100 Books Like A Handful of Dust

This book is an unyielding portrayal of the excesses of 1980s consumerism, hedonism, and self-destruction. Amis pulls no punches in his depiction of John Self, a 35-year-old director of TV commercials who lives a life of excess driven by his appetites—primarily for food, drugs, alcohol, sex, and, of course, money. Through John Self’s descent, the novel delivers a harsh commentary on the culture of greed and indulgence that characterized the decade.

The novel's portrayal of greed, addiction, and sexism rubbed some readers and critics the wrong way. Some saw it as too nihilistic or excessively grim in its critique of 1980s culture, where everything seemed for sale, including morality. However, in this age of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and pervasive purity spirals, I personally found its unapologetically gritty satire a breath of fresh air.

This book will appeal not only to fans of dark humor and satire but also to… show more.

This is classic, quintessential British humor, the kind of dry wit that makes you laugh out loud as you’re reading. I didn’t want it to end because of how hilarious I found the main character. Even while being funny, the book does a great job establishing the imposter syndrome the main character feels as a member of the middle class attempting to enter the elite halls of academia as an older graduate student.

He is a fish out of water, incapable of having normal social interactions with his peers, “betters,” or students. Possibly, the best-ever hangover scene in writing occurs in this book. 

A complex magic realist novel. Two Muslim Indians are on a highjacked plane that explodes over the English Channel. As they fall into the sea, Bollywood superstar Gibreel Farishta, turns into the Archangel Gabriel, while Saladin Chamcha, a voiceover artist, metamorphoses into the Devil. They struggle with their new identities, with rivalry, with life in Britain, and in Gibreel’s case, with mental illness. Like all Rushdie’s work, it is a post-colonial perspective on the metropolis and the identity crises of the ex-colonised. There are long dream sequences about an Arabian prophet called Mahmoud—who resembles the founder of Islam. The Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Rushdie to death for blasphemy for this. This all sounds deep and portentous—and it is—but it’s also unfailingly funny and original. And brave. An inspiration. 

Is it a coincidence that the first great novel of Western civilisation is a satire? I think not. It began as a parody of the chivalric romances—of their disconnect from reality, their sentimentality, and dishonesty. I needn’t summarise the plot, since everyone knows the story, though usually from films, unfortunately. As with all the great satires, what appears to be a playful romp ends up being an investigation into what it means to be human—the purpose of our lives, and what makes them worthwhile. Initially, Cervantes wants us to laugh at the ridiculous old country gentleman who longs to revive chivalry, but he finds that Quixote makes his life meaningful by creating his quest. He becomes a hero—as does my protagonist. And as we all can.  

George Orwell is rightly famous for 1984 and Animal Farm. But I heartily recommend this book for its witty, gritty trudge through the social treacle of 1930s Britain. Orwell’s tale of Gordon Comstock, a young writer who embraces poverty in order to defeat the ‘money-god’, also foreshadows key themes of his later work.

Comstock has chucked in a well-paid job as a copywriter so he can write poetry. His disdain for the copywriter’s art allows Orwell to explore the emptiness of words yoked to advertising. ‘Vitamalt’, ‘Truweet’ and ‘Bovex’ are my favourites! Orwell, the journalist-novelist, is reliably strong on those under-the-skin details, from cheap cigarettes to the cost of lodgings in seedier parts of London.

A brilliant send-up of toxic work culture and self-optimization. This book has the dry, acid wit of *The Office* rewritten by Dorothy Parker.

Butler’s narrator is your worst millennial mood and best unreliable friend. She has contempt for her temp job but commits to the impermanence because she likes “slight atmospheric changes.” Butler is a wonderfully funny writer whose character, Millie, is all of us—who don’t have a trust fund; are forced to collect money doing mind-numbing work; when all we want to do is sit in bed, eat ice cream, and binge watch Netflix shows.

This book taught me that you can surf the line between realism and the incredible (even the ridiculous). The main character, Oedipa Maas, is my favorite heroine because of her openness to every tantalizing possibility (and the possibilities keep ramifying infinitely).

Everything in this book is both fully a symbol and fully itself.

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.

This was one of the first books I read at university. I admired Marie Munkara’s gruff voice and the way she delicately balanced satirical humour and dark truths.

Juxtaposing the voices of colonial guards and officers with 16-year-old Aboriginal mother, Sugar, lends this novel a messy complexity which is always compelling.

At the beginning, I found it easy to mock and deride the white colonial officers: the overtly racist Drew, the well-meaning but exploitative Ralphie, the bumbling, inadequate Hump with his mistaken ambitions of grandeur. I thought I’d figured it all out, that I’d grasped all of Munkara’s meaning. 

But as Sugar’s fate is revealed, and more significantly, she recognises the inevitability of her downfall, I was humbled. Munkara’s book taught me to look beyond the seemingly obvious characters and literary devices to the nuance within. 

The author’s voice captured me.

Once again, I’d never read anything like it before. He was having a conversation with me. I was now a character in an Amsterdam bar with him, the war had just ended, we were smoking cigarettes and drinking gin.

He would respond to my silent questions, and wax and wane philosophically, metaphysically, morally, ethically, and occasionally comically. 

And the beauty was that it had happened so randomly—a roommate had thrown the book in the trash, declaring it to be “bullshit.” I knew the lad to be an imbecile (an acceptable term at the time), so I fished the book out of the trash, read the first sentence, and loved it.

It was the quantumly entangled counter particle to Candide: one particle from the age of reason, the other particle from the age of existentialism.