Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book I

This is the book that broke the rules so future books could exist. François Rabelais tells the story of Gargantua, a giant born from his mother's ear and raised on quantities of milk that would drown a village. What follows is a wildly inventive narrative of his education, his wars, and his absurdly heroic appetite for life itself. But beneath the endless jokes, the scatological explosions, and the thousand-page lists of invented insults, there's a serious satirical fury aimed at the education, religion, and politics of Renaissance France. Rabelais celebrates the body, the appetite, the earthy and physical existence that emerging bourgeois morality wanted to repress. It's crude, violent, and absolutely unafraid. The giants are Rabelais's argument that humans can be larger than the small lives they're told to live.