Plotless novels with beautiful prose

For those who like their books confusing.

You’re reading Soft Hobbies, a weekly newsletter for creatives in all mediums, with a special focus on writers. Here you’ll find resources to nurture creativity, advice to overcome perfectionism, and inspiration to make time for art. I’m Auzin, a Seattle-based writer in the fiction, poetry, and tech spheres. Feel free to visit my author website or check out my socials.

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We’re living in an age of plot. Authorial terms like “lore” and “worldbuilding” are commonplace and regularly applied to real life, not just fiction. We say someone is wearing a “main character outfit” when they look stylish, or lament their “main character syndrome” if their behavior draws too much negative attention. Our hobbies or divergent lifepaths are “sidequests,” and the consequences of our actions are “canon events” that can’t be interfered with. We do things and people “for the plot.”

You get the idea. This is probably a result of Tiktok’s impact on the general public’s speech patterns — and for the record, I don’t have a Tiktok or use most of these colloquialisms. I was just using 1st person to make my hook feel more universal :)

But aren’t you sick of figuring out the plot? Aren’t you tired of looking at your life like an MFA workshop or a goal-oriented RPG videogame? Don’t you get sick sometimes of everything you read and watch making sense, either right away or “if you look close enough?”

Don’t you want to be free to enjoy something without worrying if you “get” it?

If you love getting lost and over your head in weird art, in beautiful language with obscure words, or maybe you’re just curious what I’m talking about—Hi! Welcome.

With these books, you can meander. You might be left stunned and confused. There are no intricate Christopher Nolan-style plot structures here, no rigid Brandon Sanderson magic systems. There’s just you and the work someone made from their heart, with their hands, without explaining themselves. Some have more structured plots than others, but all of them prioritize character work, evoking emotion, and prose quality. Enjoy!

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls (1982)

Holy shit, this book. A lost gem from a relatively obscure author, Mrs. Caliban deserves to be a widely-known classic. Short (technically a novella!) and will undoubtedly leave an impression on you.

Premise: A depressed housewife in a loveless marriage starts an affair with a sentient sea monster.

Vibes: The Shape of Water meets Shirley Jackson. Dreamy and devastatingly lonely.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2019)

You’ve definitely heard of this one, if you haven’t read it already. Vuong’s background as a poet is evident in the evocative, imagistic prose that tugs at your heart. Non-chronological, grittier and more class-conscious than you remember.

Premise: Cycles of violence follow a Vietnamese-American boy as he falls in love for the first time.

Vibes: Taking joy from what kills you, loving who hurts you, and choosing to survive.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1980)

Oscar Wilde’s dedication to the Aesthetic movement is exemplified in this novel and its preface — or is it? You either love this book and Wilde’s writing style, or you get bored from the seeming lack of purpose or direction.

Premise: A vain aristocrat gives up his soul to stay eternally young and beautiful while a portrait in the attic bears the weight of his hard living and long years.

Vibes: Gorgeous prose, opium-laced morals, fancy little twinks. What else would you expect from Mr. Wilde?

Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre (1978)

A quietly feminist SFF odyssey that is truly both SF (science fiction) and F (fantasy). The characters will stay with you, and the world is written to be deeply believable despite its oddity. I adore this book and often recommend it.

Premise: A nomadic healer loses one of her magical snakes and goes on a quest to find a replacement, falling in and out of trouble along the way. Much smarter than it sounds, I promise.

Vibes: Episodic, wistful, deeply empathetic. Leaves threads hanging in the most intriguing way.

Open Throat by Henry Hoke (2023)

Another writer working in hybrid forms, Hoke immediately garnered attention and accolades for Open Throat’s odd premise, spare-yet-powerful prose, and hilarious parody of what it’s like to live in LA.

Premise: A mountain lion who lives under the Hollywood sign is forced to leave his home because of a man-made fire. He narrates his thoughts about humanity and his own existence as he wanders through the city.

Vibes: Queer alienation, poetry-prose hybrid, catty narrator (lol). A slim, gritty novel with deep emotions.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

I was so stoked to find this in a Little Free Library this year! A stunning read — I didn’t know what was happening until three-quarters of the way through the book, but I didn’t even care because the world was so strange and fantastical. This is worth the accolades, and Clarke’s bibliography is worth a deep-dive.

Premise: Piranesi lives in a House which is his whole world, filled with giant marble statuary and raging, oceanic tides. He doesn’t remember a time before he lived there, and he’s only ever met one other person.

Vibes: Hard to say without spoiling it! Unsettling, gripping, bewildering.

Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018)

My favorite Rooney, and I hope folks aren’t too annoyed with me putting it on this list! On the surface, Rooney’s novels are just mostly-chronological scenes of millennials talking to each other, but underneath, they’re fantastic character studies. Her prose is never florid, but is beautiful in its simplicity. Characters rarely say what they mean and I love how realistic that feels.

Premise: Connell and Marianne start out as high school classmates, and as the years pass, their relationship becomes exponentially more complicated.

Vibes: Slow burn, realistic dialogue, flawed-but-endearing characters.

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (1928)

Did you know this joined the public domain last year? Someone please do something cool with it! Anyways, Woolf’s prose is always so tasty to me, even if it is hard to get through sometimes. And just a heads up that this is not a real biography, despite the title.

Premise: An English nobleman named Orlando lives during the Elizabethan era and wakes up one day to discover he is now a woman. Orlando then lives for another 300 years.

Vibes: Florid prose, strange symbolism, skewering of social mores from the 1600s to the early 1920s.

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These eight books are definitely worth your time, and if you’ve read any of them, please leave your thoughts in a comment! And definitely let me know what you’d add to the list; I’m always interested in reading more plotless novels, haha. Happy summer reading!

Softly yours,

Auzin