Strange and Amazing Books

[Shahid]

This is where we are going to share some of the wonderful and strange writing masterpieces. You are always welcome to discuss your opinion whether negative of positive about the writing works shared here or based on your personal experiences and readings.

[Shahid]

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg
My first selection is also the shortest: fourteen drawings, each with a title and a very short caption. That's it. But each caption is the seed of an irresistable story and, taken with Van Allsburg's haunting drawings, they produce a sensation in the reader that is pure magic.

One such drawing, "Uninvited Guests," seems an ordinary sketch of a basement storage area: a shelf with old cans, a neglected ice skate hanging from a wire, a stack of newspapers, the bottom of a staircase with someone's foot just visible on the third step. But closer examination shows, cut into the wall, an impossibly small door with rounded top and tidy doorknob - maybe 18 inches high. And this caption: "His heart was pounding. He was sure he had seen the doorknob turn."

Chris Van Allsburg produces the kind of children's books that are really purchased for the guilty pleasure of adults. This book, which I take down regularly to marvel at, is the quickest antidote I know for a sluggish imagination.

for more on strange and wonderful books you can also visit: www.cartania.com

[Shahid]

Flatland - A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott

In its review under the 20 Strange and Wonderful Books, the cartania.com writes, "An adult mind is not fully formed until it grasps the possibility of higher dimensions. These dimensions may or may not exist, but the idea that they could, and the fact that we can describe and partially understand things that are quite literally beyond our 3-dimensional imaginations, is so astonishing that it can keep a sense of wonder alive in the most jaded mind. And undermine the pretensions of anyone who thinks the boundaries of our world are fixed."

This 80-page book was written by an English clergyman over a hundred years ago which describes the adventures of a resident of a two-dimensional world who is lifted up into three-dimensional space and set down again to rave like a madman before the unseeing denizens of his world.

[Shahid]

The Well At The World's End by William Morris

In his collection on 20 Strange and Wonderful Books, Johan Cartan in his review on cartania.com attributes this book as a dangerous one, especially for teenagers. He also comments, "when I first read it at the tender age of thirteen, I absorbed it so completely that for weeks I spoke in the archaic English Morris invented for this, one of the earliest fantasy novels of that genre. But it was only when I re-read the book at age forty that I understood how profound its effect was. In short, I became a romantic because of this book." He also warns that the Well at the World's End is a fairy tale written by an adult for adults. Teenagers beware!

[Shahid]

Labyrinths - Selected Stories and Other Writingsby Jorge Luis Borges

John Cartan in his review about the Labyrinths published on cartania.com writes, "The blind poet Borges is one of the better known writers on this list. I could have selected any one of his collections, but Labyrinths has the greatest personal signifcance. From an early age I was fascinated with labyrinths and came to see almost everything around me as a kind of maze: the neurons in my brain, the great tangle of human relationships, any computer, the branching journey that is every human life, and the world itself in all its bewildering glory. All Borges stories, especially "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "The Library of Babel," share this view.

Borges had perhaps the most labyrintine mind of any man in his century. A scholar's scholar, he "read everything, and especially what nobody reads anymore." Each one of his very short narratives is a glimpse into that mind: always murky, lost in shadows, twisted by paradoxes, immersed in irony, dissolving into an infinite regress of reflections.

Each one of his stories has a way of lodging itself in the recesses of the reader's mind and staying on there. To this day I still find myself wandering the "indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries" of the Library of Babel. Here I learned that there is no discernable difference for mortal man between a very large number and an infinite number - but that was just the beginning. And there are dozens more stories in this collection, each stranger and more wonderful than the last

[iceiscool]

Mysteries of the Unexplained - This one is a very old title, but it has captivated my imagination quite a lot. A lot of the mysteries in the book are already solved, but a lot are still to be unearthed.

[iceiscool]

Imaginary Numbers: An Anthology of Marvelous Mathematical Stories, Diversions, Poems, and Musings
by: William Frucht

Ever heard of mathematical fiction? This is a wildly inventive treasury of the most artful words ever written about numbers. Mathematics and writing may seem to exist in opposite realms, but as William Frucht reveals, the world of numbers has always held a special fascination for men and women of letters. Imaginary Numbers displays the fruits of this cross-fertilization by collecting the best creative writing about mathematical topics from the past hundred years.