Experiment Literature means a lot of things to a lot of people. When we started the XFX group on Yahoo years ago I noted that some books were considered very experimental, even shocking, back when they were written but today they seems rather tame: mainstream fiction.

This last quarter of the year I decided to include a classic, but very experimental at the time, work by Geoffrey Chaucer but at the last minute opted for a more modern retelling of The Canterbury Tales by Peter Ackroyd. To this I added a book I had recently read called Punkzilla: it’s not too wild but it does experiment with narrative so it”s quite interesting at times. Of course we needed a Science Fiction book and Philip K. Dick’s excellent Time Out of Joint is sufficiently mind-warping to do the trick. Then, as long as you’ve been twisting the little gray cells, Scott Adam’s (of Dilbert fame) offers the “Thought Experiment” titled God’s Debris. The final title is from Russia and what little I know of it, I expect a good story in Sergei Lukyanenko’s Labyrinth of Reflections.

Sometimes I think that all fiction is really experimental. Even genre fiction could be included since much of it is actually a grand experiment in how to write the same book over and over while still promising something new and fresh.

So these are the selections for the Fourth Quarter:

4Q15

10-16 – Time Out of Joint — Philip K. Dick
11-01 – Punkzilla — Adam Rapp
11-16 – Labyrinth of Reflections — Sergei Lukyanenko
12-01 – The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling — Peter Ackroyd
12-16 – God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment — Scott Adams