The best books that are sad but funny and qualify as bummer literature but are so great they make the reader feel joyful

I fell off the Ewan McEwan wagon for several years. 

Why? His sentences are gorgeous and impeccable but sometimes his plots seemed glitchy to me or his research was too in your face. But, Lessons! It’s one of those books that has so much of the world in it, while at the same time the characters are deep, vivid, flawed (yes, indeed), and the scenes intense and unforgettable. 

The clarity of his thinking and his understanding of politics, the eras we’ve lived through, the confusion of emotions we suffer from, and the way people fail each other as well as show up—I clutch this book to my heart.  

Should there be an afterlife and if there’s someone greeting me in the sweet hereafter, let it be Willa Cather. 

Maybe you read her in high school and did or didn’t fall in love, but in any case, no one in school reads The Professor’s House. As always, Cather looks down upon her characters with severe compassion, the sharp eye of someone who has seen all, and she’s wryly amused by her people. 

Professor Godfrey St. Peter is going through a mid-life crisis, he’s got a wife, two daughters, and he’s trying to see the way ahead. The center of the novel is devoted to a former student of St Peter’s, Tom Outloud, now dead, who it also happens was his daughter’s fiancé. 

At the center: Tom Outland’s experience of an ancient cliff city in New Mexico. It’s not a snooze, I promise! St. Peter’s recollection of Tom’s spiritual experience is lodged in my heart and brain. St. Peter is depressed—in the era before pharmaceuticals but it is Tom’s journey that allows St. Peter to—well, I won’t spoil it.  

Say Nothing is nonfiction. Keefe is a first-rate storyteller, an expert researcher, and a writer who can explain complex matters simply and beautifully. 

Even if you’re not interested in the Troubles of Ireland, or in Ireland, this book allows for an understanding of how local war is, how neighbors become enemies, how war breeds war, and how governments don’t work to erase poverty or manage the anger of young people. 

On top all of that, there are the archives at Boston University, which figure in the tale, and, the passage of time, which allows the participants to reflect on their youth. This was the best book that I read in 2018.  

This beautiful short novel about various matters, including chickens, house cleaning, idiosyncratic neighbors and parents, is funny—really, how can you not laugh at a hen named Miss Hennepin Country.  (Her owners live in Minnesota.)

Also, the novel goes to the heart of the grief of infertility. At the same time, Jackie Polzin is very, very funny in a remarkably quiet way. Her writing is spare, eloquent, and precise. She is, as we say in the biz, The Real Deal. I can open this book at any page and marvel and be filled with happiness.  

This book is happiness. 

Okay, but here’s the thing: It takes about 30 pages for Niall Williams to hit his stride. There’s a lot about weather at first, the whole Irish rain situation. Stick with it. Once Christy comes on the scene in this small Irish town, Faha, and is hoping to have a meeting with a woman he left at the alter 30 years before, and once our young narrator gets involved in his plan—BAM. 

The reader is fully in the world of Faha as electricity is introduced into the village, as Noel begins to figure out love and the insanity that is normal around him—well, I did not want it ever to end, even as at the beginning I was waiting for it to begin. Another book to clutch to the heart.