100 books like The Fall

Look, you’re often going to feel like life is meaningless. Maybe you’re right. But don’t give up.

Like Quixote, you have the power of your noble heart, and the wealth of your imagination. But you also have your Sancho Paza, to keep you moving practically forward. It all will likely come to a ridiculous end. But that’s okay, so long as you’re laughing at yourself along the way.

It is funny. We’re allowed to be funny. We’re supposed to laugh at ourselves and at each other.

Candide is wonderful for many reasons, but above all because it is an equal opportunity parody.

Voltaire spares no one as he spoofs the usual suspects, such as religion, colonialism, and the nobility, but also the Enlightenment’s excessive optimism, philosophical speculation, and rationalism. Voltaire’s greatest setups are favored upon young Candide’s mentor, Dr. Pangloss who, in the face of every monstrous, absurd tragedy that befalls Candide, insists that all is well in this “best of all possible worlds.”

I also love that this crazy, tragic farce ends with a cautiously optimistic invitation to “cultivate our garden,” – to leave philosophical speculation to the philosophers, and instead to focus on concrete efforts to make the world a better place

There are loads of good novels warning of the dangers of inequality and wealthy megalomaniacs, typically set against the backdrop of one of the many monstrous things that the super-rich have done to the rest of us throughout history.

In my view, the First World War was the worst of the lot. Society has moved on a bit since then, but I don’t doubt that the billionaire class that runs the modern world would have us all marching into the machine guns if they thought they could get away with it. Hasek’s good-humored but poignant tale of a Czech soldier serving in the army of the Habsburg Empire acts as a reminder of the need for vigilance.

Because it was not only a thick* book, but it proved that you can think a book is crap one day, and absolutely love it the next**. 

I was going to have an impacted wisdom tool chiseled out and wanted a book for my convalescence. It had a great cover, so I flipped open to the first page and read the opening line—something like, “Amoebas don’t have bones…”.

I bought it and had the wisdom tooth removed, which evidently actually removed the wisdom needed to appreciate the writing.

Time passed, and I gave the book another try—evidently the wisdom had returned because what had once been chaotic and confusing and stupid, was now delightfully random and effortlessly insightful, and really really fun. I loved this book.

* At least it seemed thick to me at that age.

** Actually, it wasn’t the next day, it was actually about a year… show more.

In the most elegant piss-take on the travel writing genre ever crafted, Swift’s hero traverses lands impossibly strange and, well, just impossible, giving satire a whole new modus operandus: expanding the cosmos!

Whenever I start to feel blue about living in an era that seems to underrate imaginativeness – especially in literature, I go back to Swift, who always reminds me that there is a path veering toward the limitless, and that path will never disappear. 

I could have picked anything by George Saunders, really. He’s the closest thing I have to a personal deity. Such is the level of awe and wonder that he invokes in me, I actually find him difficult to discuss. It’s like trying to look directly at the sun.

Suffice it to say that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline—the title refers to a failing theme park—is like all of his other short story collections. It’s beautiful and wise and heart-breaking and deeply intelligent and, yes, desperately funny. I would pay a lot of money to be able to read it again for the first time. 

This is another fictional diary but different again. To say I enjoyed it is an understatement. This is a witty, engaging, satirical romp of a journal with laugh-out-loud moments, an empathetic everyman protagonist, a full cast of colourful supporting characters, and a rich background, mainly in Amsterdam.

I whipped through the book in a couple of days and was left hoping that we might find out what happens to Gerard "next year." All in all, thoroughly entertaining.

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?

People who read The Master and Margarita will tell you that it is one of the greatest books they have ever read, but few can tell you why. It defies description.  It is truly unique. 

It opens on a blistering hot day in Moscow, a paradox in itself. The devil, seemingly out of Goethe’s Faust, is on a visit to the town. He and his strange entourage would be laughable, if they were not so lethal. Only the madness of Stalin’s paranoid Communism could have created such a story.

Bulgakov has an uncanny way of investing even the most unlikely scenes with intense realism. You never doubt him.  At times hilarious, at times terrifying, the book shows us what a fragile hold we have on reality.

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.