Here are 100 books that The Best Awful fans have personally recommended if you like
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I think of myself as a listener and life in progress. As a poet and author, I’m always listening to the words that move through my heart. I’m also a spiritual seeker, always looking for the Divine in the world around me and almost always surprised by the ways it shows up when I’m paying attention. Yet, there’s another part of me that is a Jersey girl through and through, looking for humor or irreverence in the face of life’s challenges. All these aspects come together in an unusual harmony, creating an openness to being changed by the things that come into my life. Hence, a list of life-changing books.
What a world-rocking, mind-blowing journey reading Skinny Legs and All was! I read it in my twenties, and it truly was life-changing. It is imaginative and thought-provoking. It expanded my perspective on life and what might be happening right in front of my eyes that I’m missing with my limited imagination.
It’s wickedly funny and irreverent and yet addresses difficult issues that are relevant today, such as the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The storytelling is so unique, I’ve never read another book like it. It’s a book that leaves me envying someone else’s first read of it.
It also served as a source of inspiration for me as an author many years later. There was a scene in the movie Finding Forrester, where a young writer (Rob Brown) is facing writer’s block. His instructor (Sean Connery) suggests he start typing the content of a book he loves word for…
An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations....
It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel spins, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine-while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils.
Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I believe that laughter is the best way into a person’s heart and also into their head. Life is beautiful, but it is also incredibly fragile. Satire and humor are effective ways to raise the level of awareness of destructive behaviors and/or controversial topics that are otherwise difficult or unpleasant to address. I think satire and humor make it easier to hold up a mirror and look critically at our own beliefs and our actions.
I love the fact that this book intertwines humor and satire around subjects of religion, weapons of mass destruction, and human indifference and indolence. I love that it, sadly, also has parallels to the world we currently live in.
Good satire never grows irrelevant, and Cat’s Cradle is as relevant (and funny) today as it was when it was written.
One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilation
Experiment.
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it.
Solution.
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to…
I believe that laughter is the best way into a person’s heart and also into their head. Life is beautiful, but it is also incredibly fragile. Satire and humor are effective ways to raise the level of awareness of destructive behaviors and/or controversial topics that are otherwise difficult or unpleasant to address. I think satire and humor make it easier to hold up a mirror and look critically at our own beliefs and our actions.
I loved the book because it went in a direction, humorously describing the teen-age years of Jesus Christ, that no book had gone before.
Not only is the storyline clever and the dialogue sharp and humorous, but it also forces you to think critically about the origin stories that are handed down through centuries and millennia.
The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years - except Biff, the Messiah's best bud, who has been resurrected to tell the story in this divinely hilarious, yet heartfelt work 'reminiscent of Vonnegut and Douglas Adams' (Philadelphia Inquirer). Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healings, kung fu, corpse reanimations, demons, and hot babes, Even the considerable wiles and devotion of the…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
In my first career as an actress, I often got cast as the “comic relief” in more serious films and plays. I cut my acting chops on improv comedy before getting my BFA in drama from NYU and performing in everything from Shakespeare to Seinfeld. I wrote and performed in stage shows at Disneyland and Disney World and screamed myself hoarse in B-horror films. As an author, I like to write about serious topics but I just can’t help being funny. I received my MFA from Antioch University and have had over 30 short stories and essays published. While I read voraciously (and genre-indiscriminately), my favorite books are often “darkly comedic” or “funny yet poignant.”
I first came across this book when babysitting at a neighbor’s house as a young teen. I was a giant Judy Blume fangirl and I was confused. I thought I’d read all of her novels. When I picked this one up, I managed to find a “dirty part” quite quickly while flipping through it and I stole the book to show that passage to all my friends. Scandalous! When I was out of college, I actually read the whole book and found it a poignant, but still funny, look at dreams deferred, marriage, motherhood, and sex.
With more than four million copies sold, Wifey is Judy Blume's hilarious, moving tale of a woman who trades in her conventional wifely duties for her wildest fantasies-and learns a lot about life along the way.
