Books like A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane — picked by fans

Nothing much seems to happen in this remarkable novella, which describes a single lunch break of a man at work.

Actually, though, the reader gets to eavesdrop on the man’s ruminations about everyday things—shoelaces, bathroom blow dryers, vending machines, office supplies, and so much more.

These ruminations are practically Proustian; they start with something ordinary (a milk carton), followed by a digression (memories of having milk delivered to his home), interrupted by another digression (about his sister’s milk allergy), and veering into philosophical territory (pondering the nature of all childhood memories).

Reading this novella is both exhausting and exhilarating. It’s like wandering haphazardly through a maze of ideas and memories. Luckily, the novella is short enough that the reader never grows bored or tired.

I stumbled upon this incredible book that explored the parallels between ancient Eastern philosophy and Western psychology.

Thinkers like Zhuangzi and Laozi understood that not trying paradoxically can improve performance and focus. Indolence can be another way to release one’s mind to the ebbs and flows of the outside world. Honestly, it was a delicious surprise to realize that the ancient philosophers had so much to say about human indolence.

A fiction writer instinctively overthinks what he is writing about, but this book helped me to stop worrying about word counts or writer’s block and just accept that words come out eventually… sometimes as a trickle and sometimes as a roar.

This is one of my all-time favorite reads.

Not much happens in this light-hearted 1965 children’s book by an award-winning poet.

A solitary hunter befriends (and shares an abode with) a mermaid, a bear, a lynx, and a young boy. They live together, totally unbound by human rules. The hunter teaches human language to the mermaid and learns about the perspective of undersea creatures.

The mermaid is a perfect audience for the animals’ wild antics and the hunter’s strange human habits. She finds it hilarious that the hunter uses a fishing pole to catch fish. (“You look so helpless just sitting there waiting for one,” she says.)

This clever and carefree story lacks plot or incident, but it captures the absurdity of different kinds of creatures living under the same roof.

I love Andersen because his stories almost out-Kafka Kafka.

His animal characters are not exactly philosophers, but they observe, they dread, they dream. Animals—like humans—rarely challenge the natural order of things, but they must deal with the world as it actually is.

One Danish critic said that Andersen wrote more self-portraits than Rembrandt ever painted. Andersen’s great contribution to literature is recognizing how little is needed to produce a story and how little a great story really needs to say. 

One story tells of a chance meeting and spurned friendship between two toys in a drawer. Andersen seems capable of turning anything into a story.

This annotated hardback edition by a folklore scholar is one of the most beautiful-looking books I own.

It’s a beautifully written story of Achilles and Priam, expanding upon the last book of Homer’s Iliad.

Malouf looks at warfare and heroism from inside the warrior’s complicated reality, with fatherhood woven through. Each relationship is powerful: Achilles and Patroclus, Achilles and Hector, Hector and his parents, Priam and Hecuba, Priam and the carter who transports him to Achilles’ camp with his ransom to exchange for the body of his son Hector, and in the end, Achilles and Priam in heartbreaking intimacy.

This novel arouses profound emotions, often surprising, and the details are vividly imagined. Malouf gives us much to reflect on with his retelling of this archetypal yet very personal tale.

This epic by Homer has a great impact on epic culture.

Writing such an epic in the 700-800 BC era is mind-blowing, War of Troy which we used to read in comic books and movies has so well narrated citing the bravery of Greek and Trojan Heroes in the Iliad.

Everyone should read about the heroes of Iliad epic King Agamemnon, warrior Achilles and Odyssey’s Greek hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca and his return journey about the Trojan War. Greek mythology is always a great source of information about the ancient time wars and treaties.

Logue’s modernist reworking of the Iliad – the Trojan war - mother of all Mediterranean contests, is quite unlike anything you’ll ever read. Logue doesn’t translate, he remakes. It’s as cinematic as a film script, cast in a poetic language as brilliant as anything in modern times, full of jump cuts, staccato effects, and startling contemporary references. The violence of the fighting has a slamming immediacy (‘Dust like red mist/Pain like chalk on slate’), the Mediterranean – ‘the sea that is always counting’ - glimmers and sighs, the Gods behave like spoiled children, helicopters go whumping over the dunes.

This book, published in the 1870s, is sometimes considered the best English novel ever written.

It is a monumental work, and while I found it very impressive, I have to admit that reading the long and detailed text felt heavy going at times.

Set in a provincial town with a large cast of characters, it depicts a middle-class way of life very different from that of today, and addresses various social and political questions of the time. One major theme is the psychology of marriage as analysed through the relationships between two ill-matched couples.

I’m just a sucker for books where characters who don’t seem to have power or agency within their society wind up sneakily subverting power for their own ends while letting the “power-hungry” think they are in charge.

In this case, women once again have figured out a way to get what they want and essentially take down patriarchy (in a dystopian setting) without using the tools of the aggressor. It’s a surprising, potent, and beautiful book (though there are some outdated concepts/ideologies, given that it was published in 1988).

I get it. People read Homer’s Odyssey because of the adventures and gods and monsters, but for me, his best was his first epic poem, The Iliad. The opening word of the story is “rage,” and the action never stops until the last line. From clashing swords to souls sent down to the house of death, this could have been a heavy metal opera if only Homer had played an electric guitar instead of a lyre. I chose the Lombardo translation because it captures best the action and heroism and pulse-pounding excitement that keeps me reading this one over and over.