We Have Always Lived in the Castle I read when I was 12, and that was one of those books that put me in a completely other headspace for days. Like I was convinced I'd poisoned my parents.

That's another good topic that we've sort of touched on. Books that fuck with your head. For me it was reading Hell of A Woman by Jim Thompson. Nothing like being in the head of a pure sociopath for a couple hours to completely skew your world.

Dear God, is there ALWAYS a Christian metaphor?

Sometimes there's a Vishnu metaphor. You just have to look for it.

Dear God, is there ALWAYS a Christian metaphor?

LOVE the meta.

Sometimes there's a Vishnu metaphor. You just have to look for it.

Which is tough in English/American Lit. But would be a great mental exercise.

Books that screwed with my head:

Life Size, by Jenefer Schute--novel told in first person by the narrator, a young woman hospitalized for anorexia. Really got me into the head space of a condition that I can never fully understand.

The Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper--I was (mostly) enjoying it (her environmentalist screeds were getting on my nerves a bit, though), until The Moment when everything is revealed. I realized I'd been completely mistaken about assuming some rather big assumptions and my mind was blown!

Sheri Tepper's book Sideshow really fucked with my mind. It starts off with conjoined twins, whose parents put one thorugh a sex change operation so they could have a boy and a girl. They join the circus and at some point the sci fi element of the book kicks in. Honestly, I couldn't get past the squickiness of the conjoined twins and I'm pretty sure there's some incestious action going on.

I don't think I finished it.

Wow. That synopsis reads like she was trying to win a "how many of these elements can you include in one story" contest.

Books that fuck with your head.

Pynchon's V. I was in grad school between semesters, living by myself, spending a lot of time alone doing research and whatnot when I read it. It completely took over my brain, made me very paranoid and inclined to look for conspiracies everywhere. It's the gold standard for books taht fuck with the head, for me.

Oh, I had that Family Tree moment. She completely fooled me, absolutely. Yeah.

I liked Sideshow but I felt like I was missing out on references to her other books - Grass, I think, which I hadn't read at that point.

Messed with my head Garp, HST, probably Catcher In The Rye (Lefty cliche, much) Catcher was kind of a delayed reaction, as I was a goody-goody high school girl who spent the whole first reading wanting HC to get an incomplete in English. Because it seemed very much like the other teenaged books and because I thought I would get the whole Chapman/serial murder lovefest with the book. The next year I was different, and I figured out if you are bugfuck you will read things in books that aren't in them.

I was just looking at the Amazon entry for Family Tree, and they include a Library Journal review that reveals the big twist in the opening sentence. Bah on spoiler-revealing reviewers!

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS certainly opened my eyes to what you could get away with in a "nonfiction" narrative (in quotes because Thompson himself said he had to fictionalize a lot).

THE SHINING scared the hell out of me. But the earliest that a freaky horror story put the zap on my head was reading Edgar Allen Poe back in grade school. THE TELL-TALE HEART, THE CASK OF AMONTILLIADO (sp?) and, especially, THE BLACK CAT were seriously deranged.

Seconding -t's V.

To this date, the least commerical novel I have ever read. It was all about "if you can't keep up with the preconceptions turned upside down ... piss off."

eta: Noone else has remarked on it here, so I will. Jim Baen has passed on. A light has gone out.