Sandy Pressman is a nice suburban wife whose boredom is getting the best of her. She could be making friends at the club, like her husband keeps encouraging her to do. Or working on her golf game. Or getting her hair done.
But for some reason, these things don't interest her as much as the naked man on the motorcycle...
In addition to my lived experience as someone who has struggled with mental health and addiction since adolescence, I'm passionate about social justice issues related to mental illness and substance use. In June 2021, I completed a post-graduate program in Mental Health & Addictions. Throughout my studies I was able to gain a deeper understanding of how my own struggles developed and what they have come to mean to me from both a personal and clinical perspective. Now, I endeavor to pursue future writing projects in various genres that illuminate mental health issues as a relevant and timely topic of interest. I also hope to work with disenfranchised populations while pursuing my creative writing.
Hornbacher details her experience of living with bipolar disorder—the psychological escapades, the unimaginable highs, and devastating lows. These transcendent highs and crippling lows are mirrored in the strange delights and perils of the physical world. She is the life of parties, dressed provocatively in silky red dresses and matching ruby lipstick. But she is also capable of breaking ties with reality, hopping in a car with a boyfriend and travelling across the state for no reason in particular, an adventure in which the pleasure of the high becomes too much, too dangerous to be reckoned with.
I too recall waking up at 2 am, writing for 18 hours straight, (without a water or pee break), and creating a beautiful essay in one draft which was later published. I once spent two days and nights in a blinding fury of elation that was simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. I too remember in…
Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of Wasted, Marya Hornbacher's astonishing New York Times best-selling memoir from the belly of bipolar disorder.
Marya Hornbacher tells the story that until recently she had no idea was hers to tell: that of her life with Type I ultra-rapid-cycle bipolar disorder, the most severe form of bipolar disease.
In Madness, Hornbacher relates that bipolar can spawn eating disorders, substance abuse, promiscuity, and self-mutilation, and that for too long these symptoms have masked, for many of the three million people in America with bipolar, their underlying illness. Hornbacher’s fiercely self-aware portrait of bipolar, starting as early as…
I was a funny little anxious kid, and still remember the relief of coming across friends who opened up and told their darkest thoughts and silliest moments. This is what I seek out in books and try to show in my own stories. To say...Look! We’re all deeply weird! You are not alone! Comics and graphic novels have such a unique and immediate way of whispering into your heart and it amazes me that so many people haven’t yet discovered what a wonderful art form they are.
Most of the books I’ve chosen are a bit wild and frantic like my own. Sunburning is very still and quiet and so, so funny. I felt the oceans of emotions under the surface though everything is drawn in such a careful way, and the brilliant pacing recreates the strange and humourous tension of being a human in this crazy old world. The dialogue is so well-drawn and in the gaps in between it I felt I could hear the whirr of Kieiler’s busy brain. Another book to make you feel less alone.
In an era where personal lives are meticulous curated and presented, Keiler Roberts' unflinching and intimate comics reveal real life to be as absurd as it is profound. In a sequence of vignettes, Roberts delineates the complicated life of a mother and artist that can be comical, melancholic and delightful.
Keiler Roberts' autobiographical comic series Powdered Milk has received an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Series and was included in the The Best American Comics 2016. Her work has been published in The Chicago Reader, Mutha Magazine, Nat. Brut, Darling Sleeper, Newcity, and several anthologies.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
My name is K. E. Garland, and I am a recovering female sex addict. I didn’t know it until I was 42. In 2014, I had a rock-bottom moment that forced me to confront my compulsions. I self-therapized through writing. As a blogger, I described ways I’d buried interrelated traumas. During the nine years it took for me to research and write my memoir, there were few books about female sex addiction. Now, there are several! The books I’ve recommended not only provide a well-rounded understanding of a little-known phenomenon, but they also help to demarginalize stories of how women live with behavioral addictions. I hope you’ll find them useful.
