"A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole

Jonathan Swift wrote that "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece that outswifts Swift, whose poem gives the book its title.

This is a praised classic and a Pulitzer Prize winner that are on many people's reading list. It ought to be a pleasant and interesting read!

Goodreads sells the book like:
``Here is Ignatius Reilly: slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one, who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective.

His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote's, its own eerie logic.

His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex.

Ignatius is an intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt, and one-man war against everybody: Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times.

A tragicomedy, set in New Orleans.``

The hardcover book is some 352 pages and the unabridged audiobook (published by Blackstone Audiobooks) is thirteen hours and thirty-two minutes.