THE BOOK OF THE BIZARRE // A Jumping Off Point

Rating: Three stars—Good

Basically, Varla Ventura’s THE BOOK OF THE BIZARRE is a collection of morbid and strange factoids. It includes a fair amount of information on a wide number of phenomena and happenings and suchlike, and it’s great—to a point. Some of the trivia is nothing special—for instance, I think most people know that toenails grow more slowly than fingernails since we have to cut our fingernails more often. But for all the information that wasn’t new to me, there was plenty of information that was. 

If you enjoy research as much as I do, and if you’re as morbid as I am, then I highly recommend this book to you because it is a great starting point for more research. I have yet to finish looking up all the stuff that caught my interest. If you’re a writer, especially of the morbid and macabre, you will probably get a few plot bunnies. But, if you don’t like going to secondary sources to read up on things, this book might not be for you. Most of the facts and anecdotes are rather abbreviated and are only worth reading as prompts for further research. On their own, they don’t have too much value. Also, there are some consistency errors within the text, and more than a few of the stories seemed quite implausible, to the point where I can’t recommend this book to gullible people who don’t fact check. (Grandmotherly reminder: It might be printed in a book, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.) 

I got my copy for a dollar at a library sale, and the physical edition itself is attractive. I’m glad I read it (and glad I own it) because it makes for an interesting conversation starter and it’s given me more things to go out and learn about on my own time. But I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to you if you were thinking about buying it at market value, because you could just as easily scour the internet for creepy and strange facts without needing to pay a dime. 

What about you, my little coffee beans? Do you like reading books of facts? Do you like doing research?