100 Books Like Final Vinyl Days

I love this book because I love imperfect, flawed heroines…and as a fifty-something woman, Nan spoke to me.

How many times do we think of running away—even if just for a bit—but responsibilities and maybe even fear keep us from acting? Not Nan—she takes off, simply leaving an abrupt note for her husband, Martin (which takes place before the book opens). The narrative alternates between letters to Martin and journal entries (Nan spills her thoughts into a turquoise leather tooled journal with a black string fastener and a silver button—I love that detail).

The lyrical descriptions of each place Nan visits are so vivid I felt like I was riding shotgun. And I loved taking that journey with Nan and living in her head, because honestly…being in her head felt a lot like being in my own head, flaws and all. 

I love this book because Edna Pontellier is perhaps the original flawed yet sympathetic heroine—a character ahead of her time and a symbol of the growing stirrings of feminism.

I underlined many passages in my dog-eared copy from college (my professor was the editor), including the line, “Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman,” a contrast with the other mothers summering on Grand Isle who doted on their children. She’s not what a woman and mother was supposed to be in 1899—she’s in love with a man other than her husband; she eschews the trappings of motherhood; and ultimately she escapes in the most heartbreaking way.

This book was so explosive at the time, that it was pulled from shelves and didn’t enjoy success and a rightful place in the literary cannon until it was reissued in 1966. There’s a reason it’s had a treasured place on my bookshelf for nearly… show more.

I love smart thrillers like The Practice of Deceit—thrillers that keep me turning the pages even if my alarm is going off early the next morning; thrillers that don’t rely on violence to propel the story forward but rather on interesting, richly drawn, complex characters who are not portrayed in black and white.

Charming bachelor Eric Lavender, a psychotherapist, falls for Colleen O’Brien Golden, a lawyer, but when a conflict of interest with Colleen’s client implodes Eric’s idyllic suburban life as a husband and father to an adorable stepdaughter and a newborn, he learns the dark truth about Colleen’s past. Eric’s flaw is, to me, the one that makes a character most sympathetic—being blinded by love and desire. I love that this book is in the male point of view, and it’s done so well that when Colleen tries to destroy Eric, it is a gut punch.

I love this book because, beyond the fabulous, richly layered story, it takes what should be unlikeable characters and makes you root for them. April Epner is flawed—brittle, sarcastic and closed off at times—but I love her.

As a reader, I can understand why she is the way she is, and that’s the key to making her sympathetic and likable. The payoff is so satisfying when April makes a deep emotional connection and opens up. Bernice Graverman, April’s newfound biological mom, is tacky, loud and over the top, and yet, I was rooting for her. She has a tough shell, but there’s a touching hidden vulnerability.

One more thing I loved about this book…I lived in Quincy, MA (outside of Boston), where this story is set, for five years—it perfectly captures what life was like there in the nineties.

This slim volume packs a mean punch. Following the secession of the seven Deep Southern states in 1860-61, commissioners were sent out to the remaining uncommitted slaveholding states to convince their leaders of the necessity of joining the new Confederate States of America. While the arguments of these secession commissioners included constitutional arguments in favor of secession, they relied even more so on emotional pleas that framed the election of the nation’s first Republican president as a direct threat to the institution of slavery and white supremacy. Their speeches were laced with horrific images of emancipation and a region plunged into racial violence. Charles Dew offers a compelling argument that highlights the importance of slavery and race in the outbreak of war.

I’ve always been fascinated by terrible periods in history: the Nazis, witchcraft trials, and the American Deep South in the days of slavery. I need to know why people behaved in the heinous ways they did; paradoxically, a bit like time travel, the more I read, the less things make sense.

Our heroine is an African-American woman from modern times who finds herself sent back to early nineteenth-century Maryland when slavery was rife. We experience her reactions to it through a modern lens. It reminded me of the TV series Outlander in the way it builds whole lives back in time. It didn’t pull any punches and wasn’t always easy reading, but I couldn’t put it down.

The Civil War in this short novel by Bisson, who sadly died in early 2024, is part of the book's backstory. It is set in a 1950s America in which our 1860s Civil War never happened.

In Bisson’s mirror America, Harriet Tubman joined John Brown in his raid on Harper’s Ferry, resulting in a victory for the abolitionists that led to a massive slave uprising in the South, aided by radical Europeans and Mexicans seeking to reclaim territory and ultimately the formation of a new socialist utopia from the former states of the Deep South.

With this bold and radical counterfactual as the backdrop, Bisson uses a chorus of compelling narrations to imagine the more just America that could be—and the struggles it would take to realize it.

Alan Nolan became one of the first to challenge the Lee myth that had been created in the decades after the general’s death in 1870. He starts with the premise that Lee was a good man whose actions have been distorted beyond all recognition. He then subjects the historical record to a withering cross-examination. Nolan asks: Why did Lee commit treason? Did he really oppose slavery? Did his stubborn persistence harm his beloved state of Virginia? What did he do to unite the nation after the war? Nolan even challenges to the traditional belief that Lee was magnanimous to his enemies, writing, “The historical record shows that Lee constructed a demonic image of the Federals.” This book takes no quarter and may infuriate Lee’s supporters.

This book breaks my heart. It covers the African-American experience in the postbellum years and into the early 20th Century. This was a time when the country might have chosen–and fleetingly seemed as if it would choose–to finally live up to its founding ideals.

Instead, the country chose another path, and Leon F. Litwack chronicles that path–mob violence, electoral intimidation, and official government indifference–in brutal color and unsparing detail. This is one of those books that makes me think of what might have been.  

Even though it wasn’t commercially successful in its time, Cane was a critical success. I love the fact that it’s come to be considered a representative work of both literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. 

The book’s three-part structure was described by Toomer as a circle, moving from stories, poems, and songs featuring rural characters in Georgia in the first part, to stories set in theaters and sections of dramatic dialogue set in the cities of Washington, DC, and Chicago in the second part, and finally back to the rural South in the third part.

It is a beautiful and wildly experimental work, and flies in the face of many assumptions about African American characters, in both the South and the North.