Here are 100 books that The Futurological Congress fans have personally recommended if you like
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For the last decade, I’ve spent the majority of each year traveling. I’ve been to 60 countries across 6 continents and every US state. My love of travel was inspired and encouraged by my parents from a very early age. I’ve also been inspired by a wide variety of other sources, like movies, TV, photography, and, of course, books. Often, I’ll plan an adventure around a cool location I saw or read about and then just go. I’ll just show up and see what happens. All it takes is that little initial nudge, like what I found in these books.
No book has had a bigger influence on me as a person or a writer than this one. I suppose a lot of hoopy froods could say the same. It’s an adventure on a galactic scale, and yet, at its core, it’s just about a guy who wants to go home and have a cup of tea.
It’s a brilliantly funny satire and full of jokes and moments I’ll never forget. All four books in the series are amazing, and I’ve re-read them countless times. The fifth and final book is a downer worth skipping.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
I’ve been teaching “Writing Humor and Comedy” at Drexel University (where I’m an English professor) twice a year forever, and I’m proud (and still a little awed) that at least one of my students has gone on to have a successful humor-writing career. My very first publication was a satirical story back in 1996, and in more recent years, my humor has been published in The Oxford University Press Humor Reader, McSweeney’s, and Points in Case. Writing funny fiction is my main focus as a novelist, and my sequel, The Great American Betrayal, was named one of "The Best Comedy Books of 2022" by New York magazine's Vulture.com.
The Code of the Woostersmight be the best funny novel of them all. The all-knowing valet Jeeves and the hilarious narrator Bertram Wooster helped inspire the relationship in my novels between the coffeebot narrator Arjay and private investigator Frank Harken. Wodehouse’s plotting is superb and beyond clever, but it’s the prose—the playful and inventive sentences and paragraphs—that makes me come back to read this book again and again. A sample sentence: “He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled, so I tactfully changed the subject.”
Follow the adventures of Bertie Wooster and his gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves, in this stunning new edition of one of the greatest comic novels in the English language. When Aunt Dahlia demands that Bertie Wooster help her dupe an antique dealer into selling her an 18th-century cow-creamer. Dahlia trumps Bertie's objections by threatening to sever his standing invitation to her house for lunch, an unthinkable prospect given Bertie's devotion to the cooking of her chef, Anatole. A web of complications grows as Bertie's pal Gussie Fink-Nottle asks for counseling in the matter of his impending marriage to Madeline Bassett. It seems…
I’ve been teaching “Writing Humor and Comedy” at Drexel University (where I’m an English professor) twice a year forever, and I’m proud (and still a little awed) that at least one of my students has gone on to have a successful humor-writing career. My very first publication was a satirical story back in 1996, and in more recent years, my humor has been published in The Oxford University Press Humor Reader, McSweeney’s, and Points in Case. Writing funny fiction is my main focus as a novelist, and my sequel, The Great American Betrayal, was named one of "The Best Comedy Books of 2022" by New York magazine's Vulture.com.
Dave Barry is most famous as a humor columnist and nonfiction writer. His first novel Big Trouble, with a story that reads like a suspenseful thriller, is full of comedic events and clever twists. It’s worth reading, however, for the prose alone. Sample sentence: “En route to the polling place, the old man picked up seven other voters, all men, some quite aromatic.”
Dave Barry makes his fiction debut with a ferociously funny novel of love and mayhem in south Florida.
In the city of Coconut Grove, Florida, these things happen: A struggling adman named Eliot Arnold drives home from a meeting with the Client From Hell. His teenage son, Matt, fills a Squirtmaster 9000 for his turn at a high school game called Killer. Matt's intended victim, Jenny Herk, sits down in front of the TV with her mom for what she hopes will be a peaceful evening for once. Jenny's alcoholic and secretly embezzling stepfather, Arthur, emerges from the maid's room,…
I’ve been teaching “Writing Humor and Comedy” at Drexel University (where I’m an English professor) twice a year forever, and I’m proud (and still a little awed) that at least one of my students has gone on to have a successful humor-writing career. My very first publication was a satirical story back in 1996, and in more recent years, my humor has been published in The Oxford University Press Humor Reader, McSweeney’s, and Points in Case. Writing funny fiction is my main focus as a novelist, and my sequel, The Great American Betrayal, was named one of "The Best Comedy Books of 2022" by New York magazine's Vulture.com.
