100 books like Stories 1,2,3,4

What can I say? It’s the goated friendly freaks book.

This collection of super short connected stories stars one kid per tale. The kids are weird and wild, and something that has really stuck with me my whole life is that some of the kids are rotten and stay rotten. Not everyone needs to grow and change in 120 pages.

Let a character stink. Let a kid be a wet rat. Let a nasty teacher be eaten. Anyway, there’s this incredible way that the author employs a third-person limited POV that gets me every time, even on the hundredth read.

A few illustrators have graced the pages of this all-time favorite. I grew up reading an edition illustrated by the amazing Julie Brinkloe. I also have a copy illustrated by Adam McCauley, which I also really love.

Lemony Snicket is no stranger to unfortunate events, but this standalone book contains perhaps the worst of all: the news that he, the author, has consumed poison while eating the first meal of the day. Of course, this being a Snicket story, there’s more going on. This book is a bit mystery, and a bit philosophy (or is it the other way around?). More importantly, it is also a meditation on the wonderfulness of books and reading, a part of life that remains important even if one is quite sure one has been poisoned and now has an indeterminate amount of time to discover the truth of what happened.

These interrelated short stories are whimsical, sometimes melancholy, and often use nonsense language. My parents read these to me when I was a kid and I always listened intently and laughed hysterically, and later I read them to myself. Many of the stories are narrated by the Potato-Face-Blind-Man, an old minstrel of the Village of Liver-and-Onions who hangs out in front of the local post office. That says it all right there. This book creates a magical, fantasy world which provided me with fodder for the rest of my life. These have been a huge influence on me!

This young chapter book series wasn’t around when I was a kid but I would have 100 percent loved Dory, aka Rascal, and would have wanted to be just like her. I kind of still do. I love the way the author incorporates Dory’s inner zinging life—it really feels like being in the head of a six-year-old. The first-person narrative writing weaves in and out of Dory’s fantasy and reality so seamlessly that there is really no distinction—which is how life should be for every 6-year-old. This book is sweet, poignant, and absolutely hilarious to boot! 

Eugene Ionesco is an absurd theater playwright. Absurd plays tell us things without overtly telling us things.

Rhinoceros depicts the way that Nazism went from something as shocking as a rhinoceros running around Europe, to a thing that everyone takes as a fait accompli. Only one character, who is no great shakes himself, alternately self-loathing and confused, wanting to do right, but not knowing how to, avoids becoming one of them.

It's a simple skillful play, depicting a chilling problem. It is perfect for MAGA-ism in America: book banning, election-stealing, vaccine distrust, and the like, because it shows how easily and seamlessly people fall into line behind horrific, but compelling, movements. Ionesco's dialogue is brilliant, as is his message; his work can show us the way to writing with meaning.

This well-researched and in-depth account has been translated from French and discusses the various occult movements which inspired the art and ideas of the surrealists. It covers a diverse range of topics including divination, astrology, myth, voodoo, Gnosticism, freemasonry, alchemy, secret societies, and Celticism and shows how various artists and writers took inspiration from these systems. The book contains a selection of images, copious notes, a substantial bibliography, and a good index making this an indispensable research tool for aspiring scholars of surrealism and the occult.  

This comic is a 1:1 dream story. It has the weirdness and absurdity of dreams. It is about Juliet herself and is an autobiographical classic. And it made me wonder how very personal feelings in your dreams are actually universal. It also has feministic potential, being very honest with all its dreamy gender chaos and strangeness. And it’s funny.

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.

This collection of short stories left me a bit depressed but in a good way. Cook writes with pure beauty and poetry. The ideas of this collection were, at times, odd and uncomfortable, but they succeeded in making me consider the darker elements that exist within all of us as humans. These stories kept me engaged through their balance of settings as well. Some stories felt present, while others crafted bleak futures that were all too believable. A few of the stories had some racy elements too, so if you’re into that kind of thing, you won’t be disappointed.

This book is one of my all time favorite reads. Mount Analogue is a short poetic novel. Daumal’s rich descriptions and symbolism engaged my imagination and made me think deeply about the story’s meaning. The author takes readers on a journey to a mystical place with an unusual set of characters and strange circumstances. The story revolves around an adventurous sailing and climbing expedition to a mystical mountain hidden from the world’s inhabitants which is believed to link the earth to a higher sphere of reality. It’s full of intrigue and packed with pithy philosophical statements worth pondering. Daumal’s words and descriptions are so thought-provoking, that I used a quote from this book as the opening to my memoir, If I Live Until Morning.