100 books like Wonder Boys

The reason I chose this book is simple. It was the first one to show me the first-person way.

I read this book in high school around 1973 and it stayed with me all these years. This dark side of adolescence skillfully narrated by the introverted Gene is as real today for me as it was when I was a prep school kid reading it.

Gene remembers some fifteen years earlier as he comes back to visit, and tells this story under the guise of a quintessential American story, though as he says “a very untypical one, I guess, and unfamiliar transitional blur in the memories of most people, which is the real America for me.” Every first-person story I’ve tried to write since has had a little bit of Gene in it. 

Start with the classic, this legendary British satire about cloistered college life and the darker side of the academic way of life. The story of a hapless lecturer in medieval history trying to secure his job (and get his dream girl), the book works for me on every level: it’s funny, it’s insightful, it can be scathing, and it manages to simultaneously value this strange way of life (what can be stranger than dedicating your life to study within the bubble of the academy?) while also skewering its foibles and flaws. Come for the comedy; stay for the insight and skewering. As an academic myself, this book hits very close to home.

Gentlemen and Players is a boarding house story with a dark heart. I picked this one from an aunt’s bookshelf and read it expecting something of the sweetness of Chocolat, but found a far more satisfying story, with twisting questions of identity, class, and revenge. I liked the clever split narrative, which used chess imagery, and the mystery of the Black Pawn, whose identity is deftly concealed until the close of the book. This is a surprising psychological thriller that would make a great book club pick, and I will not forget the rooftop chase nor that bonfire night.

I read this book during my school days, which we are often told are the best of our lives. I enjoyed school, overall, but did encounter more than my fair share of bullies and vindictive teachers. Reading in the school library became my favourite escape, and I devoured this book in one lengthy sitting. I was fascinated and appalled in equal measure by secret society The Vandals, who made the kids at my school look like rank amateurs! After reading this book, the reader is left shell-shocked and wondering if it’s better to comply or to ‘disturb the universe’ as Cormier provocatively puts it.

In 1927, Sinclair Lewis struck with Elmer Gantry, a richly researched and powerful satirical indictment of religious hypocrisy whose eponymous central character is an amoral preacher enthralled by his power in the pulpit and by the allure of a beautiful female evangelist, Sharon Falconer.

The Short and Incredibly Happy Life of Riley is a book that, well, the first time I read it my mind was blown. This is a self-help book for all humans in a picture book. It takes our thirst to live forever, to always want more, be more, see more, do more, look better, and compares that with the wonderful Riley, who is happy with some fruit and maybe a couple of slugs on Tuesday or Friday.

He likes a little stick that can scratch his back.
He looks like Riley. Why would he want to look like anything else?

This is a beautifully written and illustrated book on being grateful for what we have.

First published in 1959, Naked Lunch was shocking then, and it still retains its power today. Both in content and structure, Naked Lunch is powerful and wholly original.  In effect, it becomes more than a work of fiction, it becomes an experience. Burroughs invented a technique called the “cut-up method,” where he cut up his coherent storyline into paragraphs, scenes, and even sentences, then reordered them both randomly and editorially. The disorder thematically represents the chaos of existence and the universe, and it also disrupts the reader. Like the book or not, it shakes you into realizing that there are possibilities beyond the conventional.

Burrough’s language is honed to a razor’s edge, and I find that many of the sentences in Naked Lunch burn like fire. The meaning of the title as Burroughs explains it is to bare the naked truth of reality on the end of a fork. From… show more.

An angel and a demon work together to stop the antichrist from destroying the world. Simple enough. But things get off to a rocky start when they spend the first eleven years monitoring the wrong child.

I initially read this book on vacation, and while I don’t remember much about the trip itself, I remember the book! An otherwise-normal pre-teen with the power to shape reality takes this story to appropriate (and absurd) extremes, but at its core, it’s a narrative about good and evil, human nature, and free will—and it approaches these themes with sincerity, nuance, and care.

Come for the laughs, stay for the laughs…and for the profound reflection on humanity.

In the most elegant piss-take on the travel writing genre ever crafted, Swift’s hero traverses lands impossibly strange and, well, just impossible, giving satire a whole new modus operandus: expanding the cosmos!

Whenever I start to feel blue about living in an era that seems to underrate imaginativeness – especially in literature, I go back to Swift, who always reminds me that there is a path veering toward the limitless, and that path will never disappear. 

I could easily have all five of my picks be novels by Sinclair Lewis. I'll stop at two.

In George Babbitt, Lewis's titular lead, we have a character whose very name became synonymous with conformity. What I absolutely love about this book has a lot to do with the bold plot choices Lewis takes with Babbitt. I write this knowing that many critics did not like the book because, they complained, there really wasn't a plot! (Cripes, what book were they reading?)

These plot turns include his dalliances with socialism (which runs counter to his position as the city of Zenith's most successful realtor) and a socialist woman.