27 Books Like Effi Briest

Reading this book made me feel as if I was watching a great magician perform several impossible tricks.

It is both clever and funny, it teems with wonderful characters but never seems overstuffed, and it does what very few historical novels manage to do. We absolutely believe that the people are living their lives in the past (this really is Germany in the 1790s), but we also recognize them as our contemporaries.

I find it a magical book, lighter than air, a poignant, gorgeous love story that also satisfies the historian in me.

This is the best book I know (even better than a complex spy thriller!) about what the Berlin Wall meant to individual East Germans.

I first read this novel about divided lovers in a West German edition back in the 1980s, when the “other” Germany still existed. I have often used the book in classes since then because I like it so much, enjoying it more and more as I peeled back the layers, admiring how cleverly Christa Wolf interweaves the personal and political.

She talks about “this strange stuff called life,” and that is one of the things I most love about the book: how it makes things that are apparently obvious and familiar seem strange. 

If I were allowed to have only one novel about German culture and the coming of the Nazis, this would be it. And, if I were allowed only one novel about the price paid by those who create great art, this would also be it.

I have never read a better fictional account of what it means to make music, and there is something truly thrilling (but also quite chilling) about the story of the composer Adrian Leverkuhn’s Faustian pact with the devil.

I was also captivated by the way that Thomas Mann has his narrator tell this story, from the recent German past, from the “present” of bombs falling on Germany at the end of World War II.

I came to this book much later than the others. My wonderful editor sent me a copy, and I was instantly smitten. The historian in me loved the scathing indictment of the early Federal Republic, with its obsessive materialism and its idealistic narrator surrounded by a world of political opportunists and sleazy lobbyists.

But it’s the language of the book that made me sit up, the strange, almost uncanny mixture of urgent, tumbling, staccato thoughts, but at the same time, an extraordinary lyricism. I found that I wanted to taste the words, to roll them around in my mouth; this may be a book to read out loud. I found it melancholy yet somehow energizing. 

With this textbook disguised as a novel, Goldratt tells a story that sneaks up on you, revealing how simple digital thinking—like tracking bottlenecks and using systems analysis—can revolutionize physical processes. It’s not just about manufacturing; it’s about seeing challenges as opportunities to improve again and again.

This is a story about inspiration and being ready to look at the world differently to make every process—from your own projects to global operations—run a little smoother.

When I taught in Okinawa, the base library happened to have a few books by Iris Murdoch: I read one and was hooked. I read as many of her books as I could find, even buying bootleg copies in Taipei.

Several years later I was teaching in England when the librarian mentioned that the officers’ wives’ book club was scheduled to meet Murdoch but none of them had ever read her. Thrilled, I joined them in Murdoch’s husband’s messy Oxford office where I literally knelt at the author’s feet and asked her stupid questions. Were her novels autobiographical? OF COURSE NOT, she snapped. Everything, she insisted, was invented.

After her death, I read biographies of her, and of course, it turned out that the weird groups of people she wrote about were often based on people she knew. This book hosts one of my favorite groups of Murdoch characters who… show more.

This story completely threw me for a loop and I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, so I am not easily mislead.

When you think you know where it’s going, it takes a completely different turn. And it’s not only that you are being fooled, it’s the main character who is fooling himself.

Perception shapes reality 100%, and so do mind-altering drugs. I loved this one so much. It pops up in my mind often.

I enjoyed Mafouz’s marvelous retelling of the Thousand and One Nights. Although Mafouz sets the time in mediaeval era, the novel is a political fable with contemporary overtones for any authoritarian government.    

Arabian Nights and Days, tells the story of the Sultan, Shahriyar, and his entourage of rotating police chiefs, spies, and informers. Many of the same characters from A Thousand and One Nights appear in his version: Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin, Shahrazad and her sister, Dunyazad. And characters do tell stories to one another, but Shahrazad is not as prominent.

I loved this book because it made me cry with its emotional impact. It opened my eyes to the mistreatment of Native Americans and the Spanish/Mexican inhabitants of southern California when the territory was annexed by the United States after the Spanish-American War. 

This is the love story between the mixed-race orphan girl, Ramona, and Alessandro, the head of the Native American sheep shearers. When they fall in love, knowing her aunt, who took her in and owns the rancho, will never let her marry a Native American, they elope. But Alessandro’s tribe is soon driven off their land by American settlers flooding the area, and he and Ramona are thrown into poverty as they travel from locale to locale, desperately trying to find a place to call home. 

Daniel Quinn’s award-winning novel illuminates the historical roots of our consumer culture from the perspective of a gorilla who teaches a human the lessons of sustainability.

Before he died, Daniel would meet with my students to discuss sustainability and the lessons of Ishmael. His wisdom comes through clearly in this well-told tale of how Homo sapiens become a species of unsustainable “takers” and what the consequences are of a global consumer culture.