Fans pick 100 books like Keep The Aspidistra Flying

I liked this hundred-year-old novel because it explores some darker doubts and concerns I have always had about “the hidden heart of mankind unrestrained.” What’s more, the theme of Heart Of Darkness is reflected in the movie Apocalypse Now, with stark modern-day observations on the wounds the violence of war can inflict on the hearts and minds of humans.

This book is an unusual, magical story about differences and how we often react to those who don’t conform to the norms in society.

The plot is tremendously intertwined with suspense, the type that unexpectedly creeps up on you and surprises you every time. You are instantly hooked from start to finish.

Unputdownable. I was totally immersed from the first page. It's an unforgettable book. If you believe in non-conformity, then this book is for you.

This book has been described as one of the century’s truly necessary books.

If you are interested in holocaust literature, then this is a starting point. It's biographical writing at its best. No stone is left unturned in the writer’s account of his time spent in a concentration camp. A story of survival, this book is humanly honest in the portrayal of the unthinkable.

Reading this book for the first time was an experience not to be repeated. It is an essential read for everyone. 

This book is a very human story of teenage vulnerability and social instability.

Tense and gritty, this book doesn’t disappoint. Honest in its portrayal of drug misuse and abuse it perhaps isn’t for the faint-hearted. Ideal for those who seek to understand the underbelly of society. Written in a no-nonsense style, this is a novel that naturally flows.

Hard to put down, I read this book in a day. Well written, this is a story where you quickly immerse yourself in the characters who are so unnervingly real.

Sam Lipsyte’s sentences are demented and perfect. He’s one of the funniest writers I have ever read.

The story behind this book is one of publishing legend. Here's the way I've always heard it told: Lipsyte’s first book, The Subject Steve, was a brutal satire of contemporary American life that had the deep misfortune of being published on September 11, 2001. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened on 9/11, but still.)

He followed it with Home Land, a vitriolic, sleazy, hilarious novel in the form of epic pissy dispatches to a high school alumni newsletter. As narrators go, Lewis Miner is as unimprovable as he is unredeemable. This book was passed around to every publishing house in New York City, read and cherished by dozens of editors who were scared to put their colophon where their heart was.

It’s hard to remember now, but… show more.

Satires are mostly identified with laughter and larger-than-life figures moving in equally absurd settings with this… theatrical tone used to amplify, highlight very real issues. But satirical novels also demand change. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Adjustment Day, is both fun and challenging, and expertly executed. 

What is it about? A mysterious blue-black book carries directives leading to an “Adjustment Day.” It is shared among private circles, triggering a countdown to an earth-shattering schism. 

Brilliant, layered, and complex, a must-read: a nightmarish vision of our twisted and fractured societal body.

This is a funny and dramatic book and movie in which Grady Tripp is a university writing teacher who makes a mess out of his relationships. He’s having an affair with the chancellor of the college he teaches at, his wife has moved out maybe for good, and one of the students he has in class and who rents a room from him is attracted to him.

Tripp’s life is like a train wreck you can't stop watching, but also somehow funny. This book also became a great movie of the same name, starring Michael Douglas as the professor, Robert Downey Jr. as his agent, Frances McDormand as the chancellor, and Tobey Maguire and Katie Holmes as students. I mean, c’mon, doesn’t that sound great?!!!

This was the first book I’ve seen that re-oriented the United States within a cultural understanding of “the Americas,” a complete resituating of our usually conceived “unique” history. Doing this, Bolaño, a Chilean, puts our own fanatic, right-wing weirdos–religious fanatics, militarists, unhinged hyper-patriotic dictatorial aspirants–into a context where Americans can see ourselves in hemispheric context; these are political pathologies that have historically been seen as much throughout Central and South America as within our own borders.

I found this mind-blowing. This is a collection of fictional biographies, fantastically imagined and yet achingly familiar, and as relevant now as when it was first written more than two decades ago and translated and published in the US in 2009, such that our current politics seem almost pre-scripted by Bolaño’s vision. 

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. 

Another book with an episodic structure, The Confidence-Man concerns an assorted group of Mississippi steamboat passengers whose individual hypocrisies are confronted by the mysterious character of the title.

Melville’s ship of fools features a variety of types, some of whom are caricatures of American literary figures including Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe. The book was published in 1857 on April Fool’s Day, an irony equal to the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula on Valentine’s Day, and a gesture that Wiseman, himself a great ironist, surely would appreciate.

Certainly, it is no surprise that Wiseman has referred to The Confidence-Man as his favorite novel. One might even find Melville’s elaborate prose style analogous to Wiseman’s careful editing and his ability to confront spectators with their own biases and preconceptions, as the eponymous confidence-man does in the book.