100 Books Like The Rootabaga Stories

What can I say? It’s the goated friendly freaks book.

This collection of super short connected stories stars one kid per tale. The kids are weird and wild, and something that has really stuck with me my whole life is that some of the kids are rotten and stay rotten. Not everyone needs to grow and change in 120 pages.

Let a character stink. Let a kid be a wet rat. Let a nasty teacher be eaten. Anyway, there’s this incredible way that the author employs a third-person limited POV that gets me every time, even on the hundredth read.

A few illustrators have graced the pages of this all-time favorite. I grew up reading an edition illustrated by the amazing Julie Brinkloe. I also have a copy illustrated by Adam McCauley, which I also really love.

Lemony Snicket is no stranger to unfortunate events, but this standalone book contains perhaps the worst of all: the news that he, the author, has consumed poison while eating the first meal of the day. Of course, this being a Snicket story, there’s more going on. This book is a bit mystery, and a bit philosophy (or is it the other way around?). More importantly, it is also a meditation on the wonderfulness of books and reading, a part of life that remains important even if one is quite sure one has been poisoned and now has an indeterminate amount of time to discover the truth of what happened.

This is a collection of four related stories that follow a little girl named Josette, her Mama and Papa, and the maid, Jacqueline. Papa tells Josette some absurd stories within the story and everyone has a bizarre and seemingly random imagination. For example, Papa calls cheese a music box, a music box a rug, a rug a lamp, and so on. Mama can open walls. Josette eats the moon, and Jacqueline is one of many Jacquelines. The author, Ionesco was a French-Romanian playwright and considered one of the fathers of “Theatre of the Absurd” in the 1950s and 60s and these stories are surreal. Originally published in the early ’70s, this new edition contains Delassert’s equally surreal, colorful, and expressive illustrations.

This is the first book in the young readers' genre that made me think that I, too, could write for this age group. 

This book is a wonderfully funny and imaginative tale about a girl, her family, and her imaginary friends. It is not really a graphic novel but more of an illustrated early reader story. The loose but expressive pencil illustrations really impressed me with how much personality you could get in such a simple drawing. 

What sets this apart is the anything-goes/freewheeling stream-of-consciousness telling of her story, which takes you from one outlandish scene to another as Dory makes her way through her day. However, this book also has lots of heart and love in the family.  

This well-researched and in-depth account has been translated from French and discusses the various occult movements which inspired the art and ideas of the surrealists. It covers a diverse range of topics including divination, astrology, myth, voodoo, Gnosticism, freemasonry, alchemy, secret societies, and Celticism and shows how various artists and writers took inspiration from these systems. The book contains a selection of images, copious notes, a substantial bibliography, and a good index making this an indispensable research tool for aspiring scholars of surrealism and the occult.  

I wasn’t following professional cycling in the bad old days of systematic doping, but this book made me feel like I was there—not just at the roadside, but in the peloton.

The characters—the good, the bad, and the downright repulsive, are all caught in a system that grinds down the best and brings out the worst, and I couldn’t look away. I wanted integrity to prevail, I wanted justice done, but most of all, I wanted to know what happened next.

Then there’s the prose, which is so bright and vivid that I found a new favourite line in almost every chapter. It’s compulsive, stylish, and cynical—rather like the sport itself.

Best known as a surrealist painter, Carrington is one of my favourite artists for her strange, half-dreamy figures and other-worldly paintings. Her written work is similarly disturbing: animals that tear their own faces off, monsters, and the dead populate these short but memorable stories. Surrealism can often be wearing in print, but Carrington is a writer who balances the bizarre with the unsettling perfectly.

My first introduction to the surreal in art was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. My first introduction to the art movement of surrealism was seeing Max Ernst’s "Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale". I was astounded that you were allowed to do that. Then I discovered Magritte (and later Escher) and saw that the anarchy of surrealism could be put to the most profound use, that of exploring life beyond the material. Magritte uses conventional representation to undermine that very convention and puncture so-called reality in a way that is a joy to look at. This is a decent book on his life and work. Magritte reminds us things are not what they seem… and that’s a good thing.

This comic is a 1:1 dream story. It has the weirdness and absurdity of dreams. It is about Juliet herself and is an autobiographical classic. And it made me wonder how very personal feelings in your dreams are actually universal. It also has feministic potential, being very honest with all its dreamy gender chaos and strangeness. And it’s funny.

The stories that appear in this book were first published in Lilliput in the 1940s, a British monthly magazine. They relate the perilous, often diabolical activities of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club, a society devoted to playing games that no one else would dream of attempting. Engelbrecht is a diminutive boxer who fights clocks, zombies, witches, and other assorted horrors and marvels, and he generally wins because of pluck combined with luck. Richardson’s prose style here is a blend of gothic horror, period science fiction, and the wisecracking of Damon Runyan, and the reader can expect no respite from the tumult of ideas, images, situations, jokes, and subversion of clichés.