100 Books Like Dr. Feelgood

This book grabbed my attention from the beginning and had me locked in. It was written with so much detail that I felt there was no way the characters were made up. The main characters, Nate and Monica Kenny go through the toughest times after they marry. They quickly face challenges centered around miscarriages and premature menopause that make Nate’s long-time dream of becoming a father impossible.

I love how the story takes many twists and turns and introduces new characters like bad boy, low-income earning barber, Lewis, and adds him into the world of the rich and happy Nate and Monica. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Regina Everette has never been a risk taker. She has always gone with the flow and done what everyone else wanted her to do. I admired the author’s work, especially how she described in great detail how this need-to-please mentality took over Regina’s life.

One day, she decided to risk it all and step out on faith, leaving her comfort zone behind. During this turning point, I couldn’t get enough of the new Regina and how she went from a people-pleaser to an independent woman, no longer depending on her husband, mother, and friends.

It was inspiring to read about a woman getting out of her own way and living out her dreams. She left her husband, stood up to her mother and friends, quit her job, and opened up her own bookstore. She even met a new man along the way. This book inspired… show more.

I grew more and more anxious to read this book each day. The drama in this page-turner was a great escape from the stresses of a long day at the office. I couldn’t get enough of Dominic Jones, a married man who spends his free time in the arms of his mistress, Tera Larou.

He’s consumed by greed and more concerned with his next fix than tending to the needs of his wife, Donna Jones. No amount of money is enough, and neither is the traditional life of having one woman. I enjoyed getting to know Donna and witnessing how she dealt with discovering her husband’s cheating ways, insecurities about her weight, and accepting that her dreams of becoming a famous choreographer may never come true. 

This is one of those books that you never want to end. I was hooked from the very beginning when I was introduced to Regina and Larry. They had what outsiders would call the perfect marriage until Larry started getting his needs satisfied elsewhere.

I loved how Regina ultimately pulled herself together, took control of her life, and accepted her new normal. I thought the author’s way of describing Regina’s best friend Karen’s character and her husband John was one that left no room for confusion regarding their struggles of dealing with addiction and the demands of a spouse who just wasn't having it.

I finished this book in record-breaking time because it left me wanting more each time I closed it. My bookmark never stayed tucked in the creases of this book for too long! 

Sparky, fast-talking and addictive, I adored this book when it came out in the early 1990s. I enjoyed the subsequent film, too.

But you don’t hear much about it any more, though I think it’s probably still a relevant portrait of Black women’s lives in America. It’s about four friends, women in their thirties, each chapter told from the viewpoint of one of the friends.

The voice is so fresh and in-your-face, so funny and engaging. I love how teasing and chiding of each other they are when they’re together, but also so supportive and loving. Below the lighter-than-air surface of their conversations, the reader comes to realise what they mean to each other.

I recommend this book because James Baldwin’s brilliant voice and profound writing explore the intersection of personal truths and deeply held beliefs. Baldwin masterfully captures the youth and naivety of John Grimes as he wrestles with sexuality, faith, and the pervasive racism of his time.

This book brilliantly brings these struggles to life while showcasing Baldwin’s gift for conveying complex emotions and societal pressures with intimacy and precision. 

Easy Rawlins is an African American private detective in 1960s Los Angeles. Easy gets a visit from a troubled Vietnam veteran at his office. The vet tells an implausible story of him and his lover being attacked in a citrus grove outside the city. He may have killed the man. The woman and his dog are missing. Rawlins’ gut tells him the case is nothing but trouble. He takes the case anyway. The bond between veterans overriding all other concerns. Blood Grove is an exhilarating, mystery soup involving moguls, sociopaths, cops, hippies, extremists, and swindlers. Requiring Easy to call upon help from his friends. Friends who range from genius to lethal. I loved going along with Easy on this case. Admiring his resolve and intelligence in solving the mystery.

Perhaps the most “realistic” novel of this bunch, Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award-winning novel follows an unnamed black narrator’s life in a small southern town, as detailed through his memories, dreams, and desires.

Ellison didn’t intend to write a “protest novel,” apparently, but it has become exactly that: a protestation of the inequities of an American system designed to keep Black people in the shadows. The novel’s voice, though singular, is representative of an entire social movement. A perfect novel. 

I have admired Wideman for many years. As a writer, he is a virtuoso in multiple forms, making room to confront violence and racism without offering readers trite or false resolutions.

I appreciate how he keeps calling back to the themes and subjects of earlier work. His essay, “Looking at Emmett Till” (originally published in Issue 19 of Creative Nonfiction), grappled with his recollections of 1955 as a 14-year-old teenager, the same age as Emmett Till when he was lynched and murdered.

Writing to Save a Life builds upon this work, tracing a parallel history of Till’s father, Louis, and Wideman’s journey to confront official documents of Louis’s prosecution and hanging during his service in World War II. Here as in so much of his writing, Wideman chooses a unique structure for the book, braiding his own reflections on injustice into the documentary material. 

I've met Mr. Mosely a few times, and he's a helluva guy.

This is my favorite of the Easy Rawlins series. Mosley writes in my favorite genre, hardboiled, and he's perfect Chandler, but with two important distinctions: his books teach us about being in a Black man's shoes in a white man's world, and we can never learn that well enough, and Easy is a genuinely good person, and there are not nearly enough of him.

He is good to his bones, to his soul, and we all want him to succeed: we're with him from the first line, and we all get religion praying for him to make it all the way, not to solving the crime, but to solving the mystery of living life well, and on his own terms.