Fans pick 100 books like Froth on the Daydream

Again, it was a book I read when I was lost, lacking motivation, and in dear need of guidance.

The hero’s journey made me understand the unimportance of my own personal struggles in the greater scheme of things and let me proceed with ease and nonchalance, though slowly and cautiously, like an old blind man tapping the floor in front of him with his white walking stick.

This 1925 autobiographical novel dropped me into the middle of New York’s Lower East Side Jewish neighborhoods in the early 20th century. The main character has a life of substantial struggle with and against her family, employers, landlords, and an American society that seems intent on erasing her.

While the book has elements of both a classic immigrant story and a coming-of-age tale, I love how it reveals the realities of urban living for a young immigrant woman. The pace and practices of making a home in a too-small space, getting by on minimal resources, scrumming for work, and avoiding harassment fill this book’s chapters. As a social and cultural historian, reading about daily activities–both struggles and joys–in a different time and place helps fire my imagination about not just what happened but how it might have felt to experience it.  

The stories that appear in this book were first published in Lilliput in the 1940s, a British monthly magazine. They relate the perilous, often diabolical activities of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club, a society devoted to playing games that no one else would dream of attempting. Engelbrecht is a diminutive boxer who fights clocks, zombies, witches, and other assorted horrors and marvels, and he generally wins because of pluck combined with luck. Richardson’s prose style here is a blend of gothic horror, period science fiction, and the wisecracking of Damon Runyan, and the reader can expect no respite from the tumult of ideas, images, situations, jokes, and subversion of clichés.

W.E. Bowman’s comic novel, The Ascent of Rum Doodle, has achieved a cult status among mountaineers as well as aficionados of spoof adventure stories. But the sequel is much less well-known, and that’s a shame, for it is absolutely its equal in terms of humour and invention and, if anything, even more absurd and fantastical in the development of the plot, which concerns a voyage on a raft (in the manner of Thor Heyerdahl) in search of a fabled school of talking fish. I am convinced that Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns was influenced by Bowman’s work, and if not, then this is a case of great minds thinking alike.

Flann O’Brien is famous for his ingenious novels, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, but I regard his funniest book as this short fictional memoir about life in the far West of Ireland. Originally published in Gaelic in 1941, it is a mock-pastoral farce about the customs of the remotest region in the country, where it rains all the time, but O’Brien is actually satirising the lack of mutual understanding between the local inhabitants and the modern outside world. The narrator’s adventures begin immediately after he is born and include (among many other absurdities) catastrophic pigs and the quest to climb a mountain to find an eternal fountain of whisky.

This book is luminous. The world of everyday reality and the world of magic overlap and interact and influence each other. There are philosophers and gods, leprechauns and (once again) taking animals, and women wiser than all of them put together. The plot concerns a crime that never occurred and various types of bizarre trouble that result from it. Adventures follow adventures in a picaresque manner, not all of them necessarily connecting with any other, a free and easy approach that gives great fluidity to the whimsical narrative.

Malamud isn’t thought of as a crime writer, but this story of a robber who goes to work for the man he robbed as a kind of silent penance is very much a story of crime and punishment, of sin and redemption, and it directly inspired one of my own stories about a killer who winds up working for the mother of the man he killed.

A sad and troubling book, this book is about how even good intentions can lead to bad outcomes and how atonement might never be enough but is still necessary.

Sputnik Sweetheart was the first Murakami book I had ever read. The book had such an impact on me that I almost immediately went out and purchased his other titles.

It is perhaps more experimental than other titles I’ve recommended here, but I enjoyed its non-linear plot and the surreal elements included in the story. Reality and irreality become indistinguishable, and I found myself wanting to know more about Sumire’s haunting disappearance.

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. 

After extensive research, this is the only book in existence that answers the question: What is existentialism? Existentialism may be understood as the correct point of departure for addressing the philosophy of being as it relates to the individual. In other words, existentialism provides the philosophical framework with which to answer the question: What does it mean to be?

Existentialism is the culmination of the philosophical tradition moving from Kant through the German Romantics to Heidegger and Sartre, among the other existentialists. In regard to Kant’s division, it differs from Deleuze’s choice to articulate transcendental philosophy with cosmology as the point of departure, in that it takes psychology as the point of departure. Yet, at the same time, just as understanding “the moment of vision” brings about a kind of gestalt shift in the reader’s perspective, so too though existentialism may be characterized as transcendental psychology, it has a higher… show more.