Books like 'Grunt'
Readers who enjoyed Grunt by Mary Roach also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 5 Volume 9 by Miya Kazuki, 香月 美夜
Rated: 4.60 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe Battle of Gerlach begins at last. Together with Matthias, Rozemyne must defeat the cold-blooded giebe Grausam—but an unexpected development makes that easier said than done. Body doubles, collateral damage, even more dark plots transpiring in the shadows.. -
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Rated: 4.27 of 5 stars · 78 ratingsThe story takes the form of a series of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, a junior "tempter" named Wormwood, so as to advise him on methods of securing the damnation of a British man, known only as "the Patient".Screwtape holds an administrative post in the bureaucracy ("Lowerarchy") of Hell, and acts as a mentor to Wormwood, the inexperienced tempter... -
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 62 ratingsLibrarian note: Alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal... -
Extinction by Thomas Bernhard
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe last work of fiction by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Extinction is widely considered Thomas Bernhard’s magnum opus. Franz-Josef Murau—the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family—lives in Rome in self-imposed exile, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends... -
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Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsStark lives in Colour, a neighbourhood whose inhabitants like to be co-ordinated with their surroundings – a neighbourhood where spangly purple trousers are admired by the walls of buildings as you pass them. Close by is Sound, where you mustn’t make any, apart from one designated hour a day when you can scream your lungs raw... -
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsPart love story, part utopian fantasy, part spiritual fable, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You is "a beautiful, symbolic journey of the soul" (Berkeley Monthly). Into the world of the Ata comes a desperate man, running from a fast life of fame and fortune, drugs and crime. He is led by the kin of Ata on a spiritual journey that, sooner or later, we all must take... -
Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAs two pals wander the streets of Belfast in search of something better--a better pint, a better job, a better woman, a better now--readers are treated to their hilarious misadventures, political intrigues, and outlandish schemes... -
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kästner
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsGoing to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . -
The Alienist by Machado de Assis
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA classic work of literature by “the greatest author ever produced in Latin America.” (Susan Sontag) Brilliant physician Simão Bacamarte sacrifices a prestigious career to return home and dedicate himself to the budding field of psychology. Bacamarte opens the first asylum in Brazil hoping to crown himself and his hometown with “imperishable laurels... -
सुम्निमा [Sumnima] by Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, विश्वेश्वरप्रसाद कोइराला
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsSumnima a famous Nepali novel by B P Koirala, a former Prime Minister of Nepal is about the painful complications that arise in a man-woman relationship. The story is about the powerful attraction that exists between a Brahmin boy and an ordinary girl... -
Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 68 ratingsWhen Alice steps through a mirror, she enters a reflection of her world where backwards is forwards, the future is remembered, and only the opposite of logic makes sense. Increasingly befuddled, she's challenged by the belligerent Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the nonsense rhymes of the Jabberwocky, and the discovery that she's a pawn in a living game of chess... -
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratings'What! to come here a stranger, a young, unknown, and unfriended stranger, and tell us, in the name of the bishop his master, that we are ignorant of our duties, old-fashioned, and useless!' Trollope's comic masterpiece of plotting and backstabbing opens as the Bishop of Barchester lies on his deathbed... -
Forrest Gump by Winston Groom
Rated: 3.98 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsMeet Forrest Gump, the lovable, herculean, and surprisingly savvy hero of this remarkable comic odyssey. After accidentally becoming the star of University of Alabama's football team, Forrest goes on to become a Vietnam War hero, a world-class Ping-Pong player, a villainous wrestler, and a business tycoon -- as he wonders with childlike wisdom at the insanity all around him... -
The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFollowing A Boy's Own Story (now a classic of American fiction) and his richly acclaimed The Beautiful Room Is Empty, here is the eagerly awaited final volume of Edmund White's groundbreaking autobiographical trilogy... -
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Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsUniversally recognized as a landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry scandalized readers when it was first published, causing Sinclair Lewis to be "invited" to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia... -
Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFamily tumult and nationwide social unrest converge to shake the world of 12-year-old orphan Peejoe Bullis in the summer of 1965, "when everybody went crazy in Alabama... -
Anima Rising by Christopher Moore
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFrom New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore comes a hilariously deranged tale of a mad scientist, a famous painter, and an undead woman’s electrifying journey of self-discovery.Vienna, 1911. Gustav Klimt, the most famous painter in the Austrian Empire, the darling of Viennese society, spots a woman’s nude body in the Danube canal...Categorized as:
humor fantasy fiction historical-fiction audiobook historical comedy magical-realism -
The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe Horse's Mouth, the third and most celebrated volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, is perhaps the finest novel ever written about an artist. Its painter hero, the charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson, has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction... -
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsAcademics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world—even those daunted by Moby-Dick—Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever... -
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsAnd indeed Mr. Briggs seemed very much interested. He wanted to hear all about everything she had been doing from the moment she got there... -
Wild Children by Richard Roberts
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsBad children are punished. Be bad, a child is told, and you’ll be turned into an animal, marked with your crime.The Wild Children are forever young, but that, too, can be a curse.Five children each tell a different story of what they became:One learns that wrong can be right, and her curse may be a blessing.Another is so Wild he must learn the simplest lesson, to love someone else... -
Swann in Love by Marcel Proust
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe newest translation of the classic of French literature From the text: But at the age Swann was approaching, where one is already a little disillusioned and where he knows to be content at being in love simply for the pleasure of it, without demanding too much in return, this coming together of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one's youth, the goal that love, by necessity, tends... -
The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsA brilliantly crafted novel about one man's betrayal of his talent, his friends, and his principles-a work of demon energy, startling imagery, and utter originality. At fifty-six, Anatoly Sukhanov has everything a man could want. Nearly twenty-five years ago, he traded his precarious existence as a brilliant underground artist for the perks and comforts of a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik... -
