When I read it, I was 11 or 12 years old and I thought this time-shifting idea was just so funny. I remember laughing through the whole thing without a whole lot of sense of who Mark Twain was. It's a fun way to think about history.

The best book ever written about New Orleans.

A hilarious satire about college life and high-class manners, this is a classic of postwar English literature.

Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954.

This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the audience through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.

More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh.

As Christopher Hitchens wrote, “If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.”

I don't know who shoved this book in my hand. It was written before I was born. It's about the rise of this con man in Canada—a street-smart kid who ends up wrapping the world around his finger. I don't remember very much about the book except it hurt to read it because I was laughing so hard.

George Plimpton's follow-up to Paper Lion. I read it when I was 11.