Roz Chast's reading list

Roz Chast, a staff cartoonist at The New Yorker, has come up a short list of favorite books for The Week magazine.

Here is half of her list:

Stern by Bruce Jay Friedman

Perhaps the most hilarious book I’ve ever read. A blackly, bleakly comic novel about the adventures—“plight” might be a better word—of a suburban everyman. Friedman has been compared to Philip Roth—they both mine a certain vein of Jewish humor—but Friedman is more idiosyncratic and definitely more surreal.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

A deeply scary but compelling novel about a charming, amoral sociopath named Tom Ripley whose sexual confusion is the very least of his “issues.” A beautiful book about envy, money, power, sex, and murder.

The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P.D. Ouspensky

A philosophical novel that asks whether we are perhaps destined to live this life over and over until we get it right—which is why we sometimes get the feeling that we have been here before.

Click here to read about the other three titles.

Roz Chast's most recent book, Theories of Everything, is a compilation of her work from the last three decades.

--Marshal Zeringue