Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 1

Born from the belly of a giantess in a storm of earthquakes and fireworks, Gargantua arrives already shouting for wine. This is not a children's tale of gentle giants, but a Renaissance grenade lobbed at the medieval mind. Rabelais spent five books exploding every sacred cow he encountered: corrupt clergy, pedantic scholars, warmongering kings and the absurd pretensions of power itself. Book One traces Gargantua's impossible infancy and education, following his father Grangousier from jolly appetites to battle against the encroaching Picrochole's armies. But beneath the belly laughs and six-hundred-word sentences about defecation lies something revolutionary: a defense of humanist learning, a vision of the body as glorious rather than shameful, and an argument that joy might be the most serious pursuit of all. Rabelais invents the modern novel here, in more ways than one, and his influence stretches from Joyce to Monty Python. Read it if you believe books should make you laugh, think, and occasionally blush.