Five books that changed Andy Griffiths

Andy Griffiths is one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors. Over the last 20 years his books have been New York Times bestsellers, adapted for the stage and television and won more than 50 Australian children’s choice awards.

One of five books that changed him, as shared at the Sydney Morning Herald:

METAMORPHOSIS
Franz Kafka

This is the first line of Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." This is the first line of The Day My Bum Went Psycho: 'Zack Freeman woke out of a deep sleep to see his bum perched on the ledge of his bedroom window." Coincidence? Or clumsily bowdlerised homage? Obviously the latter, but the utterly matter-of-fact way Kafka relates the extraordinarily surreal dilemma of Gregor Samsa hit me like a freight train as a teenager and, later, gave me a big clue about how to write humour.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Metamorphosis is among Jason Diamond's fifty most essential works of Jewish fiction and Thomas Bloor's top ten tales of metamorphosis; Avi Steinberg says it is one of six books every prison should stock.

--Marshal Zeringue