Here are 100 books that The Mouse That Roared fans have personally recommended if you like
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I was a foreign correspondent seven time zones from home when my father died of a sudden heart attack. My grief mixed with guilt for never having sat down with him to unravel his vague vignettes about life and loss in the Holocaust. I wondered, how did he survive when so many perished? How much depended on resilience, smarts, or dumb luck? As reporters do, I started digging. I uncovered a Nazi paper trial that tracked his life from home, through ghettos, slave labor, concentration camps, death marches, and more. The tattered documents revealed a man very different from the quiet, quintessential Type-B Dad I knew…or thought I knew.
I first read Slaughterhouse-Five as a callow college student, concluding with the certainty of youth that this was a brilliant but weird amalgam of dark humor and sci-fi wrapped inside an autobiographical anti-war screed. However, my real ‘duh’ moment came after rereading the book decades later.
The opening line, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” – tells you everything you need to know: It’s about PTSD, written from the inside looking out. Like Billy Pilgrim, I could see myself time-jumping and being abducted by aliens to escape the trauma of war. Interestingly, the term “PTSD,” the acronym for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, had not entered our lexicon when Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five in the 1960s. Poignant and personal, it's still a brilliant amalgam of dark humor and sci-fi.
A special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time), featuring a new introduction by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had…
War is perhaps the most extreme human activity. I have seen firsthand some of these extremes in Iraq and Afghanistan. I now write about the philosophy and ethics of war and geopolitics, exploring some of the impacts and enduring truths that war and its conduct tell us about ourselves that might be hidden under the surface of our everyday lives. The books I have chosen here explore, with elegance, sensitivity, and sometimes brutal and unflinching honesty, what the battlefield exposes, showing us that there is both tragedy and comedy at the extremities of human nature, and without one, you cannot really truly appreciate the other.
With its repetition and echoing of phrases, Kafkaesque chronology, and circular logic, Catch-22 illustrates the absurdity of war more than any other novel I have read.
Every time pilot Yossarian, the book’s anti-hero, gets close to flying the number of bombing missions required to go home, the requirement is raised. A paradoxical catch keeps them flying. If you ask to be grounded because you understand the dangers, you aren’t insane. Insane soldiers just need to ask to be grounded. But asking proves you aren’t crazy.
Beneath the absurdist comedy, there is an existential dread at the heart of the book. The death of Yossarian’s friend Snowden leads him to see that ‘Man was matter.’ For me, this is the dreadful secret that war exposes - the precarious preciousness of life - as our fragile bodies are turned to quiet, still matter.
Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage.
Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the…
Growing up in Scott, Louisiana, I didn’t know that everyone else in the United States did not get Mardi Gras off from school and work. I thought everyone knew some French. Crawfish boils were a natural, expectable part of every spring. South Louisiana is a world unto itself. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate my heritage, my Cajun lineage, and the sometimes-befuddling ways we Louisianians look at that world. Between conversations with elders, reading historical documents, and even looking at land transfer maps, I’ve become even more grounded in what being from this little wet corner of the world means.
This Pulitzer Prize winner remains a time-tested testament to the absurdity that is New Orleans.
I felt like I’d met every one of the characters at least twice in my own walks on the streets of this storied city. I could even taste the Lucky Dogs. This is one of the few books to have me consistently laugh out loud. You can even take a picture with the statue of Ignatius J Reilly (the main character) on Canal Street.
'This is probably my favourite book of all time' Billy Connolly
A pithy, laugh-out-loud story following John Kennedy Toole's larger-than-life Ignatius J. Reilly, floundering his way through 1960s New Orleans, beautifully resigned with cover art by Gary Taxali _____________
'This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians . . . don't make the mistake of bothering me.'
Ignatius J. Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much…
I am a joker at heart and was always the class clown. I currently write on my own humor website, A Man Eating Chicken. I started drawing comics in grade school and grew into writing comedic prose in high school. There was never a goal for any of this; it was all pre-internet, so I didn’t realize that humor could be published anywhere. As I got older, I was able to find some books that really spoke to my sensibilities. The books on this list really showed me the power and possibilities of humor and influenced my own writing.
The Big Book of Hell is the holy grail of dark humor, packaged perfectly in a comic format. Growing up as a sarcastic kid from Brooklyn, this was the first humor book I read that I felt was aimed directly at my sensibilities. It has a very unique “substance-over-style” aesthetic that is striking and somehow managed to become widely identifiable. It dances around subjects, poking fun at the absurdities of the world it was written in. It really showed me that you don’t need to be a conventionally great artist to publish comics and that there is a market for dark humor comics. The book, which reads almost like a variety show, opened my eyes to ways to play with structure of an individual comic and a whole book.
A bumper collection of the classic Life in Hell cartoon strips from the 80s and 90s which were the basis for The Simpsons. Painstakingly assembled and rigorously organized by that master of clutter, Matt Groening, this is not another mini-jumbo, hard-to-read, abreviated compendium in that seemingly endless series of discourses on hell bu a gargantuan historical extravaganza of ten years' worth of the ever-popular Life in Hell cartoon strip, which looks uncannily like The Simpsons if you keep your eyes closed and have a sufficiently fertile imagination. Includes: The birth of Bongo! Binky's arrival in Los Angeles! Akbar and Jeff's…
I love writing group biographies (I‘ve written four and my next book, Spellbound by Marcel:Duchamp, Love, and Art, will be another). I enjoy the intellectual scope they offer, the way they let you explore a world. I’m less interested in the details of individual lives than in the opportunity biography offers to explore social history, and group biography is particularly suited to that. They’re not easy to do, it’s no good putting down just one damn life after another, but I enjoy the challenge of finding the shape that will let me fit everyone’s personalities and ideas into a coherent story.
