
Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. A flock of sheep is trying to solve the murder of their beloved shepherd.
How about Time's Arrow where the life of the protagonist is discovered as if the the video of his life is watched on rewind.(I realized I just alienated all of the Post-VHS readers on the forum. Sorry.)
Todd wrote: "How about Time's Arrow where the life of the protagonist is discovered as if the the video of his life is watched on rewind.(I realized I just alienated all of the Post-VHS readers o..."
...I remember videotapes. Those things I used to hurt my fingers trying to unjam from our VCR. XD
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Some of these sound amazing.
Chaos Reading
Books mentioned in this topic
Johnny Got His Gun (other topics)Time's Arrow (other topics)
Time's Arrow (other topics)
Three Bags Full (other topics)
Foreigner (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Leonie Swann (other topics)R.J. Anderson (other topics)
Leonard Edward Read (other topics)
Clare Bell (other topics)
Christopher Moore (other topics)
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I'll start us off with a couple that immediately spring to mind..
We3
POV=Weaponised semi-cybernetic house pets.
The Brief History of the Dead
POV - Dead people. Lots and lots of dead people.
Filth
POV - A tapeworm inside a man's intestines.