Books like Sport & Leisure — picked by fans

I was on an extended trip to Eastern Europe, back when Eastern Europe was not such a dandy place to visit, and I found myself with nothing to read. In a used bookstore in Prague, I found a tattered paperback, translated into English, of this next pick. It was falling apart, the pages stained by coffee and God knows what else. I bought it anyway.

And over the next few weeks, I was, for the third time, blown away by words on a page, by an author’s imagination. It’s been said that Don Quixote, written around 1600, was the first novel ever written. It may also be the greatest novel ever written. Adventure. Humor. Pathos. Crazy amounts of imagination. The Whole Damn Human Condition.

Make sure to find a first-class translation!

I first read this book exactly 50 years ago, back in 1974, when I was 26. Ever since then, I have reread Jaroslav Hašek's masterpiece every single year, always in February. It is the gloomiest month of the year in Europe when our tonus is at its lowest, and we desperately need something to cheer us up.

The hilarious story of the good soldier is precisely that “injection” of optimism, serenity, élan vital that helps me make it through the last winter months till the arrival of the Spring. Although I already know by heart many passages from Svejk, I still laugh aloud while reading them—reading about the instinctive wisdom of an ordinary, small Czech man trying to comically outsmart the demonic forces of History…

I loved this book because it’s such a great concept.

It’s a delightfully intoxicating cocktail of Cervantes, Ian Fleming, with a twist of Beckett—shaken, not stirred. Fantastically fun and propelled by an extraordinary character who is obviously totally crazy, or maybe that’s just his cover story. An absolutely ingenious concept for a character and a book that is surprising, funny, ludicrously action-packed, yet strangely plausible, weirdly believable, and ultimately, completely enjoyable!

The characters, the locations, the menus, the yachts, the clothes, the witty repartee—I felt a little classier and more sophisticated just from having read it.

I loved this book because it proved that you can think a book is crap one day, and absolutely love it the next*. 

I was twenty-something and about to have an impacted wisdom tooth chiseled out and wanted a book for my convalescence. It had a great cover, so I flipped open to the first page and read the opening line—something like, “Amoebas don’t have bones…”.

Whoever wrote this book was of dubious sanity, so I bought it and had the wisdom tooth removed, which evidently actually removed the wisdom needed to appreciate the writing. Time passed, and I gave the book another try—evidently the wisdom had returned because what had once been chaotic and confusing and stupid was now delightfully random and effortlessly insightful, and really, really fun.

I loved this book.

* Actually, it wasn’t the next day; it was actually about a year or so later.

I loved this book because it combines the gothic tradition with politics. Written during the Soviet era, it deals with the Devil and his entourage who visit Soviet-era Moscow and reveal Soviet society.

While not truly a gothic novel, it is an imaginative work and kept me mesmerized as an undergraduate student so much that I have gone back to read it again as an adult.

This was the first book I’ve seen that re-oriented the United States within a cultural understanding of “the Americas,” a complete resituating of our usually conceived “unique” history. Doing this, Bolaño, a Chilean, puts our own fanatic, right-wing weirdos–religious fanatics, militarists, unhinged hyper-patriotic dictatorial aspirants–into a context where Americans can see ourselves in hemispheric context; these are political pathologies that have historically been seen as much throughout Central and South America as within our own borders.

I found this mind-blowing. This is a collection of fictional biographies, fantastically imagined and yet achingly familiar, and as relevant now as when it was first written more than two decades ago and translated and published in the US in 2009, such that our current politics seem almost pre-scripted by Bolaño’s vision. 

I can totally relate to his non-conformist views on subjects that too many unthinking flocks of people religiously believe in. I absolutely love the way he fearlessly challenges societal norms and his generally humorous discussion of taboo subjects.

Laumer’s satirical books about Jame Retief, a functionary in Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, were inspired by his real-life career in the U.S. Foreign Service. They don’t have to be read in any order and mix short stories (as in this collection) and novels. Much of the humor comes from Retief ignoring the diplomatic niceties in dealing with the problems involving Earth and various alien races.

Oy, forget the mediocre movie. George Burns was perfectly cast but the reason God appears as a little old Jewish man is that he’s granting an interview to a Jewish freelance journalist, not a white bread grocery store clerk played by John Denver. This book taught me that a writer could be laugh out loud funny and still have something serious to say, something I’ve aspired to in my own fiction.

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.