92 books like Native Tongue

Bryson inspired me while writing a book about my walk along the 600 miles of the Israel Trail.

He hiked the famous Appalachian Trail, but it was his traveling companion–an amusing type who has difficulty walking, who stands at the center of the book. I had more than one friend like this with me, and I learned that trees and landscapes are just the background in a travel book.

The whimsy and humor of this book make it an easy choice to round out an otherwise serious list! An engrossing story lurks behind the comedy, which is no doubt why this book has transcended generations and cultures to persist as a worldwide fan favorite.

The truth is that we have no idea what humanity’s first encounter with aliens will look like, even if Arthur Dent’s experience with the bureaucratic Vogons is a little more tongue-in-cheek than those in our more “serious” picks.

It takes guts to write a protagonist who’s hard to like. Agatha Raisin, a tough businesswoman who retires to the tiny village of Carsley, is so beautifully flawed she’s impossible to ignore. She’s somewhat of a bully, prone to conniving, and deeply competitive, which is why she buys her quiche at a shop and enters it as her own creation. Of course, someone drops dead after eating it. This crusty woman of a certain age just bulldozes her way through the investigation and her flaws are so funny and refreshing that you wind up rooting for her. She’s a breath of fresh air in the cozy mystery world.

A friend recommended this series to me and, because we both enjoy British literature, I knew I’d give it a go.

What I didn’t expect was to be so utterly charmed, not just by the Britishism, but by the premise: literary detectives must stop her former professor before he can murder Jane Eyre…and have the heroine disappear from literature forever.

The alternative reality is a surreal, quirky 1985 that I reveled in (who wouldn’t want a pet dodo, airships, literary detectors, or a Prose Portal?), but it’s Thursday Next’s insights into her own mistakes, human motivation, and the beauty of the written word that gripped me until I’d finished the last page.

While it’s hard to pick a single favorite among the Discworld series, Mort stands out for me as a mix of a bizarre concept, quirky characters you can cheer for, and unexpected plot twists.

It’s hard to imagine a book about death being so funny, but the outlandish premise sets a stage rife with opportunities for humor. And yet, it’s the characters that really carry the story. Characters of this world have a wide spectrum of moralities, and yet despite their flaws and mistakes, you find yourself cheering for them.

While Silverstein is most known for his wonderful compendium of poetry, Where The Sidewalk Ends, this was one of my favorite books as a child (and my sister’s too). Yes, it’s written for kids, but it’s still a great read as an adult, laugh-out-loud funny – and ultimately, very affecting. As you may have deduced from the title, it’s about a lion who figures out how to shoot back to defend himself and his pride against hunters – which then sparks an extremely inventive and surprising journey. Plus, it is deftly illustrated by Silverstein as well.

Jonathan Lethem’s first book is, perhaps, not as well regarded as some of his later works. But it blew me away back in the ’90s—with a black humor that satirized both noir mystery and science fiction. I still love it.

The future is totalitarian. Everyone is stupefied by mandated memory-deadening drugs. Karma scores must be kept up, or you’re put in the freezer—literally. Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf gets hired to tail a cheating wife. But things go sideways when the client turns up dead. The cops suspect Metcalf. He encounters many a shady, seedy character, including animals given human-like intelligence; such as Joey, the kangaroo hitman. And whodunit? I think the answer is shocking…and hilarious. I think you’ll think so, too.

“I poured a few drops of an ’87 Mondavi Chardonnay into her navel and leaned down to slurp it out.” Thus begins the first adventure of Archie McNally, Lawrence Sanders’s foppish gumshoe. I first heard of him on a golf course not too far from his Palm Beach digs. I’ve been a fan ever since.

Think of Archie as the love child of Bertie Wooster and Sam Spade. He tootles around town in his red Miata, sleuthing for his barrister father and hiding his extracurricular ding-dongs from girlfriend Connie. Along the way, he rubs elbows with the one percent and collars crooks. And at day’s end, he can be found sipping martinis at the Pelican Club. I wish I could join him.

Edna Buchanan moved from New Jersey to Miami on a whim in 1965 and found her calling in the journalistic life.

Calvin Trillin would later write, “In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel. Another is Edna.”

She had a nose for the bizarre and the macabre—as well as for a good lead: “A man wandering along a Miami Beach street in his undershorts and carrying a blood-stained knife Sunday morning led police to the scene of a murder.”

In this memoir she recalls zipping around South Florida from Hollywood to Homestead in her yellow Triumph Spitfire to produce her almost-daily cataloguing of gruesome crime. The “polite” killer who abducted couples on dates, raped the woman, and then allowed her to dress before shooting both.

The hand grenade thrown… show more.

Gissing is forgotten now because he was a realist working in romantic times. Fiction writers were the rock stars of Victorian England. New Grub Street explores the other side of the coin: the vast number of struggling writers who hankered after the fame and fortune that was never to be theirs. At the heart of the story are two friends, the pragmatic materialist Jasper Milvain and the talented but idealistic Edward Reardon. The modest success of one novel prompts Readon to marry, saddling him with an overwhelming financial burden that crushes his talent. Milvain values money over everything else in life at a time when everything else in life depends on money. I found Gissing’s hard-boiled novel touching because, without flinching, he shows the inner conflicts of people trapped by circumstance.