You might know Hugh Laurie as the actor who played Dr. Gregory House in House,though he’s been great in lots of other stuff, including playing Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster. He’s also a hell of a writer. The Gun Sellerhas the pacing of a spy novel and the sentences you might expect if P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler went into that gene-combining teleportation portal from The Flyand emerged as P.G. Chandlerhouse. Sample sentence: “But Rayner was also three inches taller than me, four stones heavier, and at least eight however-you-measure-violence units more violent.”
When Thomas Lang, a hired gunman with a soft heart, is contracted to assassinate an American industrialist, he opts instead to warn the intended victim - a good deed that doesn't go unpunished.
Within hours Lang is butting heads with a Buddha statue, matching wits with evil billionaires, and putting his life (among other things) in the hands of a bevy of femmes fatales, whilst trying to save a beautiful lady ... and prevent an international bloodbath to boot.
A wonderfully funny novel from one of Britain's most famous comedians and star of award-winning US TV medical drama series, House.
I am obsessed with personal development, having attended seminars to walk across hot coals and jump from crazy heights to test my limits, and I have read hundreds of books and watched hundreds of videos on self-improvement. But sometimes the best lessons come in fiction, and kid’s books do this so wonderfully. And they are a lot quicker to read and absorb! They also teach with humour, rhythm, and joy, and can change a child’s life simply by letting them escape into a world of laughter and joy, expanding their imaginations, and letting them absorb the lessons, sometimes without even realising it.
The Short and Incredibly Happy Life of Riley is a book that, well, the first time I read it my mind was blown. This is a self-help book for all humans in a picture book. It takes our thirst to live forever, to always want more, be more, see more, do more, look better, and compares that with the wonderful Riley, who is happy with some fruit and maybe a couple of slugs on Tuesday or Friday.
He likes a little stick that can scratch his back.
He looks like Riley. Why would he want to look like anything else?
This is a beautifully written and illustrated book on being grateful for what we have.
I taught teenagers and young adults for 40 years. During these years, I always thought about what I could use to make my classroom an exciting place for learning. I would hear a new song about loneliness that I wanted to share with my students. Or I would think of a prompt they would laugh about in notebook writing. Too often, we take the dedication teachers give to their students for granted. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have and make you remember again a special teacher in your life who gave his/her all, and if you’re a teacher, here’s to you!
I love this book, a classic from the 1960s, for its humanity and how much this young, inexperienced teacher cares about her students. She is pretty much thrown into the NYC public schools and struggles to stay afloat.
The book, written as a novel, is actually a collection of discarded scraps of paper from the classroom wastebasket—notes, doodles, memos, hall passes, student complaints. The young teacher expresses age-old dilemmas teachers face: “Am I making a difference? Do I get through? Do they care? Do they understand how much I care?”
Our reissue of Bel Kaufman's bestselling 1964 novel timelessly depicts the shambolic joys and myriad frustrations of a young teacher. With an introduction by Diane Ravitch.
Sylvia Barrett arrives at New York City's Calvin Coolidge High fresh from earning literature degrees at Hunter College and eager to shape young minds. Instead she encounters broken windows, a lack of supplies, a stifling bureaucracy, and students with no interest in Chaucer. Her bumpy yet ultimately rewarding journey is depicted through an extraordinary collection of correspondence: sternly worded yet nonsensical administrative memos, furtive notes of wisdom from teacher to teacher, 'polio consent slips',…
Like a caricature, satire lets you see reality better by exaggerating it. When satire is done right, every element, from the overall plot to the characters to paragraph-level details, is there to cast an exposing light on some part of our real world. They are books that exist on many levels, expose hubris and essential misunderstandings, and generally speak truth to power. They should leave the reader reassessing core assumptions about how the world works. I’ve written a best-selling nonfiction book about machine learning in the past, and I probably could have taken that approach again, but AI and American politics are both ripe for satire.
