whimsical books you should read (but they keep getting weirder) 🧚🌀

I would say that the ultimate whimsical girl is Alice from Alice in Wonderland and that is why I highly recommend reading Alice in Wonderland and also Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.

This book has just such a wonderful take of what it means to be scary and that according to this book, the scariest thing out there is actually the unknown.

This is a book about obsession, about sister relationships. I think this is one of those books that everyone interprets it differently.

And then of course, I cannot make a video about weird books without recommending Bunny by Mona Awad, one of my favorite books of all time.

It is a very funny take on the absurdity of corporate culture, but also how we use the internet, internet trends, beauty trends, capitalism, just anything that would make a modern corporate woman discontent.

The fae are actually scary and mean, but somehow Heather Fawcett writes it in such a way that it never is scary, but it always feels cozy and just a little strange.

It is a book about hunger, a book about feeling monstrous, breaking free from social rules, breaking free from your own small town. If you love the trope of a main character with a monster living inside of them, you got to read this.

This book has all the makings of a classic whimsical fairy tale. It's one of those cozy fantasies that feels like a warm hug without ever becoming boring because a lot is happening in this book.

If you are someone who is interested in existentialist philosophy or interested in the question of basically what to do with my life, you are really going to enjoy this French novel Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre.

she blends poetry with prose and story with actual philosophical ideas about love, about entanglement, but also about the impending doom of climate change.

I love books that have a lot of imagery of rots and mushrooms and decay, and this book is full of that.

I think one of my favorite weird little books about a weird little guy is Perfume by Patrick Suskind. This is for everyone who loves to read about obsession and how it always leads to someone's downfall.

First, we have Rouge, which is a retelling of Snow White, and which means that this is mostly a story about beauty and a main character who is absolutely obsessed with skin care and beauty routines.

Sleuthfoot is for the fans of the darker Ghibli movies. Dark wood spirits, witches, and vengeance.

I highly recommend you pick up some Angela Carter, and a great way to start with that is actually The Bloody Chamber, not just the short story, but the entire short story collection, because this is all of her retellings of fairy tales.

So, on one end, it is a novel about literal cannibalism, but it is also a novel about how capitalism eats you up from the inside.

I would actually really recommend this nonfiction book called The Little Book of Mushrooms. It is a beautiful little nonfiction book about all the most common or the most well-known mushrooms.

I think The Starless Sea has just slightly more whimsical qualities to it in a sense that the entire book feels like a little puzzle or even a scavenger hunt.

This book gets very graphic at certain moments, so I do want to warn about that. It's one of those books that constantly almost becomes surreal, but never completely, and therefore it lives on this edge of tension all the time.

In only 50 pages, this book is just a perfect account of what happens when, as a woman, you are not allowed access to your own intelligence.

This is a beautiful love story, but I'm calling it whimsical because it plays with the concept of time travel in a way that doesn't feel like you're watching a Christopher Nolan movie that you don't really understand.

This book is thorny with some dark sides, but ultimately will always be heartwarming. I am always just amazed with T. Kingfisher's imagination.

I specifically recommend Through the Looking-Glass cuz Through the Looking-Glass has a lot of characters that you may not be familiar with yet because you're so used to Alice in Wonderland.