I loved this book because, while it is common for celebrities to write tell-all memoirs, it is not common for esteemed actresses to write so candidly about mental illness and sex addiction.
I was shocked when I read that Lewis was diagnosed as bipolar, and that is what led to a subsequent diagnosis of being a female sex addict. Reading her words and descriptions made me question if I, too, needed to seek out a psychiatrist to confirm if I was bipolar.
This book also helped me to see that there didn’t need to be shame attached to being a female sex addict, and I don’t have to be a celebrity to “tell it all.”
I am Frederick L. McKay, the youngest son of the composer and author George Frederick McKay (1899-1970), and I have re-issued and edited Professor McKay’s theory books and also authored his biography titled McKay’s Music: The Composer Chronicles. George Frederick McKay hoped to have more American music performed in the concert halls of our country and also involved cultural elements from around the world in his musical works, including poetry and whimsical pieces for young people studying music. His other works include Creative Harmony, How Music Begins and Grows, and Workbook for Creative Orchestration.
An exciting and mysterious author illustrating a particular period of American literary history. The composer musically interpreted Poe’s times and personality in a major symphonic work.
McKay composed several dark and dramatic pieces during his career, including an arrangement of March to the Scaffold from a classical piece and an original work called To Bury the Dead for an anti-war stage play.
Edgar Allan Poe is credited with having pioneered the short story, having perfected the tale of psychological horror, and having revolutionised modern poetics. The entirety of Poe's body of imaginative work encompasses detective tales, satires, fables, fantasies, science fiction, verse dramas, and some of the most evocative poetry in the English language. This omnibus edition collects all of Poe's fiction and poetry in a single volume, including The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Pit and the Pendulum,." "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," the full-length novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", and much more.…
I am Zangba Thomson, a happy, positive, and charismatic human being. I appreciate the simple things in life, and I am content with what I have. I laugh and smile a lot, and people say I am always in a good mood. I love to motivate, encourage, and inspire people to focus on the solution and not the problem; and to be optimistic and cheerful despite difficulties. In a nutshell, I love seeing people succeed. My motto is (P) Positive (E) Energy (A) Always (C) Creates (E) Elevation (PEACE). I hope you enjoy my book recommendations and I wish you the very best on your road to success.
A book I strongly recommend on your success journey is As A Man Thinketh. This 60-page book is short, sweet, and to the point. Your thoughts are things, and you are where you are in life because of how you think. Understanding that profound statement can enable you to weave happiness and prosperity into your life. Also, As A Man Thinketh will show you how to always stay positive and keep successful thoughts flowing in your mind so you can live a prosperous life.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
From the age of ten, I became enthralled with Abraham Lincoln. The story of his life captured my imagination. I had to know more about him. Through the decades I searched out little-known stories, eyewitness accounts, and letters thought lost. Becoming fascinated how he went from an almost illiterate young man to becoming the person we know from history; I went to the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield Illinois and to where he lived in New Salem to do additional research. After that, I started writing a three-year labor of love: my own Lincoln book, primarily focusing on one key period of his life.
This is an insightful examination of Lincoln’s struggles with depression and thoughts of suicide. The author has done a masterful job of exploring Lincoln’s bouts of sadness, which began in his childhood and continued throughout his life, often closing in on him. My own research revealed much the same: from a cruel father with no real understanding of his son to the tragic loss of those he loved. It was always in the back of his mind, eating at him.
The National Mental Health Association and others have praised this book. If you want to get inside Lincoln, read this wonderful study of the man.
A nuanced psychological portrait of Abraham Lincoln that finds his legendary political strengths rooted in his most personal struggles.
Giving shape to the deep depression that pervaded Lincoln's adult life, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy reveals how this illness influenced both the President’s character and his leadership. Mired in personal suffering as a young man, Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health. Shenk draws on seven years of research from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of Lincoln’s unhappiness. In the process, Shenk discovers that the President’s coping strategies—among them,…
