Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver’s Travels
Patrick De Witt - Ablutions
Douglas Coupland - JPod
Sue Townsend - Adrian Mole: From Minor to Major
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Seconding Catch 22 and Lucky Jim
Also So The Wind Won’t Blow It All Away by Brautigan, very beautiful and bleak at points but the bit where he’s interviewing the hamburger chef practically had me on the floor laughing. Also any of the memories of the fat fishing couple who brought their entire lounge to the lake kept getting funnier every time he went back to it.
Donleavy lives up the road from my family home! He’s in his nineties and pretty eccentric. Johnny Depp visited him years ago to talk about making a movie of The Ginger Man but nothing ever came of it