Candide by Voltaire. Short, insightful and funny.

have you worked your way thru Dickens or Dostoevsky or Hardy? They're mostly winners. (I'd start with †he Idiot for Dostoevsky)

Fiction:

"Stand on Zanzibar", by John Brunner. This novel made me incapable of reading for about three months, after I was done with it. Dense as hell, full of ideas, and written in 1968, way ahead of its time in every way. (Except for the formatting, which was intentionally stolen from Dos Passos).

Non-fiction:

"Last Chance to See", by Douglas Adams. A wander around the world, looking at endangered animals, extremely well written, and with (of course) wit.

And, of course, anything at all by Jack Vance.

As we seem to have similar taste, I'll just throw out the old standards:

Any Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Murakami.

Mao II, Whitenoise, and Underworld (or at least it's first chapter) by DeLillo.

JR and The Recognitions by Gaddis.

Lost in the Funhouse and The End of the Road by Barth.

Pale Fire by Nabokov.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera

Focault's Pendulum by Eco.

Under the Volcano by Lowry.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.

Master and Margarita by Bulgakov.

The Mezzanine by Baker.

House of Leaves by Danielewski.

Well that's a good decade's worth of reading... And, apologies for the all Y-chromosome list.

If you go with Vollmann, I’d recommend starting with You Bright and Risen Angels, even though, like most of his books, it’s on the long side, and mightn’t be the most efficient use of your reading time. Also, one of the books I’m reading now: Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper strikes me as a young man’s book, and while I’m enjoying it very much even so, I think my fifteen-years-ago self would have loved it even more. And maybe try some of Victor Pelevin’s books, such as Omon Ra or The Life of Insects.

Jeff Vandermeer. Start with City of Saints and Madmen, then move on to the fabulous Veniss Underground. And then you can wait for his new novel, Shriek; an Afterword.

Yay for Jack Vance!

On the subject of the SJC reading list, I find myself going back to Tacitus a fair bit. You might want to check him out if you haven't already.

Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler
The Gro Vont Trilogy (Skipped Parts, Sorrow Floats and Social Blunders) - Tim Sandlin
Bad Haircut, The Wishbones and Little Children - Tom Perrotta
Union Dues - John Sayles
Ladies Man, The Wanderers, and The Breaks - Richard Price

too many big thick doorstops.

Slim little book with a powerful kick: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Slim little book with poverty and humor: Tortilla Flats by John Steinbeck

Big book with comics and humor: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Big book about a sprawling family that I enjoyed much more than 100 Years of Solitude: Bellefleurby Joyce Carol Oates

Slim little book about a very humorous sprawling family: The Hills at Home by Nancy Clark

oh noes: i wasn't clear at all. i actually prefer the long form; i just wasn't getting through as much as i'd like.
thanks for los suggestions, compadres.

Long books with short, discrete chapters work well for me in my schedule, and right now I'm reading more non-fiction than fiction. (Right now I'm reading Herodotus's The Histories, which is flying by.)

The other two long non-fiction works on my 2006 reading list are:

--Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, available in a two-volume set from The Library of America. I suggest ordering the books straight from them at www.loa.org, as I had a hell of a time getting them from Amazon (I eventually had to cancel my order of one of the two volumes). They're technically in print, but not readily obtained, except from the publisher.

--Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I've started this twice and had to put it down for other things both times. I have the lovely three-volume Allen Lane hardcover edition, some of the most beautiful books I own, but unless I actually read them they're going to waste. This is the year when I buckle down and do it.

Also, if you haven't already read them, check out William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru. The Modern Library used to print hardcovers of these, which you may still be able to find--if not, I'm sure that at least the Mexico book is available in paperback. Prescott's book on Mexico, in particular, reads like an adventure story.

You're obviously into humorous writing, so you may want to check out Mark Leyner. I'd recommend Et Tu, Babe.

i read et tu, babe back in college and strongly disliked it. the joke just didn't seem to get any funnier as the book went on.

Second Parkman's histories. My dad has been pestering me to read them for years, and now that I'm doing it I'm sorry I waited so long.