Satire Bucket List

A St Petersburg copying clerk saves for months for a new coat and is robbed of it on the first night he wears it.

A con man is sentenced to run the post office, against a semaphore monopoly.

An island rises between two nations and both immediately claim it.

A man reads the Confucian histories and finds the words "eat people" written between every line; the first story in modern vernacular Chinese.

Granny and Nanny at the Ankh-Morpork opera house; the Phantom, rewritten.

The last Discworld novel: Tiffany inherits a role she is not ready for, and the elves return.

Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter Thompson of the future, against the City; Warren Ellis.

Enid and Rebecca after high school in a suburb of nowhere; Clowes' teenage bible.

A human raised by Martians comes to Earth and starts a church; grok.

A dead man narrates his pointless life with digressions; Machado's 1881 modernism.

A Bangalore driver murders his master and explains why in letters to the Chinese premier; Adiga's Booker.

A 36-year-old who is only normal behind a till; Murata's deadpan bestseller.

Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia and fights a virus in the Metaverse; the word comes from here.

A Muslim party wins the French presidency in 2022; Houellebecq published it the day of Charlie Hebdo.

Earth is demolished for a bypass; 42 and a towel.

A god reduced to a tortoise and the one boy who believes; the Discworld book to start with.

Yossarian wants out of the war but only the sane ask, and asking proves you are sane; Heller's loop.

An idiot, or a genius, in the Austro-Hungarian army; the funniest book about a war.

Ice-nine, a fake religion and the end of the world in a Caribbean republic; Vonnegut at his funniest.

A professor of Hitler studies, an airborne toxic event and the fear of death; DeLillo's comedy.

A nature columnist sent by mistake to cover an African war; Waugh's Fleet Street satire.

A thirty-year-old is dragged back to school; Gombrowicz's grotesque about immaturity.

Ignatius J. Reilly, hot-dog vendor and medievalist, against New Orleans; published eleven years after the author's suicide.

The pigs take over the farm; all animals are equal, but some more than others.

Alexander Portnoy tells his analyst everything; the novel that scandalised 1969.

A 999-line poem and the mad commentary of the man who stole it; Nabokov's puzzle novel.

Oedipa Maas and a secret postal system; Pynchon in 150 pages.

Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time between Dresden and Tralfamadore; so it goes.

A tennis academy, a halfway house and a film so entertaining it kills; 1,079 pages and 388 endnotes.

Lilliput, Brobdingnag and the horses who are wiser than men; Swift's satire dressed as travel.