Here are 100 books that Candide fans have personally recommended if you like
Candide.
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When I was about 8 years old, I read a book called Tom and the Two Handles by Russell Hoban. It’s a children’s book designed to teach that every story has two sides. This book stuck with me for some reason. So, when I started writing novels, I always made sure my villains had pure motives. Remember, no well-written bad guy THINKS he’s a bad guy. He thinks he’s doing the right thing. This is true of all the classic Bond villains right up to Thanos in the MCU. Plus, and I’m sure most writers would agree, the bad guys are always more fun to write.
As shocking as I felt Kubrick’s film was, I think the book is possibly more startling. Some scenes Kubrick played for laughs are described as violent and sadistic in the novel. If, like me, you are a fan of the film, it’ll fill in some blanks for you. Ever wonder why Alex and his friends drink milk?
The book is written in futuristic teen-speak that did take me a while to get my head around, but this ultimately adds to the strangeness of the insular world these ‘droogs’ inhabit. Though it was first published in 1962, I think this is still a very relevant and unflinching look at the place of violence in society.
In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
Each of these novels, in their own way, forces us to confront the realities of war and power, showing how fragile humanity truly is. They’ve inspired me to reflect on how interconnected we are, especially regarding the scars of conflict. I am reminded of the John Donne poem that inspired Hemingway’s title, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)–which begins: “No man is an island, intire of its selfe; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the maine.” War doesn’t just affect the soldiers: war has its hooks in us all.
Vonnegut’s book is a unique combination of satire, science fiction, and raw war critique. Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, lives out the trauma of surviving the Dresden bombing by becoming "unstuck in time," drifting through different moments of his life, from past to future. This strange, nonlinear structure mirrors how we process trauma in fragments and waves, never in a neat, chronological order. The randomness of death, the meaninglessness of war—all these themes come together in a way that’s both absurd and deeply moving. As we witness terror and violence continually unfold across the globe, the echoes of Slaughterhouse-Five feel ever-present.
The phrase “So it goes” serves as a refrain throughout the novel, after every death—reminding us of the inevitability of loss in wartime, no matter the scale. This book hit me hard with its dark humor and cynical commentary on the glorification of war. Vonnegut forces you to laugh in…
A special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time), featuring a new introduction by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had…
Like a caricature, satire lets you see reality better by exaggerating it. When satire is done right, every element, from the overall plot to the characters to paragraph-level details, is there to cast an exposing light on some part of our real world. They are books that exist on many levels, expose hubris and essential misunderstandings, and generally speak truth to power. They should leave the reader reassessing core assumptions about how the world works. I’ve written a best-selling nonfiction book about machine learning in the past, and I probably could have taken that approach again, but AI and American politics are both ripe for satire.
This book taught me the meaning of the word “totalitarianism.” It’s like a horror movie you can’t escape from, but instead of a zombie fungus eating your mind, it’s the state controlling every little aspect of your life, down to—and worst of all—the words that you think with, and therefore what you can even conceive of.
Few books have stayed in my mind like this one. Even today—or more than ever—its images come to my mind over and over again when I see what is happening in America and the world.
1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party's power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party's department for propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair. As he writes the words 'DOWN WITH BIG…
I fell in love with Italy the first time I visited as a graduate student. Later, as a professor spending extended periods there with my family, I began investigating Italy’s experience of World War II. I was inspired by the diary of Iris Origo, an Anglo-American who lived in rural Tuscany. She reported of civilians bombed by Allied aircraft and strafed by machine guns from the air—even after Italy had surrendered. In my quest to understand the relations between the Allies and Italian civilians, I came upon a trove of great wartime novels, many recently back in print, and I am eager to share my enthusiasm for them.
I encountered this book backward. As a teenager growing up at the end of the US war in Vietnam, I read the Mad magazine spoof of the movie version long before I saw the movie itself, and then I read the novel. I focused on the antiwar theme and the concern of the bomber crew to get home without getting shot down.
The novel was based on Heller’s wartime experience, but I hardly realized it was about bombing Italy until I discovered the papers one of his crewmates had donated to Cornell University. I learned how many of the episodes were based on real incidents, including the only time the novel focuses on Italian civilians—when the crew objects to destroying an Italian Alpine village of no military significance.
Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage.
Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the…
I am both a writer and a teacher of writing at the university. I have always wanted to be a writer, even though one of my aunts lied to me when I was five that writers would be poor and would die of tuberculosis. I like listening to stories of ordinary people and can learn so much from them. I studied English literature and psychology in my undergraduate studies. I hold a PhD in applied linguistics. I enjoy reading about the subject of philosophy and am fascinated by the theories revolving around ethics. Naturally, I challenge my characters with moral dilemmas so I can write about their struggles.
We have all heard of this book. We all know something about the plot either by watching the film or hearing something about it at school. If you haven’t yet read the book, you must put it on your reading list. We can only give Mary Shelley’s work full justice by reading it from beginning to end; not until then will you be able to feel Victor’s internal struggles. In his attempt to achieve immortality, he created a monster.
I never get tired of reading chapter five where Shelley describes Victor’s utter disappointment upon watching his creation coming to life. I love the choice of language. The thoughts that went through his mind and his guilty feelings mixed with pride and excitement present an unsolvable moral dilemma. Should he destroy his own creation?
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
As a former graduate student who holds an MA and Ph.D in English with a Creative Writing emphasis, but also as the child of immigrants and the first in my family to go to college, I love when writers deflate the pretensions of academia. I didn’t grow up around formally educated people so I can relate to the imposter syndrome some of the characters in these books experience. I don’t know who recommended Lucky Jim to me, but that book began my infatuation with the genre of academic satires or campus novels, of which there are many others.
