Top ten comic war novels

Jesse Armstrong is the co-creator and writer of the BAFTA Award-winning Peep Show, as well as co-writer of The Thick of It and the Oscar-nominated In the Loop. Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals is his first novel.

At the Guardian, Armstrong tagged his top ten comic war novels, including:

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut noted that nothing good had come from the terrible destruction of the allied firebombing of Dresden, which he survived in a meat cellar. It didn’t shorten the war by a day, or free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited: “Me, I got several dollars for each person killed. Imagine.” The firebombing is the central event and concern of the novel, but Vonnegut’s view from early on is that there is really not much to say about a massacre. So the firebombing is something of a black hole at the centre of the book – hardly visible, but swirling the whole crazy circus of alien zoos and time travel around its gravitational pull.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Slaughterhouse-Five also made Joel Cunningham's top five list of short but deep novels, Tom Lamont's top ten list of time travelers, Melissa Albert's list of six favorite fictional book nerds, Jon Ronson's five top list of books on madness, Charlie Yu's top ten list of time travel books, John Mullan's list of ten of the best aliens in science fiction, Charlie Jane Anders and Michael Ann Dobbs's list of twelve great stories to help you to cope with mortality, Sebastian Beaumont's top 10 list of books about psychological journeys, and Tiffany Murray's top ten list of black comedies.

--Marshal Zeringue