That’s a book?

Every book is a doorway into another world, and some worlds are weirder than others. We asked members of the campus community to recommend a few that expand our notions of what literature can be. 

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A half-century before the advent of LLMs, Italo Calvino was experimenting with the use of combinatory and computational systems for crafting new literary works.

The automation of writing, he speculated, could open up powerful new horizons of literary expression as machines became increasingly capable of bringing to the page “all those things that we are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes of our psychological life, of our daily experience, our unpredictable changes of mood and inner elations, despairs and moments of illumination.”

Frustrated by the limitations of period computer technology, he found his ideal “machine” in the tarot card decks used by card players and cartomancers. 

Such is the storytelling engine deployed in “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” (1973), a novel built out of images instead of words, in which the narrator “plays” two separate decks and each run of cards generates a sequence of intertwined tales that include the stories of Astolfo’s journey to the Moon in the “Orlando Furioso” and the plots of “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and “King Lear.”

The novel is divided into two sections: “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” (which takes place in a medieval castle and is built around the mid-15th-century Visconti-Sforza tarot) and “The Tavern of Crossed Destinies” (which occurs in a Renaissance inn and is built around the 17th-century Marseille tarot).

Calvino thought of adding a contemporary, post-apocalyptic coda to the book, titled “The Motel of Crossed Destinies,” generated by remixing fragments of comic strips and popular magazines, but never brought the project to fruition.

— Jeffrey Schnapp, Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance and Comparative Literatures, founder of MetaLAB (at) Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

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Playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s “People Who Led to My Plays” (1987) is an extraordinary memoir, a journey into the mind of a brilliant artist, an explosive collection of lists, thoughts, photographs, and images that takes us into her life and development as an artist.

The memoir begins with her years as a young Black girl in elementary school in Ohio in the 1930s, and it ends with her traveling to Europe and Africa in 1960-61 with her own young family, where she finally discovered the distinct nonlinear style and voice that would make her one of the greatest playwrights of our time.

The structure of the book is exhilarating and unexpected. It is divided into five chronological sections, and each section is full of vignettes — sometimes a few paragraphs and sometimes only a line or two, each one beginning with an italicized name or place. A single page might include headings such as: “People my mother dreamed about,” “Julius Caesar,” “Lorca,” “My father,” “Paul Robeson.”

Threaded between these vignettes are family photos, pictures of movie stars, writers, art — all the people and places that shaped her plays.

Imagine someone taking you into a room that leads to a thousand other rooms — showing you this image and that, telling you what it is that struck their heart as they saw it or thought about it, speaking to you with a powerful directness and candor. This is a book that is at once a work of poetry, a scrapbook, a glimpse into the mind of an artist, and a portrait of the world.

I cherish my copy. Adrienne Kennedy taught at Harvard my freshman year, and her playwriting class was the first course I took. She gave me a copy of “People Who Led to My Plays” after I’d finished her course, over tea, and she wrote words of encouragement inside. It meant so much!

— Talaya Adrienne Delaney, research adviser in the humanities and lecturer at Harvard Extension School

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It’s hard to call this experimental fiction since I don’t know that the author is explicitly trying, but it certainly falls under “weird books.” It’s a collection of fragments, aphorisms, short little things that Lichtenberg, the 18th-century German polymath, jotted down for himself. It feels quite modern, like a person’s “drafts” folder for the current social media age. 

— Tomer Ullman, Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology

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My pick is Tove Jansson’s “Moominvalley in November”(1970), translated by Kingsley Hart.

Queer Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson’s balloonish, serene Moomins are popular children’s characters the world over, as are the other figures who populate their world of Moominvalley. But “Moominvalley in November,” the ninth and final book in the series, is an unlikely children’s book about adult problems, written after the death of Jansson’s mother and suffused with suppressed grief and rage, all written in the gentle, sparse style of the earlier books.

The Moomin family are absent — they are having an adventure at sea driven by Moominpappa’s midlife crisis, documented in “Moominpappa at Sea” — and in their absence, six lonely, neurotic strangers drift into their empty house and wait for them to return. Among them are Fillyjonk, a cleaning obsessive who has developed a phobia of cleaning; Hemulen, who cannot live up to the standards of masculinity he has set for himself; Toft, a small, quiet creature who becomes fixated upon an old biology textbook he finds in the Moomins’ attic, and from it accidentally creates a monster; and Snufkin, who has lost a tune.

