Books like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman — picked by fans

This story has remained one of my most favorite of all time.

While teaching English at a community college, I assigned this book to my students. Its tale, about a young Andalusian, Santiago, who leaves home to seek his destiny, changed my students’ lives and mine.

Together, we grew to appreciate that the best teacher is personal experience. We identified how travel teaches lessons, such as using caution judiciously and the necessity to work hard to achieve goals.

We also discussed how travel provides opportunities to develop skills like learning new languages and raises awareness about other people’s customs and perspectives. 

This book was an integral resource when I began to write my book. It helped me shape the structure of my book.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”

This, and other books I've read, did this. My favorite books of all time have inventive structures. And reading these helped me find mine.

I find that Frankenstein transcends eras by posing critical questions about the ways we develop and use new technology.

I first read a comic-book version in elementary school and have returned to Shelly’s novel over the years because it stimulates my critical thinking about technology, particularly the current rise of AI and our response to it. Frankenstein raises a fundamental ethical question about technology in real life: just because humans can create something, should they actually create it?

For me, the novel also creates the opportunity to explore questions about how we engage technology once we choose to invent it. Dr. Frankenstein abandons his creation, and the creature becomes an angry monster. I ask myself, is this an allegory for our own response to technology?

Before I was an author, I was primarily a national magazine copy editor, a job I finally scored after eight years of climbing up the magazine journalism ladder.

I wrote once in a while, but this mostly meant TV recaps by the time I was entrenched in magazines. But one day, an article about a safe-driving activist crossed my desk, and soon I was speaking with him in high schools.

Around the time I checked off “swim the width of a river” from my father’s bucket list, I also read Huckleberry Finn, as the setting seemed only right. I wrote a tribute to it in the second chapter of my book. My dad’s favorite author was Twain, but what I appreciated about him was that he wrote the novel as veiled propaganda. It’s a book that professes Twain’s anti-racism perspective. He just put his cause into a novel.

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I find this to be the perfect book about an artist’s coming of age in a different time and place. Thea, a young woman living long ago on the American prairie, is discovered to have musical genius. She nurtured, pushed, and even loved while everyone around her knew that her destiny lay out in the wider world, onstage. 

To be fair, I read this book on a summer holiday in Cinque Terre, Italy, which perhaps made the experience even more dreamy and lush.

This is a modern love story that celebrates the desire of its female protagonist, and makes no apologies for her ability to take what she wants - in the form of her current romantic partner’s father. The story contains nuance and delicacy, and talks about relationships with honesty and vulnerability.

There is an undercurrent of grief here, as well, which bonds our lovers, and makes the lightness of the romance that much deeper.

What comfort library would be complete without Emily Henry?

I’ll read anything she writes, but Poppy and Alex’s love story is the stuff of my dreams. Friends to lovers, split timelines, and more yearning than I know what to do with Seamlessly blending humour and heart and set between Palm Springs, New York, Italy, and somewhere in the sedate American midwest, You and Me on Vacation was the antidote to my mid-lockdown claustrophobia.

I like to read my fluff on the treadmill – it keeps my brain more occupied than music or podcasts, so I’m less likely to remember how much I hate working out – and it was so delicious I found myself looking forward to time at the gym. A true feat.

This beautifully written novel showed me what life must have been like on the island of Orkney in the Dark Ages and trapped me in a gripping, almost ‘other-world’ coming-of-age tale.

Full of fascinating descriptive details and wise human insight, the story tells of the developing, sometimes tender, sometimes aggressive, relationship between two homeless adolescents in a very dangerous adult environment.

Ah, these juvenile narrators: they think they know it all. Lucille Odem has it all figured out. She can fix her broken family and heal her parent’s broken hearts—because of course she can. For me, the pleasure of a great young adult narrator is watching as even the smartest of these smarty pants comes to learn that we all have blind spots and that it’s often the things we can’t see or don’t know that are the most important part of the equation. What a sweet book this is.  

Waylaid is a bawdy coming-of-age novel about a Chinese American teenage boy working in his parents’ seedy motel – a vibrating bed kind of place – in New Jersey.

He broods about how to lose his virginity. He learns about the adult world from the patrons: Johns, sex workers, the families kicked out of their homes, and the rest of the down and out of American life. I gravitated to Waylaid because it isn’t wholesome yet doesn’t fall into the spirals of toxicity of a Bukowski poem.

It speaks to how sex is used to distract us from the working-class problems all around us, many of which our young are well aware of, but still holds onto this little flame of hope that even in such dark and down-and-out spots, we can find light.