100 books like You Might Feel a Little Prick

This is not a book about animals, but it is a great book in which animals play a critical role.

This is the seventh book in Hiassen’s Florida-based Skink series and possibly the best. One of the main characters, Angie Armstrong, is a wildlife wrangler with extraordinary skills which leads to hilarious consequences.

This book also manages intriguing social and political commentary including Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons’ efforts to support a fictional president whose behavior is similar and almost as wacky as our former leader who is apparently running again – I hope someone reads this book to him.

I love a good mystery that also makes me laugh. Kinky Friedman does that on almost every page. He is most known for his singing and songwriting, (and his run for Texas Governor), but I’ve found all his books to be page-turners and laugh-out-loud funny. In Spanking Watson, Kinky calls upon his real-life friends to help him solve a mystery that he instigated. Kind of a test to evaluate his future assistant, or Watson to his Sherlock. 

This book is one of a series of Mathew Scudder stories by Block. I enjoy his books because his main character is as flawed as we are. Matt is a hard-drinking former cop who goes about helping friends out of their troubles. And his friends are in a lot of trouble. Action and close calls, as well as humor, abound in this well-crafted story.

While not as funny as the above books, I like this one for its story of betrayal, dignity, and revenge. Set in Mussolini’s fascist regime and the Nazi occupation, young Angelina Rosini witnesses her mother’s brutal murder and will enact revenge no matter how long it takes. She escapes to Rome with her daughter and joins the resistance where she encounters spies, and friends that are not really friends. Who can you really trust? The characters are believable and flawed like most of us. This novel is full of action, Nazi cruelty, and a relentless determination to make things right.

For one year, award-winning sportswriter Joe Posnanski traveled with baseball ambassador Buck O’Neil all over the country, sharing stories about those who played in the Negro Leagues. This is a book about baseball, yes, but this is a book about choosing hope time and time again, even when it doesn’t make sense.

This is a book full of stories of those who were denied a chance to play in the major leagues because of something beyond their control—the color of their skin. But this is also a book about how love is the strongest power in the universe, breaking down hate, and replacing it with hope. I read this book almost every spring, as MLB players are headed to Spring Training.

My list could not be complete without a book about my beloved Tribe, and like most Clevelanders, watching the Indians of the mid-90’s was as good as it gets. Whether you are a Cleveland fan, or not, Glory Days in Tribe Town is a phenomenal book that chronicles one of the most intriguing Major League Baseball teams of the past 30 years. 

The Indians had 455 consecutive sold-out crowds home, many of whom stayed until the final out regardless of the score because they knew that the Tribe’s potent offensive could always overcome a deficit in the bottom of the 9th.  

The combination of two of Cleveland’s most iconic voices in Terry Pluto and Tom Hamilton makes this a must-read for any baseball fan.

This book is a call to action for communities to create more diverse housing opportunities. Missing middle housing refers to a wide range of housing types that are gradually disappearing from US cities, including duplexes, smaller homes, and garden apartments. These types of housing have traditionally represented an affordable option within cities that also promotes a sense of community. The book’s premise falls in line with my own experience growing up in an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, where there were single-family homes, duplex and triplex houses, small apartment buildings, and a genuine Rockefeller mansion all in the same thriving neighborhood. The book goes beyond design with lots of “how to” advice on building local support for city leaders, real estate developers, and residents to work together to create stronger and more affordable communities.

There are a few good men out there who fight for the underdog. The main is bound by a powerful overlord. He’s good at his job but doesn’t have a choice. His only friend appears to live inside a ring he wears (djinn). The bad work environment doesn’t mean he doesn’t fight for what is right, even as he tries to figure out a way out of his predicament.

This is a thriller-level urban fantasy with solid plotting and lots of twists and turns. It is about as far from romantasy as you can get, and the hero has a great story to tell. McClellan is better known for his fantasy, but I absolutely love this urban fantasy series.

In a novel inspired by the decade-long kidnapping of three women in Cleveland, Ferrell has crafted a story out of voices. We hear each of the young women—their inner obsessions and distractions, the details they live inside of—before, during, and after their confinement, and their joy in each other. But Ferrell has also included the Miss Metropolitan of her title, a nosy woman living on the same street, with her eager attentions misdirected, one of the neighbors who didn’t notice. There’s an extra ambition in the reach of that, a context that insists on including unexpected corners, picking up lots of loosely connected characters to get the full meaning of the story.

This horror novel about a haunted IKEA-like store is playful and fun in every way—from its inventive narrative structure to the book’s mimicry of an IKEA catalogue, complete with a store map and advertisements for furniture that become increasingly deranged.

During daylight, Orsk is a regular furniture store in the suburbs of Cleveland, but when several employees attempt to stay overnight to find out why products keep getting damaged, the building’s dark history begins to bleed into the present. This book perfectly captures the uncanny way nighttime makes familiar landscapes, such as stores and schools, seem entirely unfamiliar, a phenomenon that has always fascinated me.