The Satyricon by Petronius is one of the funniest books ever written, and also, probably the first novel we have that still exists (although some of it is missing)
Brave New World is also hilarious and a classic. 90 years old now? It's still a great read.
Childhood's End is fun... Ringworld and Dune and Hyperion. Yeah.
Lloyd deMause with his books on psychohistory, or the idea that psychology and history are intertwined and that more archaic societies were defined by their childhood traumas. A fun read, sort of like Julian Jaynes (who wrote about bicameralism, or ancient schizophrenic consciousness).
The classics, of course. The greek philosophers and plays, the roman rhetoric and satire, the middle age epics/myths (beowulf, the sagas, song of roland, le morte d'arthur, tristan and iseult, gargantua and pantagruel, piers the ploughman, dante, 1001 nights, don quixote), then renaissance pieces (erasmus, chaucer, moliere, voltaire, rousseau, kant, hume, goethe), and industrial age stuff (priestly, flaubert, mdme de stael, defoe), err... modern stuff? the dystopian stuff, tolkein... some scifi... what i mentioned above.
the tale of genji is good too
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