33 books like Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing

I’ve been assigning this book to students for a few years now, introducing them to the ways that Americans dueled with one another over slaveholding and Black citizenship.

In 1779, British privateers attacked a few South Carolina plantations and took thirty-four enslaved people away (or maybe they went willingly in search of freedom). After a series of adventures, the men and women arrived in Revolutionary Massachusetts, and their enslavers wanted them back. The resulting dispute foreshadowed the debate over slavery that hides in the heart of the United States Constitution.

Because it’s not too long, I think this book is a great way to introduce students to slavery in the North and South. Blanck shows how Black people pushed back against the compromises that tried to box them in.

This book opened my eyes to indigenous Americans’ experience of the Revolutionary War. Heavy on detail, it’s not for the faint of heart. Each chapter focuses on one North American community at a time, from various spots on the map, and shows the many different ways that Native people responded to the upheavals of the American Revolution.

Calloway went on to write several other great books, and other authors have since expanded our understanding of Native peoples’ history, but this was my first, and it’s a great place to start. 

What do we know about the Revolution, and why do we think we know it? Sometimes, even canonical events we think we know are not nearly as well-documented as we might think, like the Boston Tea Party.

This book is about history and memory, the gap between what happened when colonists threw the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, and how that event was remembered decades later. Drawing on the as-told-to-reminiscences of Tea Party participant George Robert Twelve Hewes, which were written down over half a century after the Tea Party took place, Young plumbs the gap between the “destruction of the tea,” as the event was known at the time, and the “Boston Tea Party,” a name which only emerged in the 19th century as Americans reimagining that revolt into the story of how America was made. 

Young shows us that accounts like Hewes’s had as much to… show more.

I couldn’t put down the story of Isabel, a fictional Black teenager who lived through the American Revolution in New York City.

The book covers everything from the assassination plot against George Washington to the fire that burned much of the city in September 1776, along with the everyday injustices of eighteenth-century slavery. The book gives the reader a true feel for the Black experience in Revolutionary New York.

Each chapter starts with an excerpt from a real Revolutionary document. It’s geared at young adult readers, but this is not your grandmother’s Johnny Tremain. I loved this book and the remainder of the trilogy that followed it.

I’m troubled by the way young people today seem to live their lives glued to smartphone and computer screens.

M. T. Anderson gives us a hint of what this might lead to in Feed. It’s one of the scariest books I've read in many years. The six teenagers partying in this novel live in a world of constant distractions. Fashions may change by the hour.

A powerful future version of Virtual Reality allows them to experience novelty and excitement at any time without special equipment—and without pausing for reflection.

And that’s how they live, closed off from life in the real world. As I said, scary.

City of Glass: The Graphic Novel is the adaptation of a Paul Auster novella about a man who receives a call meant for a private investigator and is pulled into an existential mystery. I’ve long been a fan of film noir and the mystery genre, and I like how this adaptation handles these themes in more unusual and modern ways, as well as Paul Karasik’s thoughtful page layouts. The Great Gatsby also has many noir themes which I tried to hint at in places, although I resisted going full-out noir, since that wouldn’t have been appropriate for the book. 

I was unprepared for this book’s unrelenting pace, as it provides some of the most on-the-nose and funny skewering of our present era that I’ve read to date, via alien invasion and our coping strategy of viewing reality as a show. Anderson wields short chapters and surprising reveals in his last sentences as atypical, but effective, literary weapons. His framing of the whole work as a series of images, through chapter titles that read like illustrations, is brilliant and a quite literal representation of figurative language. Each time we’re reminded that this is a story about television, about fiction, about the comfortable lies we tell ourselves, the words strike a familiar beat, like a cinematic score reprising a theme. 

In this short story collection, SFWA Grand Master Nalo Hopkinson gives us heaps of imagery to roll around in with delight and horror. Calling a snowflake “six-clawed” or relating a tree’s memory of how it “felt to unfurl your leaves to the bright taste of the sun” all add to the mood-heavy stories of a teenager overcome by her desires after swallowing a cherry pit, children who must survive their parents’ frightening transformations, and more. Through all the tales, humanity shines through, our rough edges and our beautiful scars. And the characters themselves play with language to pass the time.

I studied the literature of the Harlem Renaissance in college, and the rhythmic power and cadence of so many great works of that time still influence me: the deep bass throughline of Claude McKay’s Banjo; the fiery, relentless push of truth in James Baldwin’s essays and novels. Zora Neale Hurston imbued her allegories and anthropological studies of the era with literary devices that made them smooth to read and easy to slide under your skin. Just the repetition of mountain in Moses, Man of the Mountain, is enough to reveal the power of the simplest literary devices. And her expert use of alliteration makes this a beautiful, boisterous, and emboldening read.

This classic middle grade fantasy tale is what first taught me an appreciation of figurative language and lyricism in writing. It revolves around a young courtesan tasked to provide a definitive definition of delicious to resolve a court dispute. He asks many people throughout the land, which yields answers such as “a cold leg of chicken eaten in an orchard early in the morning in April when you have a friend to share it” or “a drink of cool water when you’re very, very thirsty.” At an early age, those descriptions made clear to me the power of making comparisons that evoke memory and mood. It also heavily influences my food and drink reviews to this day!