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Funny books

Austen and Voltaire make comedy out of people who are certain they are right: in «Pride and Prejudice», a quick-witted woman and a proud man keep misreading each other, while Candide's tutor insists this is the best of all possible worlds and the story keeps testing the claim. Both are funny in a dry, exacting way, and both leave you noticing how often your own confidence rests on very little. If you like laughing at self-deception rather than at slapstick, these two are a good place to start.

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A man reframes his self-interest as an act of atonement.

Having now a good house and a very sufficient income, he intended to marry; and in seeking a reconciliation with the Longbourn family he had a wife in view, as he meant to choose one of the daughters, if he found them as handsome and amiable as they were represented by common report. This was his plan of amends—of atonement—for inheriting their father’s estate; and he thought it an excellent one, full of eligibility and suitableness, and excessively generous and disinterested on his own part.
— Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813)

  1. Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen, 1813

    A sharp-eyed comedy about money, manners and misjudgment, in which a quick-witted woman and a proud man keep being wrong about each other. Funnier and more cutting than its reputation suggests.

  2. Emma

    Jane Austen, 1815

    A clever, rich, bored young woman decides to arrange her neighbours' love lives, and gets nearly everything wrong. Austen's funniest, most merciless book about self-knowledge.

  6. Ulysses

    James Joyce, 1922

    One Dublin day in 1904, followed through two men's minds — an ad-canvasser and a young writer — with every joke, smell and stray thought left in.

  7. Candide

    Voltaire, 1759

    A sweet-natured young man is told this is the best of all possible worlds, then sent across it to test the claim. Short, fast, savagely funny, and still aimed at our comforting ideas.

  24. Moby Dick

    Herman Melville, 1851

    A sea story that keeps stopping to joke, lecture on whales, and stare into the abyss, led by a captain who has turned grief into a single, ruinous purpose.

A taste of the feed

  1. Every honest confession leaves something out, and it rarely matters.

    Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material.—Mr. Knightley could not impute to Emma a more relenting heart than she possessed, or a heart more disposed to accept of his.

    Emma · Jane Austen

  2. What it sounds like when someone loves you and you can't believe it.

    Ἔχει τηλέφωνο στὴν κρεβατοκάμαρά μου». Ἔτσι λοιπὸν ἀνεβήκαμε ἐπάνω. Σᾶς διαβεβαιώνω πὼς ἡ συμπεριφορὰ τῆς Λίλι δὲν εἶχε τίποτα τὸ πρόστυχο ἢ τὸ χυδαῖο. Ὅταν ξεντύθηκε, ἄρχισε νὰ μιλάει μὲ τρεμάμενη φωνή: «Σ‘ ἀγαπῶ! Σ‘ ἀγαπῶ!» Κι ἐγὼ εἶπα ἀπὸ μέσα μου καθὼς ἀγκαλιαστήκαμε: «Πῶς εἶναι δυνατὸν ν’ ἀγαπάει ἐμένα – ἐμένα, ἐμένα;» Ἀκούστηκε ἕνα κουβάρι ἀπὸ μπουμπουνητὰ κι ὕστερα ξέσπασε δυνατὴ βροχὴ μὲ ἀστραπὲς ποὺ μαστίγωνε τοὺς δρόμους, τὰ δέντρα, τὶς στέγες καὶ τὰ παντζούρια. Τὰ πάντα ἄστραφταν.

    Χέντερσον, ο Βασιλιάς της Βροχής · Saul Bellow

  3. Being starved by someone who calls it love.

    The more my wrong, the more his spite appears: What, did he marry me to famish me? Beggars, that come unto my father’s door, Upon entreaty have a present aims; If not, elsewhere they meet with charity: But I, who never knew how to entreat, Nor never needed that I should entreat, Am starved for meat, giddy for lack of sleep, With oaths kept waking and with brawling fed: And that which spites me more than all these wants, He does it under name of perfect love; As who should say, if I should sleep or eat, ’Twere deadly sickness or else present death.

    The Taming of the Shrew · William Shakespeare

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