Books like The Consultant — picked by fans

If American Psycho is too bloody an evocation of hyper-capitalism for your stomach, try this tragically under-appreciated door-stopper of a novel, in which an eleven-year-old becomes a millionaire by playing the stock market. Written almost wholly in unattributed dialogue! As with Pynchon, everything written by Gaddis deserves to be on this list; alas, alas. 

I still remember the first time I read this book. I laughed, then I winced, then I realized I had just been handed a live 18th-century grenade disguised as an essay. I was stunned by how Swift used reason itself as a weapon to expose cruelty. It is not just satire; it is intellectual rebellion in powdered wig form.

What I love most is how he never once breaks character. The horror of the argument creeps in slowly, and that slow-burn discomfort thrilled me. It made me rethink what writing can do… how it can mock, indict, and entertain all at once. I have never trusted “logic” the same way since. And I have never underestimated the power of deadpan again.

Francis Plug is a drunken fictional author crashing literary festivals, manufacturing chaos in whichever space he steps into, collecting autographs of “real writers,” and offering absurd wisdom on how to behave like a proper prize-winning novelist.

It’s satire for writers and readers who love the literary world... and love to roast it, too.

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?

A story about a biographer who pokes into the corners of a Nobel-winning author’s salacious life to write an exposé is juicy enough, but what happens when the latter uses the opportunity to write a counter-exposé on the former? Unstructured in plot and other novel-craft, this book is laden with pithy quotes on the writing life. The biographer and his subject are libidinous, adulterous, and self-absorbed, a testament to the fact that a writer has to be appreciated separately from their work. Also on display are the strategies employed by the publishing industry to keep the reputation and marketability of a once best-selling author alive, long after their effective shelf-life. 

Does Terry Pratchett seem a frivolous choice compared to my others? Not at all. There is deep and humane wisdom hidden in his Discworld humor. 

In the eternally recurrent conflict between Dwarves and Trolls in the Discworld, the board game Thud (a parallel world echo of the Scandinavian hnefatafl games) plays a pivotal and, ultimately, crucial role.

The story's hero is Samuel Vimes, a favorite avatar of Pratchett's. Vimes is a recovering alcoholic, depressive policeman who through chance and a stubborn inborn streak of decency and sense of fair play, happens to end up as the Duke of Ankh Morpork (the Discworld equivalent of London) and mediator between the two warring tribes. It's his job to find the point at which they can at least agree to not slaughter each other.

Before I was an author, I was primarily a national magazine copy editor, a job I finally scored after eight years of climbing up the magazine journalism ladder.

I wrote once in a while, but this mostly meant TV recaps by the time I was entrenched in magazines. But one day, an article about a safe-driving activist crossed my desk, and soon I was speaking with him in high schools.

Around the time I checked off “swim the width of a river” from my father’s bucket list, I also read Huckleberry Finn, as the setting seemed only right. I wrote a tribute to it in the second chapter of my book. My dad’s favorite author was Twain, but what I appreciated about him was that he wrote the novel as veiled propaganda. It’s a book that professes Twain’s anti-racism perspective. He just put his cause into a novel.

I… show more.

Told as a series of movie reviews, A Short Film About Disappointment unfurls its dystopia gradually. A hacker attack kicks off a global multi-decade economic depression, and to prevent this from ever happening again the Internet is abolished and replaced with the “Betternet,” a neutered and highly censored version of the Internet. Personal screens are also banned in this nanny state, leading to a robust cinema culture that the unread reviewer wants to contribute to with a dense art film of his own. The hilarious capsule descriptions of eighty (fictional) films serve as an oblique way of introducing the world, while the numerous tangents of the writer “Noah Body” tell a personal story of love, filmmaking, and a literal haunting by an ex-friend.

I could have picked anything by George Saunders, really. He’s the closest thing I have to a personal deity. Such is the level of awe and wonder that he invokes in me, I actually find him difficult to discuss. It’s like trying to look directly at the sun.

Suffice it to say that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline—the title refers to a failing theme park—is like all of his other short story collections. It’s beautiful and wise and heart-breaking and deeply intelligent and, yes, desperately funny. I would pay a lot of money to be able to read it again for the first time. 

The animal is a number of racehorses. The human is a collection of owners, trainers, jockeys, and more, yielding a comprehensive look at human and animal behavior in the horse racing industry. A strong, intimate novel. I used to ride but never very well, and I’ve always wondered what a horse’s “thoughts” involved. Author Smiley gave me a feel for that as she applied her own assumptions to one horse in particular.