An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch
Rated: 3.80 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA scintillating novel of fate, accidents, and moral dilemmasSet in the time of the Vietnam War, this story concerns the plight of a young American, happily installed in a perfect job in England, engaged to a wonderful girl, who is suddenly drafted to a war he disapproves of... -
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Titmuss Regained by John Mortimer
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss has clawed his way up the Tory government ranks and is now Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (H.E.A.P.), and in pursuit of beautiful widow Jenny Sidonia. But seismic changes are afoot in the beautiful countryside where a new town threatens to engulf his own back garden... -
زنان فوقالعاده by Barbara Pym
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 25 ratingsExcellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of ”the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,” helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work... -
Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy
Rated: 3.81 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin... -
Thuggin In Miami (The Family Is Made : Part 1) by R.A. Robinson
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsAfter the death of his father, Rich Kid takes his destructive, malicious, and loyal team of hustlers, known amongst them-selves as The Family, to the next level of thuggin. Using his relationships within the drug distribution realm, Richard catapults his growing empire, taking down anyone who stands in his way... -
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAugie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” It’s the “Call me Ishmael” of mid-20th-century American fiction. (For the record, Bellow was born in Canada... -
King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratings'Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest', Nabokov wrote of King, Queen, Knave. Comic, sensual and cerebral, it dramatizes an Oedipal love triangle, a tragi-comedy of husband, wife and lover, through Dreyer the rich businessman, his ripe-lipped ad mercenary wife Martha, and their bespectacled nephew Franz... -
The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsManfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adele Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis... -
Tauben, Die Den Mambo Tanzen by C.D. Payne
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratings"Jonathan Livingston Seagull as imagined by the Marx brothers." That's one take on Frisco Pigeon Mambo, an uproarious new comic novel by C.D. Payne, author of the cult classic Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp.When a flock of alcohol and tobacco addicted lab pigeons are liberated in San Francisco, our feathered heroes turn the whole city topsy-turvy... -
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsGerald Middleton is a sixty-year-old self-proclaimed failure. Worse than that, he’s "a failure with a conscience." As a young man, he was involved in an archaeological dig that turned up an obscene idol in the coffin of a seventh-century bishop and scandalized a generation... -
The Painter of Signs by R.K. Narayan
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsFor Raman the sign painter, life is a familiar and satisfying routine. A man of simple, rational ways, he lives with his pious aunt and prides himself on his creative work. But all that changes when he meets Daisy, a thrillingly independent young woman who wishes to bring birth control to the area... -
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Don Juan by Lord Byron
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsProbably few subjects fitted Byron's particular talents better than Don Juan.In this rambling, exuberant, conversational poem, the travels of Don Juan are used as a vehicle for some of the most lively and acute commentaries on human societies and behaviour in the language... -
Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth
Rated: 3.76 of 5 stars · 23 ratingsIn this outrageously farcical adventure, hero George Giles sets out to conquer the terrible Wescac computer system that threatens to destroy his community in this brilliant "fantasy of theology, sociology, and sex" (Time)... -
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer
Rated: 3.64 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsLibrarian note: Alternative cover edition of ISBN 0140021663"The Pumpkin Eater "is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist's couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention... -
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Rated: 3.73 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsShe was a schoolmistress with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic, her ideas were progressive, even shocking. And when she decided to transform a group of young girls under her tutelage into the creme de la creme of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have predicted the outcome... -
Party Going by Henry Green
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA group of rich, spoiled and idle young people heading off on a winter holiday are stranded at a railway station when their train is delayed by thick, enclosing fog. Party Going describes their four-hour wait in a London railway hotel where they shelter from the grim weather and the throngs of workers on the platform below...Categorized as:
humor fiction classics 20th-century literary-fiction historical-fiction historical male-author -
Ulysses by James Joyce
Rated: 3.74 of 5 stars · 65 ratingsIn the past, Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and even unreadable. None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful... -
Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics by Anonymous, Joe Klein
Rated: 3.61 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA brilliant and penetrating look behind the scenes of modern American politics, Primary Colors is a funny, wise, and dramatic story with characters and events that resemble some familiar, real-life figures... -
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Rated: 3.65 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsProsperous and socially prominent, George Babbitt appears to have everything a man could wish: good health, a fine family, and a profitable business in a booming Midwestern city. But the middle-aged real estate agent is shaken from his self-satisfaction by a growing restlessness with the limitations of his life... -
Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick
Rated: 3.58 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsThe Glimmung wants Joe Fernwright. Fernwright is a pot-healer - a repairer of ceramics - in a drably utilitarian future where such skills have little value. And the Glimmung? The Glimmung is a being that looks something like a gyroscope, something like a teenaged girl, and something like the contents of an ocean. What's more, it may be divine... -
Loving by Henry Green
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War... -
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The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Heine
Rated: 3.43 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsE. M. Forster once described The Longest Journey as the book "I am most glad to have written." An introspective novel of manners at once comic and tragic, it tells of a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent... -
The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs
Rated: 3.42 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsIn Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo... -
Closing Time by Joseph Heller
Rated: 3.05 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsRevisiting many of the characters of Catch-22, Joseph Heller's Closing Time is a darkly funny depiction of the moral collapse of the Western world. It features ageing versions of Yossarian, Milo and Sammy Singer and others fighting not the Germans, but The End...
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