If I ever have to write a book to get past the censors, this book will be my model. Who knew that a mordant critique of a corrupt state could be so elegant, even whimsical?
The barbs are so oblique that the censor has a hard time finding something to pick on or even noticing it, and yet they’re unmistakable to anyone living in a society with even a passing resemblance to Stalin’s Russia—and after reading The Master and Margarita, I see those resemblances in every organization and every regime.
'Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest' Independent
Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. Bulgakov's carnivalesque satire of Soviet life describes how the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one Spring afternoon. Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from witches, poets and Biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who will…
As we watch the news–the increasing number of earthquakes, volcanoes, wars, inflation, the rapid progress of AI, unelected elites deciding they know best for the world, and more–we don’t know how to process it all, and it leaves us feeling anxious. My passion for helping my readers not just escape but actually live better fuels me. I created this retelling of the Book of Revelations from the POV of celestial warriors and fallen angels in the unseen realms of our world to allow my readers to “make more sense” of the world and be at peace.
The premise of a fussy angel and a fast-living demon positions the book with humor, which I absolutely loved. As the plot unfolds, we discover that these two figures have been living on Earth for thousands of years and enjoying it. So when the demon receives word that the Apocalypse is upon them, they conspire together to subvert the ancient prophecy that predicts the world's end. LOL
The ingenuity and cleverness of these authors are top-notch, starting with the character names: The demon character is Crawley. If you recall, Satan was made a snake in the Garden of Eden after tempting Adam and Eve. But it doesn’t stop there. Crawley creates a motorway that emanates evil, with all of the issues associated with that. LOL.
THE BOOK BEHIND THE AMAZON PRIME/BBC SERIES STARRING DAVID TENNANT, MICHAEL SHEEN, JON HAMM AND BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH
'Ridiculously inventive and gloriously funny' Guardian
What if, for once, the predictions are right, and the Apocalypse really is due to arrive next Saturday, just after tea?
It's a predicament that Aziraphale, a somewhat fussy angel, and Crowley, a fast-living demon, now find themselves in. They've been living amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and, truth be told, have grown rather fond of the lifestyle and, in all honesty, are not actually looking forward to the coming Apocalypse.
I confess I was a serious little boy and used to be an excessively serious writer. Stoning the Devil, which is about desperate Gulf Arab women, was longlisted for major prizes and hailed by the feminist press. Poignant, even heart-breaking, but hardly a barrel full of laughs—though even then I couldn’t resist some black humour. But when I became a professor of Creative Writing at an American university, I found I’d fallen into a world madder than Wonderland, and realised that the best way to tackle woke insanity was through humour—as the great comedians are doing. Nearly all the best British fiction is humorous, so I started letting out my own zany side.
One of the rare successful tragicomedies. Starting as a witty sendup of the decadent British upper classes, it turns deadly serious in the middle, when John, the young son of Brenda, has an accident while fox-hunting. Because her lover is also called John, she imagines, on being told, that it is her lover who is hurt—and thanks God when she discovers that it is her son. Brenda’s distraught husband Tony, the one noble character, mounts an expedition to South America, but instead of finding meaning and redemption, as the reader hopes, a nightmarish fate awaits him. With this novel, Waugh proved himself the greatest British novelist of the inter-war years—and inspired me, showing me how to mix elements of gravity and tragedy with comedy.
Evelyn Waugh's celebrated tale of decadence and social disintegration, now in a beautiful hardback edition with a new Introduction by Philip Eade
After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. Brilliantly combining tragedy, comedy and savage irony, A Handful of Dust captures the irresponsible mood of the 'crazy and sterile generation' between the wars. This breakdown of the Last marriage…
I’m an Irish novelist and occasional screenwriter. My latest book, Duffy and Son, is my sixth. I can be drawn in by any well-told tale, of course, but I’ve always had the strongest reaction to stories with at least some element of comedy. I don’t know, I just find books in which no one says anything funny to be deeply unrealistic. It infuriates me when any piece of fiction is viewed as ‘lesser’ because there’s a chance it might make you smile. The books listed here will definitely make you smile. If you give them a chance, I hope you find them as worthy of your time as I did.
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.
Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice.
Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
