Readers of my blog on the weirdness that permeates Auckland Libraries will have guessed I have a soft spot for the odd and ridiculous. While my own reading is largely from the crime shelves, I love stumbling across something that adds a bit of spice to our collection. Scanning the journals for new material to buy here at Collections HQ, I've discovered a few winners. Although, quite frankly, nothing can ever beat Cooking With Poo (a Thai chef called Poo, of course).
Hopefully one of these titles will tickle your fancy too!
Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach - Colin Cotterill
A mystery set in Thailand (though with no characters called Poo, I understand). The author has quite a tradition of interesting titles, with other novels such as Curse of the Pogo Stick, Disco for the Departed and Killed at the Whim of a Hat.
Apocalypse Cow - Michael Logan
Sounds like a bovine Black Sheep. An escaped bioweapon turns cows into a cud-chewing zombie apocalypse. This won the latest Terry Pratchett prize for best unpublished SF/fantasy novel, so it could be a prime rib-tickler. Mooooooooo.....
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs
A spooky and highly original book for tweens, teens and adults alike, complete with (real) photos of peculiar children like the floating girl on the cover. I'm looking forward to the sequel!
Rubber (R16)
I've included a DVD in here, because no collection of oddities would be complete without it. If you thought the likes of Delicatessen were strange, wait till you see this offering by another French film-maker. It's all in English, don't worry, but you may have difficulty following it all the same. You see, it's a road trip tale about a homicidal tyre called Robert who blows people up with his magical powers. It's also a story about the people who are watching things unfold within the movie. And a paean to "no reason". Lunacy with latex and a high splatter quotient.
Speaking of Black Sheep, here's a forthcoming graphic novel by one of its creators (and published by Weta Digital). Since the first word was transcribed onto parchment, man has searched for tomes that lift the lid on the inner machinations of the human condition and reveal truths about humanity and its place in this universe - there are books that teach, books that inspire and books that offer a glimpse into our very souls. Triumph, on the other hand, is full of violence, bad language, interplanetary racism and a little sprinkling of smut, but you get what you pay for. Strictly for adults!
VN - Madeline Ashby
This could be a teen/adult crossover, for fans of sci-fi and dystopian novels (with unusual tastes.) Amy Peterson is a self-replicating humanoid robot. For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother's past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive. (As you do.) Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, trying to find the secret of why she alone can override the programming not to kill humans.
Let me know if you've come across any great titles or stories of your own.
2 comments:
The bovine cow idea makes me giggle and the peculiar children is intriguing (is it sort of an Elephant Man tale?). But VN just sounds wacky! Wacky enough for me to want to read it actually.
I obviously don't read enough as I had heard of only 1 of these titles before. I'm with Kowhai Reader in that VN sounds completely insane and something I definitely want to read
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