Books like Candide, or Optimism — picked by fans

I adore this book because it is so unique—I’ve never read anything quite this specific or niche which seems so all-encompassing.

It is the story of a life lost, and a life found. Of a father that dies and how the recovery of his daughter is tied up with the start of a new relationship—with a goshawk.

At the outset, the author is so wonderfully eloquent on all aspects of loss; the sudden jarring sense of confusion when a person dies and you have their possessions still in your hands; the struggle to keep in touch with reality (“for weeks I felt like I was made of dully burning metal”); the desperation to see the back of grief when new relationships are desperately grasped at, and fail of course, because of that desperation. 

The goshawk saves her (and us) from the darkness, as she becomes gripped with the… show more.

I was hungry for a great piece of comic writing when a friend handed me this book, and it delivered so much more than laughter.

Once I’d tuned in to the language, I ended up shambling through 30s London alongside impecunious painter Gulley Jimson. A humble man, driven by a holy need to make the sort of art which, it turns out, nobody wants, he encounters a world of squalor and beauty, both physical and moral.

I grew to love him and his daily observations on the play of weather and light on the Thames, which form a sort of sketchbook. As Jimson’s physical health declines, he grips beauty wherever he finds it. Theroux, Lessing, and Updike all rated this author.

I’m a sucker for a pun, and this is another witty book about a serious subject, so it’s right up my street. Milton it ain’t—I romped through it at a time when I was desperate for entertainment. Aging is explored with a sense of freshness and fun as a teenager goes to work in an old people’s home.

I love the delightful daftness, the sheer infantile silliness of this autobiography; it’s proof you can preserve your inner child well into maturity. Words are like Play-Doh to our Bob.

The comedian’s early years were marked by sadness, but he celebrates the power of having a laugh and hanging out with your mates. It made perfect sense to me to learn that the book came about because of a brush with heart failure.

It’s one of those books I dip into for a quick fix.

Soviet satire is often overlooked or dismissed as purely propaganda. John Etty offers a refreshingly updated look at a key Soviet publication and provides the casual reader with an introduction to the colorful and humorous content in the USSR’s premier satirical journal. He explores how content was created, revealing a collaborative process that could involve everyone from the head of the party to everyday readers. While there was oversight and interference from state censors and political authorities, and self-censorship in the 1930s due to repression, Etty reveals that editors and creators had a great deal of creative freedom.

Etty also explores the Krokodil “Extended Universe”. In the 1920s, when there was a severe shortage of paper and many citizens were illiterate, Live Krokodil, a repertory company was organized in theatres, workers’ and Red Army clubs. Additionally, Krokodil published the Krokodil Library (Biblioteka Krokodila) which included cartoon compendiums and… show more.

I liked the concept of man being small and adrift in the darkness of the wide world. This book taught me to see through politics, grandstanding, and the grandiose nonsense of man. Swift is my kind of guy, brutally satirical and profound. This book is really not for children. We see Gulliver travel on many adventures and experience Swift's disappointment as he engages different cultures, small and large, rational and irrational. 

His adventures demolish Gulliver’s sense of humanity to the point that when he is about to be rescued, at first, he rejects the offer like a misanthrope before finally climbing aboard. Swift is very dark here. Why would anyone want to return to the same old life after having their eyes opened?

I enjoy the dark humor in this one—savage and satirical, targeting pomposity. Voltaire uses a series of essays to show Candide going on travels and adventures, and meeting ignorance and bliss in turn. At the end, Candide reaches the conclusion that he should just “tend his own garden.”

It’s an ironic anti-clerical work that strips bare the follies and foibles of mankind. I appreciate how he didn’t hesitate to deconstruct the religious conditioning of the time.

In my teenage years in the 1970s, I read science fiction voraciously. I loved the ideas and imaginativeness, but it was all rather serious stuff. So, I was delighted when I discovered Robert Sheckley, a rare humorist and absurdist in a largely serious genre. 

I reckon his best novel is this one. It tells the story of a rather dull civil servant who wins the grand prize in a galactic lottery. He is whisked across space and time to Galactic Central to receive his prize: a shape-shifting, talking device/creature. Unfortunately, there is no provision for returning home, so an absurd journey begins from galactic bureaucracy to bizarre alternative Earths and homes. Maybe.

In addition to this book, I recommend diving into any of Sheckley's short story collections.

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.

I love this book, a classic from the 1960s, for its humanity and how much this young, inexperienced teacher cares about her students. She is pretty much thrown into the NYC public schools and struggles to stay afloat.

The book, written as a novel, is actually a collection of discarded scraps of paper from the classroom wastebasket—notes, doodles, memos, hall passes, student complaints. The young teacher expresses age-old dilemmas teachers face:  “Am I making a difference? Do I get through? Do they care? Do they understand how much I care?”