This is about a group of young women dealing with sex, contraception, powerlessness, and the conflicting demands of family and work. It appeared in 1963, was set in 1933, and was scandalously frank. But women’s lives and problems have not changed. Candace Bushnell, advised by her editor to write a modern version of it, produced Sex and the City. Need one say more?
* 'I consider it a masterpiece' HILARY MANTEL * 'A brilliant novel: honest, engaging and sharp as a tack' SARAH WATERS * 'One of my favourite books ever' INDIA KNIGHT
When first published in 1963, The Group was on a bestseller for almost two years. This groundbreaking novel, with its frank depiction of friendship, sex, and women's lives, was a revelation, and continues to inspire today.
Mary McCarthy's most celebrated novel portrays the lives and aspirations of eight Vassar graduates. 'The group' meet in New York following graduation to attend the wedding of one of their members - and reconvene…
John J. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, a writer for National Review, and the host of two book-themed podcasts, The Great Books and The Bookmonger. His books include The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football and Reading Around: Journalism on Authors, Artists, and Ideas. He lives on a dirt road in rural Michigan.
Okay, it’s a collection of stories rather than a novel. Yet no veteran of the Civil War wrote better fiction about the conflict and its terrors than Bierce. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is one of America’s greatest short stories: A staple of high-school English courses, it has a twist at the end that's worthy of The Twilight Zone and often inspires an immediate second reading. Chickamauga reveals the horror of war from the perspective of a child. Amid these fictions, What I Saw of Shiloh is Bierce’s nonfiction account of the 1862 battle in Tennessee.
Newspaperman, short-story writer, poet, and satirist, Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) is one of the most striking and unusual literary figures America has produced. Dubbed "Bitter Bierce" for his vitriolic wit and biting satire, his fame rests largely on a celebrated compilation of barbed epigrams, The Devil's Dictionary, and a book of short stories (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 1891). Most of the 16 selections in this volume have been taken from the latter collection. The stories in this edition include: "What I Saw at Shiloh," "A Son of the Gods," "Four Days in Dixie," "One of the Missing," "A Horseman in…
I grew up in the lap of Borscht Belt comedy in an entertainment family, the dour child with a precocious predilection for reading archaic literature. My parents gave me a subscription to Punch Magazine and subjected me to countless comedy movies during my formative years strapped to a chair à laClockwork Orange. Which explains how I ended up an international banker. Until late in life with the publication of my first novel, a satire. After eight successive novels, I realized that I should have listened to the family’s adage, “Don’t Quit Your Day Job.”
This compilation of short stories influenced my writing as I read this while a teenager. Outlandish and funny, Kurt Vonnegut created a universe and characters that brought science fiction comedy to the mainstream. He literally knocked the socks off of establishment literature. In addition, he has been more than prophetic of today’s global foray into absurdity in one particular story, "Harrison Bergeron," which I would put on par with George Orwell’s 1984.
A MASTERFUL COLLECTION OF TWENTY-FIVE SHORT STORIES FROM THE INIMITABLE AUTHOR OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, KURT VONNEGUT
'Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer...a zany but moral mad scientist' Time
A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms. A scientist discovers the secret to unlocking instant happiness, with unexpected consequences. In an America where everyone is equal every which way, a tennage boy plans to overthrow the system.
Welcome to the Monkey House gathers together twenty-five of Kurt Vonnegut's short stories from the 1950s and 1960s. Shot through with Vonnegut's singular humour, wit and bewilderment…
I love reading adaptations of classics which complicate the original texts in interesting ways, I have just written one myself, The Middle Daughter. Transcultural adaptations, particularly remind us that we are all members of one human family, dealing with the same kind of problems across time and space and cultures. In these times of deepening polarization, it's important to see that there's more that unites us than not.
FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER
LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2009 WINNER OF THE ORANGE YOUTH PANEL AWARD 2009 FINALIST FOR THE HURSTON WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD 2010
'A phenomenal book. It is so ingenious and so novel. Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Noughts and Crosses with a bit of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll thrown in. This should be thought of as a feminist classic.' Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast
Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris, from England, is playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage.…
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’ve loved cinema since I was 9 years old growing up in New York City and my grandmother took me to see The Ten Commandments at the Paradise Theater, Loew’s magnificent flagship theater in the Bronx. The theater’s famous canopy of twinkling stars on the ceiling was the perfect magical venue, and I was thunderstruck not only by the epic sweep of the movie but also by the opulence of the theater, which mirrored the monumental pyramids that Ramses constructs in the film. Ever since, my passion for movies has been as all-consuming as DeMille’s jello sea was for the infidel Egyptians who doubted the power of special effects and cinematic illusion.
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.
On April Fool's Day in 1856, a shape-shifting grifter boards a Mississippi riverboat to expose the pretenses, hypocrisies, and self-delusions of his fellow passengers. The con artist assumes numerous identities — a disabled beggar, a charity fundraiser, a successful businessman, an urbane gentleman — to win over his not-entirely-innocent dupes. The central character's shifting identities, as fluid as the river itself, reflect broader aspects of human identity even as his impudent hoaxes form a meditation on illusion and trust. This comic allegory addresses themes of sincerity, character, and morality in its challenge to the optimism and materialism of mid-19th-century America.…
