Odd Books

Freakish things and people are plentiful--all over the world.


Just a few odd books to read over the summer! Also a little about Jeff Noon, author of most of the books below.

Jeff Noon
Jeff Noon was born in 1957 in Droylsden, a small town near Manchester, England. Prior to the publication of his debut novel in 1993, Noon had worked as a playwright, bookseller, and performer – both as a musician in punk bands and staging his own one-man shows. His current output, which encompasses novels, novellas and collections of short fiction, is characterized by emotional intensity and linguistic innovation.
Noon’s versatile prose is marked by musicality. He has a fine ear for natural speech, and uses a lot of dialogue in all of his works. Music, on the other hand, is not only ever-present in the stories themselves, but also suggests new ways of storytelling. The rhythms created by sound and silence, be it in the space of a single paragraph or that of an entire work, punctuate the narrative.
Often, Noon centers his novels around a single object. This object, be it a feather or a grain of pollen, is subjected to incessant repetition and extrapolation, until it becomes linked with nearly everything within a given work. When one takes into account Noon’s rich use of allusion (both to his own works as well as those of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges), it is not surprising to find that he has managed to create a network of powerful visual motifs. It might not be going too far to claim that something akin to a private vocabulary has begun to emerge; a chamber of echoes where everyday words embrace new layers of meaning and association.