100 Books Like A Book of Silence

Isabelle Eberhardt was born in 1877. She was “a crossdresser and sensualist, an experienced drug taker and a transgressor of boundaries”. Born in Switzerland, she crossed the Sahara Desert on horseback dressed as a male marabout, driven by a hunger for nomadic adventures, and for love. Isabelle’s evocative diaries are intense, beautifully written, self-centred and dramatic, occasionally very funny. She fell madly in love with the Sahara, was accused of being a spy, married a young Algerian soldier, and drowned in a desert flash flood at the age of 27. This book is about a short life that burned radiantly and the desiccated landscape that mirrored her intensity.

This is through and through simply a gorgeous little book.

I enjoyed rereading it for this article. The largest body of fresh water on earth is Lake Baikal, not far east of Irkutsk in Siberia.

(If you’ve never heard of Baikal, that’s a measure of the variety of wonders to be found in the high north. Baikal holds so much water because it’s so deep: the world’s deepest at more than 5300 feet). If you ever have the opportunity you must visit.

My wife and I have traveled together a good bit, and I don’t feel we’re cloistered in any way, but to turn up in the ramshackle town of Listvyanka, Russia, at the beginning of this century, and then to charter a small boat to cross Baikal made me feel, I don’t know, maybe like Dorothy in the Emerald City.

I was just a total alien in a place… show more.

In 1991, Mariusz Wilk, a Polish journalist long fascinated by the mysteries of the Russian soul, moved to the Solovki islands, a lonely archipelago amidst the far northern shores of Russia’s White Sea. He lived on one of these islands for seven years, and came to know every single one of its thousand residents. His sparse, heartfelt account of these islands that are dominated by the powerful interwoven forces of religion, politics, and the Arctic, is unconventional, and well worth the challenge. He pierces beneath the skin and the ice of this remote community and slowly begins to unravel the complexities and contradictions of Russia’s history and her landscapes.

This book is a ‘gold standard’ piece of investigative journalism, a travelogue about a people I will probably never meet, rolled into the intriguing history of a unique city.

The book interweaves the tale of the efforts local people made to save priceless manuscripts from al-Qaida in 2012 with the West’s fascination of fabled Timbuktu since the 18th century.

It is an un-put-downable example of creative non-fiction at its most interesting and easily readable.

This witty, quirky, ever-escalating modern classic celebrates burgeoning creativity and rubs out the criticism of others and our own self-doubt! A joyous squiggle of a story with the eponymous Pencil as a hero. How often does our own creativity – especially when we are little – begin with a single pencil line?

Hope Farm moved me so much because it conveys the bitter-sweetness of being thirteen, being privy to adults who make terrible choices, and having to adapt to the consequences of those choices. It is about parents who join cults (in this case, a hippy one) and the effects of this on their children. Peggy Frew has such a seductive and captivating way of engrossing the reader in the story through her stunning prose.  

I read Olivia Laing’s book at the height of my own loneliness: isolated, in lockdown, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part memoir, part art history, part cultural criticism, the book managed to be both intimate and expansive—just what I needed as I sat by myself in front of a computer, anxiously refreshing virus graphs.

I became absorbed by the lives of Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, artists I’d heard of but knew nothing about, and by the various aspects of loneliness I’d never previously considered. It’s the perfect example of the type of hybrid writing that I find truly magical.

Boot and Shoe are siblings and best pals. They live together in the same house and do everything together, but they are each in charge of opposite porches: Boot can be found guarding the back porch, while Shoe takes care of the front porch. Until one day, when a squirrel ran amok around their house and turned everything upside down. Now, where is Boot? And where is Shoe? And can they find each other again? You can’t help but be fully invested in these two adorable doggie characters. 

In a list about vegetables, I couldn’t resist including one book about fruit, simply because I love it so much. Various fruits take turns being celebrated in rhyme, but as one increasingly gloomy orange realizes, it cannot be included, because, well, it’s in the title. This is a book parents love every bit as much as the kids, and reading it aloud 10,000 times just made me love it more. It will make any meal or snack involving fruit more fun. (Our family still quotes a particularly memorable line every time we eat kiwi.) There are some references that go over kids’ heads, but the book is so funny and well-written that mine never cared. Have fun, and plan on stocking the fruit bowl.

I picked up a copy of this book at a time in my life when I was feeling less than, left out, and lonely. After experiencing the sting of multiple rejections, I had forgotten who I was—a person of incredible value.

But I was encouraged as I read Lysa TerKeurst’s story of being abandoned by her father, which resulted in a deep sense of rejection, and how she was able to heal by embracing her identity as a dearly loved child of God.

Lysa’s personal narrative was interwoven with practical advice in such a caring way that I felt like I was having coffee with a dear friend.

If you are struggling with your sense of belonging, I highly recommend this book.