89 Books Like Feet Of Clay

This might be my favorite book ever, and while it is not about business, career, or personal development, it speaks to me about the power of opening our eyes and seeing a world filled with possibilities.

I believe in our ability to explore, wonder, and imagine what could be possible.

I first encountered Douglas Adams when I caught The Hitchhiker’s Guide on late-night radio, and I was hooked. The novel is slightly different, with Adams giving a bit more consideration to plot and logic, but it has the same wonderful, rapid-fire dialogue style, which has seldom been replicated.

I absolutely love Arthur Dent’s ludicrous accidental odyssey, meeting characters like Zaphod Beeblebrox and the wonderfully named Slartibartfast. The Guide sits in the background, popping up to provide superbly funny explanations of the history of the universe, humanity’s obsession with money, and a lot more.

For me, the thing that sets this apart from a lot of SFF humor is its ‘Britishness’—there’s a distinct feel of the surreal comic legacy of, for example, Monty Python and The Goon Show.

It’s hard to beat Scalzi for nailing the execution of a high concept.

Redshirts could have so easily been nothing but a gimmick, but Scalzi really gets into the guts of the horror and humor of being a character written for the sole purpose of dying. I picked up the book with a cynical eye, expecting to hate it, but it drew me in.

Scalzi went so much further with the concept, shined a light on every corner of the idea, that he managed to create a deconstruction and reconstruction of the same trope at the same time. 

Peake writes with the experience of someone who paints and that has a remarkable effect on his use of imagery. There are certain figurative turns of phrases he uses, such as “a face like scrunched up paper” or describing a cat purring as “the sound of an ocean inside a shell,” that click in my mind like—yes! You’ve put that into words! And Titus Groan is, once again, full of that amazing and immersive wordsmithery that elevates the text into something cinematic.

Robert Sheckley stands out from his contemporaries of the golden age of science fiction by being not just great but also often very funny. 

Sheckley has a wry, insightful wit, which puts him in a class of his own among the giants of the post-WW2 era. Start with his eight stories of the AAA Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service. Great idea, great characters, great settings (two shysters running a fly-by-night planetary fixer-upper service, on the cheap): they are light, effortless, unpretentious, insightful, and brilliant. 

It’s basically Ghostbusters in space. What more could you want?

Like a lot of folks, I found out about this book when the movie version came out, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The world-building in the movie was so compelling and unique that I decided to pick up the book. And I’m so glad that I did. The plot in the book is much more complicated, and the social satire is even sharper. One of my all-time favorite noir mysteries.

No one, and I do mean no one, can craft a sentence like Larry Doyle.

What Usagi Yojimbo is to a katana, Doyle is to the English language, building statements that manage to at once stretch the imagination but be immediately recognizable. Doyle will describe a feeling, an instant, a moment that is universal in words you’ve never seen strung together.

On top of that, this book is a hilarious romp in an alternate history with monsters and mad science, and it manages to pull off one of the most incredible narrative twists I’ve ever seen.

I’m cheating a little with this one since this is technically three books but go with me. Slaves of the Volcano God, Bride of the Slime Monster, and Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies are some of those series that used to be thick on the ground but now are harder to find.

They’re adventure novels that play with the tropes of B-movies, and not only are they hilarious, but they made a young Justin like B-movies more. Playing with tropes can get exhausting, but when it’s done with genuine love, as it is here, it makes for an airy joy of a series.

When it comes to fantasy books, it’s hard to narrow things down to only one book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

He was a master of satire and the use of asides to parody the tropes of fantasy while also telling compelling stories and building a world you could imagine visiting. If we’re going to annoy the people trying to ban LGBTQ+ books, though, I’d have to recommend starting with The Fifth Elephant.

As the kingdom of dwarves is in disarray over the disappearance of the Scone necessary to crown their king, a group of Night Watch detectives from a distant land must work together to solve the crime while dodging evil werewolves.

One of the detectives on the case is Cheery, a dwarf who causes waves for openly identifying as female (the dwarves follow logic similar to J.R.R. Tolkien’s dwarves in that every dwarf has a beard and gender… show more.

I fell in love with Terry Pratchett’s writing style with the first Discworld novel I read—they’re all great, and could fill a ‘best of’ list by themselves. But if I’m forced to pick a single favorite, it’s this one. I love the witches (and Nanny’s cat, Greebo), and can’t help but grin at the conversations between Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg.

The highlight of this particular book is Nanny Ogg’s rather rude ‘cookbook.’ Oh, and Greebo in human form. And Henry Slug pretending to be Enrico Basilica, while wanting nothing more than wholesome Ankh-Morpork cuisine, not to mention… I could go on for ages: I love everything about this book.

One warning, though: don’t listen to the audiobook in public. When among strangers, it’s embarrassing to burst out laughing for no readily apparent reason.