100 books like CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

This is a classic oral history of jobs in what older people call “the good old days.”  It is told from the perspective of the individuals doing the jobs they were talking about, and it reveals how interesting their day-to-day experience is.

The reminder for today, especially in our remote workplaces, is how important relationships with people at work are to our happiness and well-being. It’s also a reminder of how important it is for people to have some control over what they do and to feel invested in their work.

People want to do things well and take pride in what they do. We forget all this when we think of workers as widgets to be optimized. 

This Pulitzer Prize winner remains a time-tested testament to the absurdity that is New Orleans.

I felt like I’d met every one of the characters at least twice in my own walks on the streets of this storied city. I could even taste the Lucky Dogs. This is one of the few books to have me consistently laugh out loud. You can even take a picture with the statue of Ignatius J Reilly (the main character) on Canal Street.

The atmosphere and voice created by Robinson in this timeless and widely beloved novel, which is potent in a way that’s difficult to quantify, has endured in my memory since I first read it as a teenager. In prose rich with imagery and allusion, narrator Ruth tells the story of how she and her sister, Lucille—orphaned after their mother’s suicide—came to be cared for by their aunt, Sylvie, an eccentric drifter, who moves into their rural Idaho home and alters the tenor of their lives.

This is written with the precision of poetry, containing such sentences as, “When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.” A novel to re-read and savor.

This is the drama of a twenty-second escalator ride, during which the narrator, returning to the office from lunch, ponders his morning at work and his just-ended lunch hour, and reflects upon just about everything that he has observed or handled on this day (sunlight, shoelaces, staplers, doorknobs, carpet, rubber stamps, popcorn, and yes, escalators), and on every seemingly insignificant and fleeting human activity he has engaged in (tying his shoelace, signing a co-worker’s get-well card, replacing a wastepaper basket bag, avoiding another co-worker, ending a conversation). Though an office drone with a boring job, he remains undefeated, and engages the mundane and the routine around him with joy and renewal and wonder. A very funny and heartfelt book.

One early summer afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from the mud of Lake Vättern, and Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Swedish National Police is assigned to the case. Who was she? Who killed her? These questions remain unanswered for months and months (and months). Catching a killer, it seems, is a slog, and the routines of police work are captured here in all their tedium. And this is exactly why I love this book, as it compellingly dramatizes (to quote from Henning Mankell’s introduction) “the fundamental virtue of the police: patience.” There’s a heroism to these steadfast and rumpled men, and something thrilling about their dogged, often frustrating, yet ultimately successful pursuit of the truth.

During Italy’s post-WWII economic boom of the ‘50s, in an anonymous northern Italian city, an unskilled laborer named Marcovaldo struggles to support his wife and five children (or seven, or four—the number changes). In twenty tightly-plotted tales, we observe him stealing a trout, stealing a rabbit, getting lost in the fog, shoveling sidewalks, trying to fall asleep, trying to stay warm in the winter. Each “adventure” complicates absurdly, and some are more dire than others. Though on the brink of poverty, Marcovaldo hangs on, strives and fails, and strives anew, never losing his naive sense that things will turn out fine. The best comic writing is always tinged with the tragic, making you laugh and making you feel, and Calvino is a master.

As the author no doubt intended, right from the first page, I took a dislike to the protagonist (he makes his weekly visit to a prostitute). It emerges that David is, in fact, a sexual obsessive, and it is not long before he is forced to leave his university professorship after aggressively pursuing and bedding one of his students. 

I was surprised, therefore, when the story took off in a different direction and ended up as a graphic and sad portrayal of the predicament of white families in South Africa recently coming to terms with black rule. The portrait that emerges is a bleak one that includes violence, dislocation, theft, and (I thought this a nice circular touch back to the MeToo opening chapters) the rape of David's daughter by a young black man. I found the book disturbing as well as compelling.

This book takes you on a rollercoaster through contemporary lives and dilemmas, moving and inspiring you on the way.

From a young woman teacher with a big alcohol problem and a mess of a relationship through a lonely middle-aged male whose use of sex workers damages his ability to relate to regular women, this is a no-holds-barred exploration of how we live now.

Moshfegh shows us the pain, the humour, the sorrow, and the potential joy, in beautifully written prose with a real edge to it.

I recommend this book because, to me, it is unique–I’ve never read a book like it. It’s an interesting plot, end-of-the-world stuff, with some very unlikeable, low-life characters. It’s set in a very dark version of London that I know and love, in a pub environment similar to the one that I grew up in.

There is murder on the cards throughout the story, but the author still manages to squeeze in some humor. It’s just a different style of writing that I think people should give a try.

My wife and I and half of our friends have had the same experience reading this book, namely, bursting into tears while reading it on the subway. About half the stories in this collection have endings that are devastating/ecstatic gut punches, and the reason is that they are explorations of disgrace. Curtis is hilarious, but the everyday ostracizations that befall the young women in this book would tear you apart even if they weren’t funny.