100 Books Like Fanny Hill

I love how this book elevates lying into an art form. Following the convention of the era, Defoe published the work as if it were written by its main character, Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe stands out from its peers for the subtlety of its mimicry. I envy how natural and easy Defoe makes writing look.

The book reveals the novel’s roots in other genres, such as satire, journalism, religious writing, and personal narrative. Defoe excelled at all of these, and I find the strange convergence mesmerizing. It’s possible to see the outlines of these earlier traditions even as something like a modern novel comes into view.

With apologies to Oprah and James Frey, this book helps me remember that the best writers have always been a bit loose with the truth. 

I liked the concept of man being small and adrift in the darkness of the wide world. This book taught me to see through politics, grandstanding, and the grandiose nonsense of man. Swift is my kind of guy, brutally satirical and profound. This book is really not for children. We see Gulliver travel on many adventures and experience Swift's disappointment as he engages different cultures, small and large, rational and irrational. 

His adventures demolish Gulliver’s sense of humanity to the point that when he is about to be rescued, at first, he rejects the offer like a misanthrope before finally climbing aboard. Swift is very dark here. Why would anyone want to return to the same old life after having their eyes opened?

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. 

I read this book in college, and it is perhaps the book that got me interested in gothic literature. It has everything a gothic novel should have: a haunted castle, a damsel in distress, and mystery. And I love all three of these elements. There is also a misguided King who creates havoc.

Like the books above, I have read this one more than once.

I thought this book would be a dry, academic chore—it really is all about house numbers, for goodness’ sake—but the Enlightenment story of the rise of house numbers is, in its own way, a brilliant story of the making of modern government.

The author is an Austrian academic, but the book doesn’t read like other academic books—the fact that he found a sometimes thrilling story on this topic felt like a miracle the first time I read it.

I was struck by this when I read it decades ago, and returned to it while researching. The Humbler Creation, written in the ’60s and set in the ’40s, gives a vivid depiction of that physically and morally shattered and patched-over post-war era.

Maurice, a repressed clergyman, lives with his wife Libby and her widowed sister, Kate, but right from the get-go, there’s the feeling that he and Kate would be better suited. But because of convention, this is not to be, and the frustrated Maurice and Kate seek satisfaction elsewhere. Passion, scandal, and tension ensue.

The characters, the dynamics between them, the sparky dialogue, and the 1940s setting all contribute to making this an addictive read. I was even more riveted the second time around.

This is a less sophisticated mystery than the other four but doesn’t suffer for that reason.

Mickie Mckinney is a schoolboy detective and the setting is a school. I like the conceit that his office is in a cupboard under the stairs. The crimes are not sophisticated, which will suit some readers, and the humour is good.

The Enlightenment is often associated with intellectual changes. But the book sheds a new light on this “Age of Reason” by showing how emotions and feelings played a crucial role in this intellectually and sensorially dynamic period. Purnell tells this change by providing many interesting, and funny, episodes. My favorite, among others, is the seventeenth-century vogue for perfumes made of the excretions of the civet cat or the musk deer, and it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that floral scents became popular. This shift had to do with people’s ideas about health, cleanliness, and naturalness that changed over time. You will learn how and why people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought about the senses, how they experience their sensory world, and how our sensory experience came about over the course of a few hundred years.

When British scientist and novelist CP Snow lamented that society had become divided between scientific and literary cultures, he sought a way to bridge that gap. He needed to look no further than Mary Terrall’s hero, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, who was the very model of a modern scientist-artist.

Maupertuis achieved early scientific fame by leading a geodesic voyage to Lapland (modern-day Sweden and Finland) in 1736, where, after a year of fighting extreme cold and summer plagues of mosquitoes, he proved Newton’s theory that the Earth was flattened at the poles. Maupertuis became a regular fixture in the cafes and literary salons of 18th-century Paris and Berlin and helped transform European society in the Age of Enlightenment.  

I have long considered Jean-Jacques Rousseau the most influential of all major figures in the Enlightenment.

As I tell my students, if they are wearing jeans, then they are showing the abiding impact of Rousseau’s celebration of “nature” over civilization. I could recommend any of Rousseau’s books on the origins of society, the “social contract,” or his Confessions, the first modern autobiography. Instead, I will recommend my favorite study of Rousseau.

The great French historian Jean Starobinski illuminates the paradoxes of Rousseau’s personality and writings, his habits of self-deception and obfuscation in conflict with his celebration of total honesty or transparency. This book, though written in the late 1950s, greatly influenced later French authors on Rousseau such as Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction.