77 Books Like Cathedral

For whatever reason, I have always been interested in sad men. Successful men can be boring. It is failure, and how men manage it when success is the primary marker of masculinity, that I find interesting as a subject for fiction. Even when I was in my 20s, I liked reading novels about men suffering mid-life crisis. And now that I am squarely in middle age, novels that were about the future are now novels about the present.    

I’m a Korean American author who believes life is too short to read books that bore you, classics or otherwise. I’ve always had eclectic tastes and like to pick out books the way customers choose bonbons at my chocolate shop (which I’ve co-owned since 1984). And while I do read and often write longer works, I’ve always preferred to fall into a world from the opening line and bow out soon thereafter. By nature, I’m a minimalist – and maybe don’t have the greatest attention span – so I’m in awe of short works that stand on their own. They’re just more dramatic and memorable to me.

I’m a Korean American author who believes life is too short to read books that bore you, classics or otherwise. I’ve always had eclectic tastes and like to pick out books the way customers choose bonbons at my chocolate shop (which I’ve co-owned since 1984). And while I do read and often write longer works, I’ve always preferred to fall into a world from the opening line and bow out soon thereafter. By nature, I’m a minimalist – and maybe don’t have the greatest attention span – so I’m in awe of short works that stand on their own. They’re just more dramatic and memorable to me.

I’m a Korean American author who believes life is too short to read books that bore you, classics or otherwise. I’ve always had eclectic tastes and like to pick out books the way customers choose bonbons at my chocolate shop (which I’ve co-owned since 1984). And while I do read and often write longer works, I’ve always preferred to fall into a world from the opening line and bow out soon thereafter. By nature, I’m a minimalist – and maybe don’t have the greatest attention span – so I’m in awe of short works that stand on their own. They’re just more dramatic and memorable to me.

As a creative writer, I think it is important for me to put myself into the bodies and minds of people, unlike myself, and imagine how they move about in the world. In my book, I write about Blind Tom, a person from the nineteenth century who has little in common with me. However, there are some affinities and connections between Tom and myself. Although I am not blind, I suffer from a disability. Also, I like writing about music and musicians. I chose to write about Tom in part because he was a great musician who has never received the proper credit he deserves from musicologists and historians.

Known for my sweet billionaire romance novels, I am a purveyor of book boyfriends and happy endings. I absolutely love romance stories as you know exactly what you’re in for when you pick them up. You know there will be a Happily Ever After no matter how dire things get at any given point in the story so you can really just sit back and enjoy the ride. As an author I always write epilogues and I’ve built up a growing universe where characters pop in and out of each other’s books. It’s my happy place and as an author I love sharing that world with others.

I first read about Helen Keller when I was in 4th grade. When I took swimming, I had two classmates who were blind like Stevie Wonder because they had been born premature and placed in oxygen-enriched incubators. I became curious about what it was like to live in a dark world. I walked around my house and neighborhood with my eyes closed, learning my way around. I gave a book report to my class about Helen Keller’s autobiography, and my classmates became excited about her, too. I learned to read braille, and proofread books for the blind when I was in junior high. I also learned the deaf sign language hand positions.

I first read about Helen Keller when I was in 4th grade. When I took swimming, I had two classmates who were blind like Stevie Wonder because they had been born premature and placed in oxygen-enriched incubators. I became curious about what it was like to live in a dark world. I walked around my house and neighborhood with my eyes closed, learning my way around. I gave a book report to my class about Helen Keller’s autobiography, and my classmates became excited about her, too. I learned to read braille, and proofread books for the blind when I was in junior high. I also learned the deaf sign language hand positions.

Thanks to a degenerative retinal eye disease, I’ve lived on pretty much every notch of the sight-blindness continuum. While going blind super slowly I’ve engaged with the science of seeing and not-seeing as an  academic and artist for about 25 years. I like to say that there are as many ways of being blind as there are of being sighted, there are just fewer of us. Besides teaching literature and humanities courses at NYU, I’ve lectured on art, accessibility, technology, and disability at universities and institutions around the country. I love sharing stories about the brain on blindness, and hope you find my recommendations as fascinating as I do.

I’ve read everything I could lay my hands on since I was young, and like so many others, I’ve always preferred to read about unusual characters, uncommon situations, or both simultaneously. The books I described here fulfill those requirements for me, even though they are superficially very different from one another. Now that I write my own novels, my over-arching goal is for each of my books to be better than the one that precedes it. I do my best to offer my readers interesting characters in compelling situations, and if my readers think I’ve succeeded, I will be a very happy author.