What’s amazing about this book is that it’s told through recommendation letters written for students and colleagues by the main character, Professor Jason Fitger.
Each letter reveals more and more about his life, his failing romances, his dismal work environment, and his floundering creative efforts. In other words, topics that are completely inappropriate for these types of letters, which makes them all the more hysterical.
Finally a novel that puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary."
Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he…
Life is stories, man. Telling stories. Listening to stories. One day, somebody had the brilliant idea to start writing these stories down. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. Trading yarns. Figuring things out. Reading and writing. I wrote my first story in middle school. My first novel in college. My first published novel (This Way Madness Lies) in my late twenties. Now it’s thirty years, twenty-five novels, fifty short stories, and three books of poetry later, and I’m still as obsessed with and passionate about storytelling as I was as a young buck backpacking around Europe with a notebook and a beat-up copy of Down and Out in London and Paris stuffed into my leather satchel.
I was on an extended trip to Eastern Europe, back when Eastern Europe was not such a dandy place to visit, and I found myself with nothing to read. In a used bookstore in Prague, I found a tattered paperback, translated into English, of this next pick. It was falling apart, the pages stained by coffee and God knows what else. I bought it anyway.
And over the next few weeks, I was, for the third time, blown away by words on a page, by an author’s imagination. It’s been said that Don Quixote, written around 1600, was the first novel ever written. It may also be the greatest novel ever written. Adventure. Humor. Pathos. Crazy amounts of imagination. The Whole Damn Human Condition.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.
Life is taking a bite of the comedy/tragedy sandwich, savoring the mix of flavors, deciding how you feel about the taste, and taking another bite. I love writing that can gather experiences from across the emotional spectrum and incorporate them into a narrative that is absurd and all the more true because of it. These five books do it better than the rest.
I love a book that makes me laugh out loud and feel something deep about the characters and the world it presents. Ignatius J. Reilly, this novel’s main character, is basically a blueprint for the modern incel: he’s rude, selfish, hypocritical, infantile, and inconsistently idealistic, and while he’d be a horror to interact with in real life, he’s absolutely one of the funniest characters in all of literature.
One of the many magic tricks of this book is making the reader realize they’re halfway rooting for Ignatius by the end of his inane New Orleans adventures.
'This is probably my favourite book of all time' Billy Connolly
A pithy, laugh-out-loud story following John Kennedy Toole's larger-than-life Ignatius J. Reilly, floundering his way through 1960s New Orleans, beautifully resigned with cover art by Gary Taxali _____________
'This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians . . . don't make the mistake of bothering me.'
Ignatius J. Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much…
The worst of all deceptions, said Plato, is self-deception. Perhaps it is also the most common. I'm fascinated by the human capacity to believe nonsense, and also by the power of satire to weaken twaddle’s hold on us. As a political science professor, and as a political speechwriter, I often used humor to expose sloppy thinking, debunk untruths, and open minds. Especially today, satire is one of the best ways to show the high price we pay for our delusions. Satire alone will not end our collective folly, but laughing at rather than denying what we're doing to the natural environment can be a step on the road to change.
If you don’t find Make Russia Great Again hilarious, you have no sense of humor.
Here’s my executive summary: Former Trump Chief of Staff, a naïf named Herb Nutterman – think Chauncey Gardner without the acumen – narrates the book from prison, where his service to the very stable genius has landed him. The leader of the free world saw Nutterman as eminently qualified to run the White House because he was his “favorite Jew,” and had loyally served him for 27 years as a resort manager.
Got the gist? OK, that’s all the executive summary you need for now. Just read the book. It’s outrageously funny.
In "the Trump satire we've been waiting for" (The Washington Post), award-winning and bestselling author of Thank You for Smoking delivers a hilarious and whipsmart fake memoir by Herb Nutterman-Donald Trump's seventh chief of staff-who has written the ultimate tell-all about Trump and Russia.
Herb Nutterman never intended to become Donald Trump's White House chief of staff. Herb served the Trump Organization for twenty-seven years, holding jobs in everything from a food and beverage manager at the Trump Magnifica to being the first general manager of the Trump Bloody Run Golf Course. And when his old boss asks "his favorite…
I have been a keen walker/hiker/backpacker since I was five when my parents named a local footpath James’s Path. Almost fifty years later, I have walked all over the UK and further afield in the Pyrenees and the Alps, Nepal, and the Antipodes. Walking for me is both a means to an end—to reach mountaineering routes and as exercise—and as an end in itself. Days spent walking can be reflective, social, demanding, and memorable. I always take a book, even if it's a day walk, and two or three if it’s a multiday trip. I hope you’re as energized and stimulated by my suggestions as I’ve been.
I love this book because it feels deep—it is deep—but it’s also engaging. There’s a story and characters to follow, but at its core, it’s a fascinating introduction to philosophy.
The meaning of life, the big questions, how to understand and negotiate the world. I first read it as a teenager during my gap year in Southeast Asia, and it was the perfect mental companion to the bombardment of my physical senses. Zen turned my perception of the world upside down, and I reread it occasionally.
It has one of the most memorable titles of all time, and I still quote its core message, which involves motorcycle maintenance.
Acclaimed as one of the most exciting books in the history of American letters, this modern epic became an instant bestseller upon publication in 1974, transforming a generation and continuing to inspire millions. A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, the book becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions of how to live. Resonant with the confusions of existence, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a touching and transcendent book of life.
