100 Books Like Blindspot

I’ve always been fascinated by the “dreaming spires” of Oxford University and enjoy Gaudy Night because it immerses me in the world of a (fictional) women’s college set in 1930s Oxford.

As a former professor, I’m intrigued by the internecine political and personal battles in the Senior Common Room (SCR), or college faculty lounge, as well as the friction between those professors devoted entirely to an academic career versus those trying to maintain the challenging balance of work and family, the same issues women struggle with today, nearly one hundred years later.

Sayers weaves together these tensions with a mysterious “poltergeist” who torments the college with poison-pen letters, pranks, vandalism, and violence into a compelling mystery under the dreaming spires.

My grandmother had this novel on her bookshelf, which is why I read it the first time, but I’ve read it over and over. This is my favorite classic love story that is not really enemies to lovers, but still has lots of emotion and conflict.

I love it because of the conflict and for its educational value in teaching about the French Revolution.

I began to write my own series in response to Jo Beverley’s Mallorens. These novels are set in Georgian England with its Barons, Dukes and their gambling, their rakes, and their strict inheritance laws and traditions. I invented those same rakish sons of dukes, but made them the third and fourth sons – the ones barely mentioned in classic British historical romances. I put these adventurous men on merchant vessels, and in the red uniform of the British army. Then I sent them across the Atlantic to fight a war for the King and have their adventures in America. I regret that Ms. Beverley died before I had a chance to talk to her about our connection, but her books have been a great inspiration. 

Many writers use dramatic openings to bring you into a book, and Ms. Beverely gets behind you and kicks you in. It has been very… show more.

Detectives Sarah Kelling and her much-loved husband Max Bittersohn live in her inherited house on Beacon Hill, Boston. These are detective novels of the cozy and charming sort, and because of the relationship between Sarah and Max are adventure romances as well.

Sarah has a large extended family and they enter into all the books as friends. This makes each one a friend and fun to read. MacCleod knows Boston and her descriptions of the habits and haunts of classic Beacon Brahmins/Yankees are as charming and rich as her plots. I recommend this and her other books for the fun of reading and the great plots.

Easily one of my favorite epic fantasies I’ve read in recent years. The complexity of Gillian’s world is a highlight, yet she still makes the story and those within it accessible for her readers. It felt deep, not cluttered. She writes distinctly and with heart from three different points of view. I couldn’t flip pages fast enough, anxious for the moment these three story threads would intersect. It was more than worth the wait. 

Anne Berest embarks on a detective journey after an anonymous postcard arrives at her family home listing the names of her maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz. Anne and her mother are determined to find out who sent the postcard and why. For sixteen years, Anne pursues her quest to uncover the sender’s identity and her family’s hidden past while grappling with her own identity—what it means to be Jewish and how she embodies the legacy of her murdered family members. 

Although Berest wrote her family’s Holocaust history as a novel, she describes it as a ‘true novel.’ She changed the name of the village where family members were arrested in order to protect the people living there now. She also changed the names of perpetrators to protect descendants who did not get to choose their parents but had to… show more.

How is a person like a novel? Both, at their core, are made of stories. Both, at their core, are the way in which various stories are imagined to hang together. But the nexus of stories at the core of a person is written in the brain (wordlessness), which is always in flux, changeable, and incomplete, forever before words and on the verge of being totally lost.

The nexus of stories at the core of a novel, on the other hand, is written in nothing other than words; as such, it makes manifest a disembodied, complete (i.e., fictive) person—a person invulnerable to death. A novel is what a person is forever wanting to turn into.  

This is probably the first book I ever read that made me think of the American Revolution as an event in global history.

I was mesmerized by how Maya Jasanoff gives voice to the Loyalists—the people American history usually forgets—as they faced uncertain futures as exiles in the remnants of the British empire after 1783.

And Maya writes like I want to write, absorbing readers in the human messiness of loss, loyalty, and belonging. I love how she connects intimate, personal stories to the vast sweep of empire, turning difficult work in dozens of dusty archives into living, breathing drama. 

Patenaude focuses just on the Mexican period, from January 1937 to August 1940, of Trotsky’s exile, although the previous stages of his exile — Kazakhstan in 1928, then Turkey for four years, France for another three, followed by interment in Norway — are dealt with in a series of flashbacks. In fact, the whole book is written as if Trotsky in Coyoacán were recalling his past, from his prosperous farmer’s boyhood to his underground militancy, his Civil War military brilliance, and his blundering incompetence as a Bolshevik power-broker. The danger that Patenaude flirts with is to let Trotsky’s charisma and undoubted genius charm him into overlooking his subject’s monstrous indifference to the suffering and deaths of others, sometimes even of those close to him, as well as his overweening conceit.

By dealing with the last phase of the tragedy, nemesis, Trotsky is seen to pay in fear, resignation, failure, and… show more.

If you only ever read one Palestinian memoirist, it should be Fawaz Turki.

He published three book-length memoirs, all excellent, but this is his most comprehensive autobiography and as such the must-read of all his works. It covers his early years in Haifa, his family’s displacement to Lebanon in 1948, and his subsequent adolescence in Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp; as well as his later studies and career in the US.

Exile’s Return is organized around his first return visit to Palestine in the 1990s, where he comes face-to-face with the realities of the Israeli occupation and continuing Palestinian dispossession. There are now many brilliant memoirs and autobiographies by Palestinian refugees, but Turki remains the memoirist par excellence in this genre.