It’s a bewildering, beautiful book about letting go of family, deeply weird, and I return to it over and over.

— Anna Wilson, assistant professor in the Department of English

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“The Book of Margery Kempe” is, in the words of its most recent editor, astonishing.

Its very existence is something of a miracle. The sole surviving manuscript was discovered in the billiard room of a country house in Derbyshire in 1934. The befuddled owners turned to an expert, Hope Emily Allen (who had studied at Radcliffe) to tell them what they had. Allen immediately recognized it as a long-lost copy of Margery’s “Book” and took the lead as co-editor of the first scholarly edition in 1940. (A translation by B.A. Windeatt was published by Penguin in 1985.)

The book has pride of place as the first autobiography in English, authored around 1430 by a woman who couldn’t read or write, so she dictated her life’s story to two men, one of whom was her son.

Margery herself was no less astonishing than her book. The mother of 14 children, she abandoned her conventional role as a merchant’s wife to devote herself to her spiritual calling. “The Book’s” episodes move between local life in Norfolk and far-flung journeys across Europe, including pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem. It tells of Margery’s ecstatic visions and her public bouts of weeping she called “roaring.”

Fearless about professing her faith, she came under scrutiny by church authorities, but like Chaucer’s fictional Wife of Bath, Margery adeptly used the words of scripture to refute her accusers. Weirdly unique, uniquely weird: There’s nothing quite like Margery Kempe and her “Book.” 

— Daniel Donoghue, John P. Marquand Professor of English, general editor of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

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Spanning from the 1600s until today, we see the life of Addie LaRue, who made a bargain to live forever but is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. This story, published in 2020, felt like it was creating a mythos as it was told, spanning centuries of Addie’s life as we learn what it means to be remembered. This feels more like a late summer, early fall book if you are a seasonal reader like me!

— Meg McMahon, Harvard Libraries user experience researcher

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Although the medieval writer Geoffrey Chaucer has long been called the Father of English Poetry, his most famous literary work is notably weird. “The Canterbury Tales” recounts how a group of pilgrims travel together from outside London to Canterbury and play a tale-telling game along the way.

So far, so good.

But for a supposed literary masterpiece, the “Tales” is wildly variable and uneven. It includes chivalric romances and stories of Christian virtue, fart jokes, and adulterous trysts. Parts of it are entertaining; parts are beautiful; parts are wickedly funny; parts are dull.

How are readers meant to feel about all this? Should they be offended, or bored? And which tale wins the prize? We’ll never know the answer to the last question because the work is unfinished. Not only that, but it survives only in pieces, which scholars are unsure how to arrange.

This is where the full weirdness of “The Canterbury Tales” emerges, in the murky intersection of historical accident, historical difference, and poetic invention. Chaucer was doing something quite new with the “Tales,” something that would have struck even his contemporaries as weird.

But plenty of the peculiarities we notice derive from the context we’ve lost between 1400 and today. Part of why I love reading Chaucer is the fun of following these tangled threads of the strange.

— Julie Orlemanski, Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute 

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Many years ago, I bought a book called simply, “14,000 Things to be Happy About” (1990) by Barbara Ann Kipfer. The premise is so simple it’s almost absurd — the book is just a list of things: “bakery croissants,” “a bedroom library,” “ a stalled car catching,” “the taste of cake batter,” “snappy salutations,” “listening for the sound of a key in the lock,” “the tag on our pillows that says sternly for reasons no one seems to know ‘Do not remove this tag under penalty of law.’”

I smile every time I open the book. Every page has something that I either love or marvel that I can’t stand but someone else loves, which also brings joy. How can someone get happy about “the act of entering a room and forgetting why” or “the gap in the dressing room curtain that can never be completely closed” or “overcoming acalculia (inability to do basic math),” I think, and I laugh at the variety of this world.

I also love the book’s subtle instruction — these words are just words; what brings joy is the meaning we associate with each event it conjures.

It also serves as a reminder that books are objects of craft. So, my tattered copy of the book is right there in the living room next to the others, and I love the strange little book, if we might call it that, so much.

— Sarah Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American Studies