Self-Reference ENGINE by EnJoe Toh is a very strange book. It's actually difficult to describe. It's a book of hard science fiction by an author with a PhD in physics. It's extremely literary, rich with allusion and clever turns of phrase. It's thematically dense, and goofy enough to feature a talking sock. Or something that appears to be a talking sock, anyway. We do have some neat things worked out for you, as regards Self Reference ENGINE. We put a map of the stories in the book! The wonderful online magazine Strange Horizons will be running a chapter from the book, as a short story, next week. And here on the blog we'll be featuring a Q/A with Dr. Phil Kaldon, a physicist and science fiction writer who worked as the physics consultant on the book. The book needed a physics consultant. So we could get the talking sock right. And the stuff about Sherlock Holmes's old nemesis Professor Moriarty. And the space battles. And and and... So for this giveaway contest, our question is a simple one: what's the strangest book you've ever read (and finished!) and what made it so unusual. A charming little essay of 50-200 woeThe four most entertaining answers received as comments on this blog post by Friday at noon Pacific will win a free copy of Self-Reference ENGINE. Feel free to answer in the form of a poem, or in Spanish, Japanese, German, or Greek! We ship anywhere!