10 Fictional Books I’d Love to Read

If you can tell me the actual works of fiction in which all of these appear, you win the Internet! No Google!

This is old news, but apart from the seven books of the Harry Potter series, one can buy J. K. Rowling’s versions of certain among Harry’s textbooks and library books. Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard are all available for purchase or for borrowing on my bookshelf. Although I can’t say that they’re books I’d choose to take with me on a desert island, they’re nevertheless entertaining, and I certainly don’t begrudge Ms. Rowling making money for charity.

And yet, I can’t help but find them disappointing. Not because of the writing or the ideas or the illustrations, but because in the moment when you read the title of any book, you start to imagine what it might be like. Great authors working on their masterpieces can make you forget your expectations by completely surpassing them; another kind of great author can fulfill your expectations to the last detail. But when I read the title of a book that doesn’t exist — a title mentioned carelessly as one of the protagonist’s school textbooks or a tome a main character comes across or the work of a writer within the story — my imagination goes into overdrive precisely because there is no chance I’ll ever get to read it. I can imagine it being as amazing as I like because there’s no reality ready to dash my dreams to pieces.

So maybe I should have titled this entry “10 Fictional Books I’d Love to Read, As Long As I Never Have the Chance of Actually Doing So.”

1.The Magician’s Book. If this isn’t the first one that came to mind, then pfui to you, you clearly uncultured cretin! What could be more tempting to the bibliophile than a book described as the most refreshing story ever… and then deliberately not described by the narrator, except to drop a few tantalizing hints, like it involves a cup, sword, tree, and a green hill? On the other hand, based on the way this author rolls, the entire text could turn out to be just a metaphor for and/or the New Testament, so I guess that could be kind of disappointing.

2. the Peter Jenkins series. Specifically, the installment titled Peter Jenkins and the Magic Golfer. Yeah, okay, an author whom I like very much is evidently having a gentle go at Harry Potter with this obscure fictional fiction series in which every book is titled Peter Jenkins and…, but come on. Even if the protagonist didn’t like the Peter Jenkins books so much, this author is so good that it’s hard to believe bad fantasy novels could exist even in her made-up worlds. Heck, I’d read this author’s work about a real golfer, let alone a magic one.

3. Hamster Huey and Gooey Kablooie. What can I say? With a title like that, who wouldn’t want to check out this fictional picture book? It sounds like Hamster Huey could at least give the Cat in the Hat a run for his money. (Edited to add: And I don’t mean the version someone unrelated to the original author of the container series actually wrote. As I mentioned above, the whole point of wanting to read fictional books is wanting to read the versions that are as good as the ideas of them you have in your head.)

4. the Fillory series. Evidently, I took the real book in which this fictional series appears the wrong way, because that whole story is about deconstructing Narnia-esque books like these. My first reaction, on the other hand, was to dismiss the actual plot of the book in which the Fillory series appears and be all, “OMG! If only these books were real and I could read them RIGHT NOW!” But I think what I’d really secretly be hoping for with this fictional series is being able to recapture how it felt to read the Chronicles of Narnia for the very first time, not knowing what would happen next or being able to recite the next five paragraphs by heart — the magic of discovering them for the first time.

5. Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Good To Know. Another rather obscure one, from a rather obscure source (that I nevertheless highly recommend), but I think the title is self-explanatory. Perhaps I wouldn’t love to read this, if the title is true, but it would still be interesting to see what else is inside.

6. The Neverending Story. Well, I hope it’s obvious what story this fictional book is from. I don’t think I’d go for the whole getting-sucked-into-a-magical-country part, mainly because that’s the part that brings on the Life Lessons in droves. But it would be neat to read a book that has a story that shapes itself based on its reader’s own personal fantasies and feelings. I was about to write, “And it would be awesome to have just one book that told every story you’d be interested in,” but I don’t know about that. I don’t like it when awesome books are over, but I love finishing them. And it seems to me that the worst parts of a lot of stories don’t like happened because the author(s) just couldn’t stop writing/producing/directing once the good stuff was over. I guess I could always stop reading.

7. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As far as I can tell, this is the Internet with the stupid and useless parts taken out and lots of cool new stuff about aliens added in. And who doesn’t love the Internet when it’s not stupid and useless?

8. On Secret Writings. This, if I recall correctly, is actually a monograph, and it’s singular on this list because I’d want to read it based solely on the identity of the fictional author. In fact, I’d want to read all this fictional author’s monographs, but this one seemed like the coolest. Now, I suppose by the conventions of stories, I actually have read some of this fictional character’s writing, and it was pretty awful, but I have high hopes that when he’s writing about something he actually cares about — something non-fiction besides — the quality of his work would be much higher.

9. Mr. Bunnsy Has An Adventure. I just… how could I resist? In her column Constant Reader, Dorothy Parker once famously reviewed Winnie the Pooh using the phrase, “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.” What I mean to express by this is that there’s a certain sort of book that a certain sort of person (i.e. me) enjoys expressly for the opportunities for the expression of cynicism that they afford. Based both on the title of the book and on the real-life author in whose work this book appears, I can’t help but feel that my efforts would be rewarded in the same. (Just for the record, I do like A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books, and not for that reason.)

10. The Affair of the Second Goldfish. This novel is one among many purportedly written by the real author’s fictional avatar. And the real author is so much fun to read that I don’t see why the work of her self-insertion self would be any less enjoyable. Besides, both authors write mysteries, but the fictional one is actually friends with a super-famous-awesome-eccentric detective and has helped to solve some cases herself. So you’d think her mysteries would be even more fun, given how much more inspiring her life is.