Life is taking a bite of the comedy/tragedy sandwich, savoring the mix of flavors, deciding how you feel about the taste, and taking another bite. I love writing that can gather experiences from across the emotional spectrum and incorporate them into a narrative that is absurd and all the more true because of it. These five books do it better than the rest.
I love a book that makes me laugh out loud and feel something deep about the characters and the world it presents. Ignatius J. Reilly, this novel’s main character, is basically a blueprint for the modern incel: he’s rude, selfish, hypocritical, infantile, and inconsistently idealistic, and while he’d be a horror to interact with in real life, he’s absolutely one of the funniest characters in all of literature.
One of the many magic tricks of this book is making the reader realize they’re halfway rooting for Ignatius by the end of his inane New Orleans adventures.
'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…
Overstuffed and labyrinthine, Eco’s novel dives into a highly academic rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that toss me head over heels like a strong wave in the ocean. It reads a bit like The DaVinci Code written by Thomas Pynchon (who we’ll get to in a minute), the paranoias stemming from historical entities like the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians.
I’d be hard-pressed to provide an accurate summary of events, but it all makes for a pleasantly bewildering reading experience.
Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
I love Vonnegut because he always brings the big beating heart. His trademark wit and critique are also in full swing as we travel to a recently exploited Caribbean island nation and witness the aftermath of the bizarre religion imposed there.
The book’s infamous MacGuffin of Ice-nine is outrageous and terrifying. Switching endlessly back and forth between emotionally vibrant and darkly amusing, this book is always a favorite re-read.
One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilation
Experiment.
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it.
Solution.
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to…
In this male-heavy list, this book refreshingly provides a female protagonist to follow into a maze with no discernable exit. Oedipa Maas is underwater from the outset as she wanders around California, the exact vector and identity of danger never quite clear (though it has something to do with warring, private postal services).
Like many post-modern, maximalist works, there are far too many abstract references to parse at the moment, but the overall ride is a delight just the same.
By far the shortest of Pynchon's great, dazzling novels - and one of the best.
Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting The Crying of Lot 49.
A witchy paranormal cozy mystery told through the eyes of a fiercely clever (and undeniably fabulous) feline familiar.
I’m Juno. Snow-white fur, sharp-witted, and currently stuck working magical animal control in the enchanted town of Crimson Cove. My witch, Zandra Crypt, and I only came here to find her missing…
I love a story set in a time and place I have scant reference for. Based partly on the English author’s experiences visiting Hollywood (during the filming of Brideshead Revisited), this book features a hyper-specific look at British expat life in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Sure, why not?
Things really get moving when the pet funeral home and love triangle plots begin a catastrophic entanglement that can only end in tragedy (but, like, in that ironic way, that’s fun to read about).
Teddy Lint is the kindest private investigator on the planet, committed to seeing the best in everyone he meets. Hired to find a shipping container of radioactive Agent Orange that vanished over fifty years ago, Teddy enters a maze of bizarre suspects, from nefarious ad executives, to anarchistic Boy Scouts, to a toga-clad militia fighting for exclusive rule by women. The propaganda-obsessed society that seems to be running the world is probably worth looking into as well.
The power of empathy collides with the dangers of disinformation as Teddy fights to save the people he loves. Our beloved detective doesn't give up easily, but any Angelenos with an aversion to death by herbicide might want to dust off that umbrella, just in case.
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
