Weird, maybe even bizarre, but definitely strange books

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Hello everyone. Welcome to the Old Man in the Read. My name is Jerry.

[00:00:07]Well, I just finished here recently a book by Jose D'Nasso titled uh uh Sacred Families and it had three of the very strangest novellas in it I've ever read and it got me to thinking about some of the other weird and strange books I've read. So, I thought I might make a video of the strange books I've read.

[00:00:41]Uh now the what the Sacred Families I'll save and I'm going to talk about it when I uh talk about the books I read in the month of May. So, I'll I'll discuss that book then. I have another Jose D'Nasso book here that I'll include in this. So, anyway, uh so I'm going to begin with Penguin Island by Anatole France.

[00:01:10]Uh and this is about a priest uh who mistakenly baptizes a colony of penguins.

[00:01:20]And now this action then obligates God to turn them into humans.

[00:01:29]Uh the next is the Woman of the Dunes by Kobo or Kobo Abe. Uh and this is about a man who goes to the seaside dunes to collect uh beetles. But he misses the last bus to town and so has to find a place to stay uh in the village.

[00:01:53]Uh now the houses are all located in very deep pits in the sand dunes and so he finds a house but he has to go down a rope ladder to get to the house where the woman lives that is going to let him stay.

[00:02:11]However, when he wakes up in the morning that rope is gone or the ladder is gone and he is stuck down there and then he finds out that he has to help her every day shovel the sand that is drifted down into the dune and he's stuck there.

[00:02:38]>> [clears throat] >> Uh The next book I have is Death with Interruptions by Jose de na Jose Saramago and uh the basically the this book is what happens when death decides that the people of one country will not die.

[00:03:01]They they're just unable to die and those people can still suffer and you know all of the torments that they that always go on but they simply can't die and he weaves an incredibly interesting story around that premise.

[00:03:24]Next book I have is a river called time by Mia Couto and Mia Couto wrote uh some really strange but incredibly good books. They're all stories woven around Mozambique myths and so this in this story Mariano has returned to his island home for the funeral of his grandfather.

[00:03:58]And he's uh he soon learns that his grandfather is both dead and not dead.

[00:04:09]And he begins finding letters to himself uh bought from his grandfather but are in his own handwriting and these start revealing the secrets of the family.

[00:04:28]>> [clears throat] >> Uh the next book is The City and the City by China Miéville, another of those writers who wrote just some a whole assortment of very uh strange surreal books and this is the one I'll talk about is The City and the City by China Miéville.

[00:04:52]And this is basically a detective story that's set in a place where there are two cities that existed on the exact same spot uh but there is no interaction between those two cities. The people of each of the cities are basically oblivious to the others and they just live out their normal lives unaware of the other city existing. It's a premise that doesn't seem like it would work but Miéville just uh makes it magnificent.

[00:05:30]Uh the next book is I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch.

[00:05:36]And this is about a man who calls himself Sam White.

[00:05:41]And he's arrested in Switzerland for having a false passport.

[00:05:50]Uh he is believed to be a man named Stiller who had disappeared 6 years before.

[00:05:59]Uh and he's identified as Stiller by Stiller's wife and some other people, but he insists he is not Stiller.

[00:06:13]Uh the next book is Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. Rulfo.

[00:06:20]And this is about a a young man who follows his mother's dying wish.

[00:06:26]Uh and she wants him to return to the village of her birth to make his father Pedro Páramo pay for abandoning the family.

[00:06:39]Uh he goes on a very bizarre surreal trip and when he gets to the village it's a ghost town that is both occupied by both the living and the non-living.

[00:06:55]Uh the next book is The Tin Drum by Günter Grass.

[00:07:00]In in this book Oscar has decided to stop growing at the age of three.

[00:07:07]Now he's a very manip- manipulative and he can shatter glass with his screams and he communicates by beating his drum.

[00:07:26]Uh the next book is Blindly by Claudio Magris.

[00:07:32]Uh this is about a man who is talking to his psychiatrist and he appears to be uh man known as uh Sippi Sepiko uh who had uh been a victim of torture.

[00:07:50]Uh he had been sent to Dekal Derca and later released and but then uh imprisoned and sent sent to Golai Otok uh where he was tortured. But uh he um also claims that he is Horgan Horgave Horganson who was condemned to uh forced labor in Australia and hunted down by the Aborigines.

[00:08:23]Uh the next book is a wild sheep chase by Haruki Murakami and uh this is uh a young uh advertising executive is ordered by a man working for uh a a man known as the boss and he's uh uh told to locate a a sheep that had appeared in a photograph he had used in the ad. And uh this sent him on a really uh bizarre uh search for the sheep and the sheep had a star-shaped mark on its side and is believed to have magical powers.

[00:09:11]Uh the next book is The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare.

[00:09:17]Uh this is about a a young Albanian man who goes to work for uh what's known as The Palace of Dreams.

[00:09:26]It's a vast expansive branch of the Ottoman Empire uh of the government. And um their function is to gather, sort, and interpret the dreams of the citizens to identify master dreams that can determine the destiny of the empire.

[00:09:51]The next book is uh uh 2 years, 8 months, and 28 nights by Salman Rushdie. And Salman Rushdie wrote just some whole assortment of magnificent magical realism books. And this one is about supernatural beings called jinn.

[00:10:16]And they have entered the world to battle to battle the humans.

[00:10:21]And so the humans are organized and led by descendants of a jinni who had dozens of children that were fathered by a human philosopher Ibn Rushd centuries before.

[00:10:42]uh The next book is 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

[00:10:53]And he's known for his magical realism and this is probably his the best example of it. And the story follows the Buendía family who founded a Colombian city called Macondo. Now this city is completely isolated and but eventually things begin changing as wandering gypsies bring in new inventions and there's civil wars and then eventually a railroad connects the town to the outside world. And foreign investors then set up a banana plantation. So it's a a story that just follows the Buendia family for 100 years.

[00:11:57]The next book is Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee.

[00:12:05]In this Michael K is born with a simple mind. He tries to take his mother who is dying back to her childhood village, but she dies on the way. So then he is determined to continue the journey in order to spread her ashes.

[00:12:29]But there are just a whole assortment of obstacles in his way including imprisonment and uh the Coetzee wrote this story so brilliantly it puts the reader into the mind of the simple man who only wants to exist free and to be left alone.

[00:12:56]And the final book I have is a book by Jose Donoso, the author who wrote the book that got me the idea to do the video. This is The Obscene Bird of Night. And this has got to be the strangest book I've ever read. But the premise story of a wealthy man who builds a convent and confines his daughter who has new supernatural powers and the but then a couple of the story goes a couple of centuries later and the convent is now a run-down institute for orphans and elderly people.

[00:13:44]But the main story is about a man named Humberto who is the secretary for a descendant of the original owner of that uh uh institute. It This man's name is Jeronimo. And Jeronimo has a son born with a deformity who they confined to a institute that houses people with deformities and he's placed under the care of Humberto so that he will grow up not being aware that he is deformed.

[00:14:26]But anyway, those are some of the strange books I've read.

[00:14:31]Some very bizarre, some completely weird, but really great books. Anyway, I want to thank you for watching the video and hopefully I'll see you again. Thanks.