100 Books Like Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction

I first read Lolita when I was 14 and have read it every few decades since, learning something new each time.

I love the first-person immediacy of it and the way it is a crime novel in reverse: the narrator is already imprisoned but not for the crime he describes. It is a love story turned on its head: what the narrator says is love is in fact abuse.

It is a road trip across the vastness of the US, like one I took when I was a student.

I don’t think Garcia Marquez needs a review or introduction. Reading any of his books is a pleasure, with easy and delightful writing and striking sentences.

These sentences often describe things or people in a way that feels natural and perfectly captured. For instance, he describes the world as so new that many things lack names. His eloquent descriptions, like that of ice, create vivid images. The characters are relatable, and you feel a happy exhaustion after finishing the book, reminiscent of great works like Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Those who find the stories too unbelievable should learn about Colombian history, as they provide real context. I simply love the book!

I love the experimental and absurd sensibility of this novel. In an age known for its groundbreaking fiction, this work stands out for its playfulness and complexity. Like Swift, Sterne was a clergyman of the Church of England, and I love how intelligent and sophisticated he is about dirty jokes and silly scenarios.

I also appreciate Sterne’s commitment to pushing the envelope: Sterne inserts all sorts of oddities, from marble pages to graphical representations of the book’s winding narrative. The book obsesses over the minutiae and small details of everyday life even as it considers weighty issues and tragic events.

Predicting both Freud and postmodernism, I love how this work feels both ultra-modern and very much of its time. 

In this novel, time becomes almost a character. It is an empty time, although so heavy and thick, to fill in all the space around the protagonist Dino and to enter into him.

Art and sex, the only Dino’s activities, are not characterized by their distinctive passion and enthusiasm that sometimes destroy and sometimes raise a man. Art and sex become a dead pastime dominated by time alone.      

I was a young mom when I first read this book, and abortion, death with dignity, and orphaned children weren’t exactly topics I was seeking out. But Irving pulled me in with a story so human, so layered, I couldn’t look away.

What struck me most was how these enormous ethical conflicts—ones that still ignite fierce debate—were explored through a quiet, powerful relationship between a boy and his mentor. Watching that relationship evolve helped me understand that ethics aren’t fixed; they shift with time, context, and lived experience.

This book made me sit with discomfort, question certainty, and lean into compassion. And that’s why I still think about it.

Gavin Lambert adapted the works of D. H. Lawrence and Tennessee Williams for the films Sons and Lovers and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. He directed one interesting, low-budget, Paul Bowles-like movie, Another Sky. His prose work is insightful about the behind-the-scenes world of the movies.

The linked stories in this book memorably spotlight hangers-on and working-class people on the edges of entertainment. Also of interest is Inside Daisy Clover, his novel about a teen tomboy star which became an affected, bombastic, entertaining Natalie Wood movie.

There are many remedies for racism, including education, transmission, and prevention. So as not to limit myself to the human and social sciences, I suggest this children's novel by Ayaan Mohamud. It's an embodied account, a fictionalized testimony that we discover by following Hanan, the main character, who attends a prestigious school where she is subjected to a very routine form of Islamophobic ostracism.

She follows her mother's advice to stay the course and not overreact for a while. But after a tragedy, this position is no longer tenable and she makes her voice heard, in other words, she takes her place as a visible Muslim in American society in a different way.

This novel will delight young and old alike and is a good complement to the more scientific works cited in this list of recommendations. It was originally written for my children, so they wouldn't shut up.

I read this book in high school and absolutely loved the entire idea, of essentially a prisoner of war escape plan similar to The Great Escape, set in a science fiction universe against the scale and scope of a planet. 

I love how the author took a main character that had been so strong and tough through seven previous books and made her vulnerable, gave her new room to grow, and allowed some of her supporting cast to shine as well.

In some ways, this is an even more daunting novel than Musil’s masterpiece. Initially, it gives the impression of meandering over some 800 pages, with the first hundred pages dealing with individuals who do not reappear until towards the end. It is less a novel with a narrative plotline and more a novel in which the protagonists are themselves the plot.

These individuals do much more than represent Austria and Vienna in the 1920s. Indeed, it could be seen almost as a sequel to Musil’s Man Without Qualities, which deals with the same social milieu. It is always amusingly chaotic yet equally cynical as it shows us a sector of Middle European society that was bred to run an empire when, abruptly, there is no longer an empire left to run. 

It is a vast panorama, presenting a society of rather dull-witted people educated well beyond their natural intelligence.… show more.

I am not a plotter. I have always wished I was. But nope, sorry, Gwen. That said, this is still an amazing book. Even if you are a discovery writer (sometimes called pantster for writing by the seat of your pants), thinking about your plot in terms of pacing, story elements, backstory, characterization, and setting…and thinking about them in a logical way is beneficial.

Kudos if you can write it down in a notebook before you start drafting. That’s not in my wheelhouse.