Fans pick 100 books like Identity Crisis

While reading this book, I had the impression that the author was articulating many of my own observations about the history of humans on planet Earth. Despite my education and interests giving me a fairly good insight into the history of civilizations, he surprised me with numerous insights about the laws that govern human societies. Great job, Mr. Harari.

I could not stop reading this book—and when the TV series came out, I fell in love all over again. A trapped, imprisoned aristocrat who is elegant and only slightly snotty and who has a bedrock of humanity underneath any stiffness and propriety—that’s the protagonist, Rostov.

This novel features not one but two abandoned children, and, in both cases, their plights bring out the best in Count Rostov. He is naturally kind, but he also finds resources and courage he never knew he had. I’ve experienced the book three times—reading, listening to an audiobook, and watching the TV series and I was in love every time.

For those interested in a compelling work of fiction built loosely around Nazism and the occult, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the perfect novel.

Whether it’s one of the protagonists, a young Jewish magician, escaping Nazi-occupied Central Europe in the coffin of the “Golem of Prague” or the eponymous cousins finding success with their own comic book series infused by contemporary esoterica, Kavalier & Clay evokes the world in which young, first and second generation Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe created the Marvel and DC superheroes and super(natural) villains, often allied with the Third Reich, that have defined our popular culture for the past eighty years. 

There is one major reason I include Grand Days in my list of "best" books and her name is Edith Campbell Berry. Some might suggest that as Edith happens to be an Australian character and Frank Moorhouse an Australian author I’m favouring the pair, being Australian myself. But this is definitely not so. To me, Edith Campbell Berry is one of the most beautifully conceived heroines in literary fiction. And when I make this sweeping statement I include every great leading lady you can think of. 

From the moment I met Edith on the train from Paris to Geneva where she was to take up her position with the newly-created League of Nations in the 1920s, I was captivated. She is wickedly naïve, worldly innocent, outrageously proper and every other contradiction imaginable. She continued to bewitch me in Frank Moorhouse’s companion Edith novels, Dark Palace and Cold Light, but… show more.

Told as a series of movie reviews, A Short Film About Disappointment unfurls its dystopia gradually. A hacker attack kicks off a global multi-decade economic depression, and to prevent this from ever happening again the Internet is abolished and replaced with the “Betternet,” a neutered and highly censored version of the Internet. Personal screens are also banned in this nanny state, leading to a robust cinema culture that the unread reviewer wants to contribute to with a dense art film of his own. The hilarious capsule descriptions of eighty (fictional) films serve as an oblique way of introducing the world, while the numerous tangents of the writer “Noah Body” tell a personal story of love, filmmaking, and a literal haunting by an ex-friend.

While I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War, there was something in The Mouse that Roared that really spoke to me. The way that it takes an already absurd reality to an extreme really spoke to my own sensibilities and humor. History books tell the facts, but stories like this reflect how absurd the geopolitical culture must have felt to most people. It’s akin to Dr. Strangelove, not only in being a Cold War satire, but in the absurd and extreme nature of the farce. It influenced my own political satire heavily.

Max Barry’s satirical science-fiction novel, Machine Man, is a dark and funny mediation on contemporary society’s compulsive over-reliance on technology. The narrator, Charles Neumann, is a mechanical engineer who, while obsessively searching for his phone, loses his leg in an industrial accident. After building himself a new machine leg, Charles purposely loses his other leg, so he can replace it with another machine leg. After seeing how great his new legs work, Charles wonders if maybe he should replace more of his body parts with machine parts, begging the question: Where does humanity end and technology begin?

I’m the youngest of six sons. Our father read this book aloud to each of us. By the time I came along, he’d had lots of practice. He had distinct voices for all the characters. I can still hear him doing Jim’s voice after Jim gets whacked by the rattlesnake. I had nightmares for a week.

Your grasp of reality is altered when you read Huck Finn as a kid. Twain sweeps you out onto the Mississippi, where you mentally, emotionally, and physically, yes, physically, endure the journey with Huck and Jim.

I didn’t realize until I read the novel years later that this book was the first to blow my mind. And what was I? Nine? Maybe ten? Thanks, Dad!

A story about a biographer who pokes into the corners of a Nobel-winning author’s salacious life to write an exposé is juicy enough, but what happens when the latter uses the opportunity to write a counter-exposé on the former? Unstructured in plot and other novel-craft, this book is laden with pithy quotes on the writing life. The biographer and his subject are libidinous, adulterous, and self-absorbed, a testament to the fact that a writer has to be appreciated separately from their work. Also on display are the strategies employed by the publishing industry to keep the reputation and marketability of a once best-selling author alive, long after their effective shelf-life. 

This book taught me that you can surf the line between realism and the incredible (even the ridiculous). The main character, Oedipa Maas, is my favorite heroine because of her openness to every tantalizing possibility (and the possibilities keep ramifying infinitely).

Everything in this book is both fully a symbol and fully itself.