100 Books Like A Bell for Adano

I’m a huge fan of satire, as I believe it can inform and make you think critically, as well as being wildly entertaining.

I think Catch-22 is one of the most perfect satires about the absurdity and tragedy of war. I’m not the fastest reader, but Heller’s dialogue, humor, and sharp observations of the human condition under the perversion of war had me turning the pages quickly. 

My son’s a young adult now, but I treasure the memories of the hours we spent reading together. We went down all the well-trodden paths and shared countless joyful hours with J.K. Rowling and Dav Pilkey and The Mysterious Benedict Society, but the creativity of this book is exceeded only by its humor. Also, it clocks in at around 700 pages, so it’ll entertain you and your children for a good while. I always enjoy a laugh as a reader, and if my work elicits a chuckle from you, then I feel my mission is complete.

This notorious 1969 Roth novel is a monologue of a self-loathing and sexually repressed Jewish man to his psychologist.

He recounts in excruciating detail his efforts to escape his parents’ interference in his life and his lifelong obsession with bedding a "shiksa" (non-Jewish woman). Portnoy’s rants are brilliant, vulgar, and entertaining – though the cultural references are dated and female readers might become incensed at the demeaning descriptions of “Monkey” (the shiksa he finally beds).

In a story I wrote, a man facetiously asks his female friend whether Carrie Bradshaw’s neuroticism and sexual dalliances would make her the “female Portnoy.” Both are insightful, emotionally needy, and charming characters. Behind this novel’s sexual humor is a complex portrait of a man trapped by his own obsessions.

I’m both inspired and depressed by this book. Yes, the book itself is on the depressing side, but what truly saddens me about it is that I’ll never write as well as Richard Yates. He packs so much into this 57,000-word work that it almost defies logic. Still, he’s an inspiration as a writer, and I will always use him as a guidepost. No one’s ever going to confuse me with Michael Jordan, either, but I’m still going to shoot hoops (poorly) in my driveway.

Lawrence Block has written, I don’t know, 33,000 books? That’s inspiration alone. But in Keller, the mononymous title character of Hit Man and star of numerous short stories, he compels readers to root for someone who’s not exactly committing good deeds. I find that intriguing, and Chapel Fox, the antihero of my story within a story, travels down a similar road. You’ll find yourself cheering him on. You shouldn’t.

Living off and on in Italy for more than twenty years, I’ve been struck by Italians’ ambivalence toward Americans. On the one hand, they credit us with liberating them from Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. On the other hand, they blame us for the harm that the preferred US strategy—aerial bombardment—caused to civilians and the sometimes high-handed and racist policies of the Allied occupation.

I was fascinated to find this deep ambivalence captured so well in Hayes’s novel, ostensibly a love story of a lonely US soldier and a destitute Italian woman displaced to Rome by the bombing of her native Genoa. As someone who teaches about gender and war, I appreciated the author’s subtle treatment of the power imbalances between two characters representing the victorious and vanquished countries.

Like the Catch-22 character, Yossarian, Burns spent part of his time as a soldier censoring prisoner-of-war letters. His own prose was considered transgressive for its time. What struck me was not only his subject matter—who else wrote in 1944 about drunken, gay American GIs hanging out in seedy dives in occupied Naples?—but also his tone.

He pulled no punches in depicting the fraught relations and power differentials between occupiers and occupied, not to mention the resentment of the ordinary soldiers toward their superiors. Still, he captured the resilience of the Neapolitans with evocative depictions of street life, and I especially liked his ear for everyday speech—across a range of social classes among both the Americans and the Italians.

As a historian of the Allied bombing of Italy, I read a lot of depressing accounts of the suffering of Italian civilians. It was a relief to discover that fellow historian Erik Linklater, author of the official British history of the Italian campaign, had published a comic novel based on his wartime experiences.

Its hero is Private Angelo, the reluctant soldier who issues forth such gems as: “It has taken us a long time to lose the war, but thank heaven we have lost it at last, and there is no use in denying it.”  Linklater doesn’t hide the war’s devastating toll or sugarcoat the occupation itself. “We are very grateful to you for coming to liberate us,” he has Angelo tell the Americans, “but I hope you will not find it necessary to liberate us out of existence.”

Michael Ondaatje’s novel is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. It is not a study or analysis of Herodotus’ history, and yet Herodotus’ spirit infuses virtually every page. Taking place during World War II, it explores the intertwined lives of four characters, including the unnamed English patient, who has survived the shooting-down of his plane, although he is severely burned.

He has nothing with him but his annotated copy of Herodotus’ Histories. I loved Anthony Minghella’s 1996 film adaptation of the novel, and it is no criticism of the film to say that it treats only one of the many strands one finds in the book. Meditating on space, time, identity, and truth, The English Patient is a book that I think Herodotus would have loved.

This summer I visited Fort Davis, Texas and learned about the “buffalo” soldiers who were stationed there in the 1860s.

This was the nickname for African-American soldiers, who were separate regiments in the U.S. Army. McBride’s novel deals with a “buffalo” regiment but is set in World War II in Italy. I did not know anything about the experiences of African-American soldiers in World War II.

What I really loved about this book was the unlikely situations that a small group of African-American soldiers find themselves in a tiny village in Italy, under siege from the Germans. Despite the differences in culture and language, the soldiers find refuge and friendship with an Italian peasant, who is raising rabbits under the floorboards of his ramshackle cabin.

One of their pals saves a disturbed Italian orphan and the small group of soldiers, separated from their regiment, get sidetracked by this humanitarian mission… show more.