Crowdsourced List of Funny Books

Someone asked me at dinner the other day for a book recommendation—a funny book recommendation. It was difficult to think of any right away! Although I laugh while reading many books, I haven’t read many books that I would characterize as comedies. So I turned to Facebook with the question, “What’s the funniest book you’ve ever read?” I received quite a variety in the results! I have gathered them all here for convenience. (Note: I have not read most of these.)

• Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615).
• Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (essay, 1729).
• Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749).
• Voltaire, Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759).
• Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1836).
• Edgar Allen Poe, «Never Bet the Devil Your Head» (1841).
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).
• Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (1889).
• Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (play, 1895).
• P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), generally recommended.
  • Psmith, Journalist (1915).
  • Leave it to Psmith (1923).
  • Summer Moonshine (1937).
  • World of Mr. Mulliner (1972).
• O. Henry, «Ransom of the Red Chief» (1910).
• Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928).
• Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (1938).
• Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954).
• W.E. Bowman, The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956).
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961).
• Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961).
• Michael Green, The Art of Course Acting (1964).
• David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down (1965).
• Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979).
• John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980).
• Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (comic strip, 1985-1995).
• Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (1990).
• Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1992).
• Dave Barry, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys (1995).
• David Foster Wallace, «Shipping Out» (1996). Reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), or available here: https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf
• Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997).
• David Sedaris, general recommendation. Best known for his essay collection Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000).
• Augusten Burroughs (1965-present), general recommendation. Best known for his memoir Running with Scissors (2002).
• Chuck Klosterman, essays. Best known for his essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (2003).
• Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (2004).
• Michael Perry, Off Main Street (2005), especially «Rock Slide!», a story about kidney stones.
• Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka (2005).
• Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006).
• David Wong, John Dies at the End (2007).
• Christopher Moore, Fool (2009).
• Justin Halpern, S███ My Dad Says (2010).
• Tina Fey, Bossypants (2011).

I also want to add Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift and «Revelation» by Flannery O’Connor. Happy reading!

Eugénie Grandet: My first Balzac novel

Reading Honoré de Balzac, I asked myself the same question I asked upon reading George Eliot, “How is it that no one ever recommended this author to me?” Balzac is one of the great 19^th century French authors, considered one of the founders of literary realism, and known for his series of over 90 works called The Human Comedy (La Comédie Humaine). The works in this collection (mostly novels) are divided into sequences which focus on a specific sphere of French life, such his “Scenes of private life” or his “Scenes of Parisian life”. The volume I just completed, Eugénie Grandet, falls into his “Scenes of provincial life”. Upon learning this, I was instantly reminded of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which bears the subtitle A Study of Provincial Life.

Mrs. Dalloway: My first Woolf novel

Overall, I did not care for Mrs. Dalloway. First of all, I was surprised by the way it was written, not having read anything about Woolf’s fiction before now. After reading for some time, I noticed that I hadn’t quite taken in what was going on, and one minute we were watching Clarissa prepare for a party, and then without pause, we were watching Septimus and his Italian wife, and there was so much apparent nonsense in between. What was I reading? I had enjoyed A Room of One’s Own (a prose work of Virginia Woolf) but Mrs. Dalloway had none of that work’s clarity or ease. I considered quitting after 30 pages, but a voice encouraged me to continue.

What made the book thoroughly unenjoyable was the meaninglessness of it all and the general unlikableness of any of the characters (with a few exceptions). These are the same reasons why I found The Trial by Kafka or Buddenbrooks by Mann thoroughly unpleasant (again, with a few exceptions). Perhaps one might say that there is much meaning and cleverness in the work if one takes the time to tease it out, but whereas I have a divine guarantee that I will find some fruit in the difficult words of Leviticus or Zechariah, I have no such assurance from Virginia Woolf, and so I do not anticipate returning to the work, at least not until someone has helped me see more clearly what she is trying to do.

Lyrics or Poetry? (Driving thoughts)

Is there a difference between lyrics and poems? Listening to music in the car lately, I have paid greater attention to the words to try and make a determination.

Overview of 2017 Reading

Back in April, I started my Classics Challenge—a plan to read 50 classic works over the course of 5 years—but that was not the start of my reading for the year. Here is a quick overview of the books I finished in 2017.

The author that stands out this year is George Eliot. Having discovered Middlemarch in 2016 and loving it, I continued to read George Eliot throughout 2017:

• Mill on the Floss
• The Lifted Veil
• Daniel Deronda
• Romola
• Felix Holt, The Radical

Apart from The Lifted Veil, I could recommend any of these excellent novels. Middlemarch remains my favorite Eliot novel, but Daniel Deronda and Romola are not far behind. In addition to those books by George Eliot, I read 11 other novels in 2017.

Some of these were excellent:

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Some of them were quite good:

• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
• The Unbearable Light of Being by Milan Kundera
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazan

Some were good, but not as enjoyable as I had hoped:

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric

And there were a couple that I did not care for at all:

• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
• The Trial by Franz Kafka

Toward the end of 2016, a classmate started a Shakespeare reading group which gave me occasion to read Henry VI, Parts 1-3 and Richard III, as well as the Sonnets. This group continued into 2017 where we read Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1-2, and Henry V. Apart from these plays and poems of Shakespeare, I also read the classic Metamorphoses of Ovid and the modern Rosmersholm of Henrik Ibsen.

The most momentous event of the year for me was certainly ordination to the priesthood on June 24^th, and with this came further reading about the saints and the liturgy. I read the Letters of St. Cyprian, the Lausaic History (about the desert fathers), biographies of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Dominic, Bl. John Henry Newman (both by himself and by another), and a handful of saints canonized in 1881. In the last month of the summer, having said Mass every day for a couple months, I wanted to read more about its history and how the prayers came to be as they are, and found the excellent Organic Development of the Liturgy by Alcuin Reid and Voice of the Church at Prayer by Uwe Michael Lang. Continuing my canon law studies, I have read all sorts of articles and books (in whole and in part) that I won’t list here. All the reading in canon law spurred my interest in other legal works, and so I read Cicero’s Republic and Laws, a huge chunk of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, and the Qur’an.

This last month, I have almost exclusively read about the history of canon law, especially in the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic tradition. With Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather in my carry-on, I expect to read more literature as 2018 begins!