When I finished my senior year of high school, I thought I was done with taking English classes and the books that accompanied the classes. I was more than finished with analyzing Beowulf or 1984; however, I found my way into an English class my second semester of freshman year and ended up loving it, but the novels read in that class and the one I have taken since are completely different. They’re weirder. This isn’t your high school's English class.

Here are some of the very strange books that I have come across in my college’s English classes:

Lolita

This novel by Vladimir Nabokov probably takes the cake for one of the strangest stories that I’ve ever read but also the one of the most well written. It’s strange and pretty risqué in the fact that it’s the story about a pedophile and his infatuation with a 12 year old girl. Eww.

Moon Tiger

Again, another pretty strange novel. This one is about a dying woman reflecting on her pretty successful life as a journalist, but there’s also some incest involved.

Never Let Me Go

I actually enjoyed this book quite it bit when I read it last semester; however, the story was still pretty weird. It starts out kind of eerie, but then you learn the cause for the eeriness: the children at this school are clones. CLONES. It gets even weirder when you find out what the point of these students' existence even is, but I won’t spoil that.

Beloved

Ahhh, Beloved. Like Lolita, I thought this book was well written too, but it’s about the ghost (or perhaps a metaphor for something deeper: the slave trade) of a woman’s baby, and you guessed it, she’s returned to haunt her family. Some strange stuff goes down.

The Woman in the Dunes

This book, this book. It’s been a few weeks since my class finished this book, and I’m still as confused as ever about it. The plot revolves around a man (kind of an outcast) who gets trapped in a small village in the Japanese countryside. He’s forced to continually dig sand out of the sand pit he’s held prisoner in with another (bizarre) woman.

Season of Migration to the North

This book also didn’t offer up a ton of answers. It is mainly about two men and their journeys home to Sudan after spending time in England. One of the characters had a pretty interesting time in England that the other character pretty much obsesses over.

Mrs. Dalloway

Yes, this is more of a literary classic, but it’s still a little strange. I’ll just leave it at that.

Well, from my short list here, I’m sure you can see that a majority of the books that I’ve read in the two English classes have been kind of weird and not at all like the regular high school books.