Samuel Butler
4 books
- You'll come for the strange country where being sick is a crime and stealing gets you sympathy, and stay for the Book of the Machines, which reads like someone worrying about AI in 1872. Fair warning, it's more essay than adventure, but the ideas keep biting.
- You get a sharper, more openly political return to Erewhon, where John Higgs discovers his youthful adventure has hardened into the Sunchild religion. It’s drier and less strange than the first book, but Butler’s mockery of institutions, reformers, and organized belief still lands with a lovely sting.
- If you enjoy watching a pompous Puritan knight lose an argument to his own squire (and a fight to a bear-baiting crowd), the rhymes alone will keep you grinning. Fair warning, the 1660s in-jokes get thick, so it rewards patience and a good footnoted edition.
- You watch Ernest Pontifex struggle out from under his father Theobald’s pious cruelty, in a novel that skewers Victorian family life with dry, patient humor. It takes its time and occasionally wanders, but its anger at hypocrisy gradually opens into something humane and oddly liberating.