Books to lose your mind to

A display of esoteric novels

Books to lose your mind to

Ava Behjat ’27

Copy Editor

The world is filled with odd minds and, subsequently, odd literature. But we need weird books because they are stories that trigger lesser touched-on feelings in order to push the boundaries of our imagination. Here is a list of the weirdest books to combat novels with digestible and straightforward plots:

1. The Voynich Manuscript: A book so confusing we can’t even read it. The anonymous 240-paged tome is written in a language that nobody has ever seen. Carbon dated to 1420, its pages feature a winding script, astrology diagrams with smiling moons and images of floating castles. Discovered by the Polish bookseller Alfred Voynich, the Voynich Manuscript has been puzzled over by scholars for decades. Many have proposed theories: that the book is written in cipher, that it’s the lost language of a forgotten culture or that it was created by a coven of Italian witches.

2. Jabberwocky: We know Lewis Caroll from his Narnia series, but did you know that he wrote a poem about a boy that slays a monster called “Jabberwock”? The work, however, has a twist— it consists of nonsense words like “mimsy” and “snicker-snack”, but if you read a sentence, it makes sense, in it’s own strange way: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”.

3. Picatrix: This occult classic of astrology is a compilation of Arab, Persian and Indian folk magic that has links to Hermetic philosophy and Islamic alchemy. Written in the 11th century, Picatrix also serves as a manual for Middle Eastern witches dealing with spells like this one for a fertile field: “Beneath the Ascent of Taurus, on a silver plate, draw a man surrounded by trees and bury it.”

4. The Memory Theater: Imagine this: the stories of the universe would be forgotten if a time-traveling troupe of actors consisting of the Director, the Apprentice, and Journeyman did not perform every tale in existence. These actors are prepared to die for the stories of the universe if it is necessary to preserve them. This is from the mind of Swedish author, Karin Tidbeck, whose worlds envision women with trains for husbands, girls that sleep in mountains at the end of time and pastors from parallel dimensions.

The Memory Theater and Blind Owl

5. The Blind Owl: This sliver of a book was written by a man in the 1930s, who spoke medieval Persian, lived with Zoroastrian priests and frequently had visions of a woman with the moon for eyes. Such was the life of Sadegh Hedayat who wrote “The Blind Owl” during a series of fever dreams. The story follows an unnamed narrator whose reality blends with fantasy due to his opium addiction, leading him to follow a celestial woman and an old man with a familiar laugh into the past of Iran.

Whether you decide to read these books or not, it’s comforting to know that some have followed and believed in their thoughts so firmly that it leads them to another plane of existence. The question is if we can follow them there.

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