Here are 100 books that If You Want to Make God Laugh fans have personally recommended if you like
If You Want to Make God Laugh.
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An avid reader, I began a project in 2012 to read one short story a week in supernatural mysteries, ghost stories, and quiet horror genres. I began with the classic authors: Poe, MR James, Lovecraft, Shelley, Stoker, du Maurier, etc. I began a blog, Reading Fiction Blog, and posted these free stories with my reviews (I’m still posting today). Over the years, it turned into a compendium of fiction. Today, I have nearly 400 short stories by over 150 classic and now contemporary authors in the blog Index. I did this because I wanted to learn more about writing dark fiction and who better to learn from than the masters?
I adore reading atmospheric adventures of mystery, supernatural, and ghostly powers; this book has these values in abundance. Noemi’s alluring character is smart, savvy, and admirably vulnerable. Loved her. At High House in the Mexican countryside, Noemi discovers ghostly entities repeatedly forming blisters across the walls. How mysterious and threatening; I was fascinated.
The best part of the novel for me was the emotional intelligence of the characters because their behavior is both suspiciously rational and heart-stopping clever. Gripping as all heck. This family was obsessed with a relentless desire to rule and control their destiny at all costs via Otherworld powers. Absolutely compelling. I was breathless along with Noemi at every step as she was drawn into the dangers and treacherous family secrets that threatened to kill her.
The award-winning author of Gods of Jade and Shadow (one of the 100 best fantasy novels of all time, TIME magazine) returns with a mesmerising feminist Gothic fantasy, in which a glamorous young socialite discovers the haunting secrets of a beautiful old mansion in 1950s Mexico.
He is trying to poison me. You must come for me, Noemi. You have to save me.
When glamorous socialite Noemi Taboada receives a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin begging to be rescued from a mysterious doom, it's clear something is desperately amiss. Catalina has always had a flair for the dramatic, but…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Reading and writing about family dynamics, particularly Black families, has always appealed to me. Particularly when it comes to the generation gap between parents and their children that causes them to see the same world through different lenses. Who we choose to see as our true family, the ones who define the place we call home, may or may not be defined by blood. I am fortunate not to have personally experienced most of the drama and trauma found in novels that I am drawn to, and in stories I have felt compelled to write. Otherwise, I would have turned to memoir writing rather than fiction.
Brit Bennett writes with a steady hand as she immerses us into the minds and lives of three people. Nadia and Aubrey are haunted to womanhood by maternal abandonment. They are friends as well as rivals for the affection of the same man. Luke would have made a mother out of Nadia had they chosen to parent, and he eventually makes a wife and mother of Aubrey. His mother is the first lady of the church that plays a prominent role in their lives. The mothers in Bennett's exceptional novel are hurt and betrayed by callous men and by each other. I rooted for each of them to persevere, but like many of my favorite novels, this is not a happily ever after for everyone type of story.
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half.
The Mothers is a dazzling debut about young love, a big secret in a small community and the moments that haunt us most.
All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.
It's the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes…
All of these books inspired me to become a better writer and to push my imagination to the limit by getting The Ballad of Perilous Graves onto the page. These books made me want to polish the contents of my own imagination and tell the biggest most heartfelt story I could. Ballad is in good company on library and bookstore shelves, so I wanted it to connect as hard as possible.
Giddings takes the stories of Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee experiments and extrapolates them into the present day. A young woman dealing with crushing medical debt agrees to participate in medical trials with strange and debilitating side effects. This book is horrific, lyrically written, and brimming with emotion.
Electric Literature: One of 55 Books by Women and Nonbinary Writers of Color to Read in 2020 | Lit Hub & The Millions: Most Anticipated Books of 2020 | Ms. Magazine: Anticipated 2020 Feminist Books | Refinery29: Books by Black Women We are Looking Forward To Reading | One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Reads of 2020 | Amazon Book of the Month Pick | Audible Editor's Pick | Essence's Pick| Glamour's Must Read | Ms. Magazine's Anticipated Read of 2020
A startling debut about class and race, Lakewood evokes a terrifying world of…
Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.
This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…
I write to learn what I don’t know about myself and our purpose as flawed beings in this Alice-in-Wonderland world. In the documentary about singer/poet Leonard Cohen, creator of the much-covered “Hallelujah” (title of the documentary), to explain the song, he says that life is so impenetrable that the only options are to shake your fist or exclaim “Hallelujah.” I think there is a third option: to laugh. And I prefer to do all three because that is what comes through me: confusion, pain, and hilarity. And hopefully a better understanding of the whole mess once I’ve written about it. And that is what I hope to share with readers.
This National Book Award-winning novel is the story of an unnamed writer negotiating life in a Black skin that pre-empts most people from seeing him as an individual human being. And it has one of the funniest (pee-in-your-pants) first chapters I’ve ever read.
I not only laughed, but I so identified with the writer (and I think most readers will, no matter what your race—that is the genius of this writing), that I lived every moment of this crazy quest to be seen in a world that absolutely refuses to drop its projections.
But ultimately, the person who needs to see this man as a human being, accepting all of his history, hurt, and uniqueness, is the unnamed writer himself. This is a combination of crazy humor and pain.
Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize Finalist, 2022 Chautauqua Prize Finalist, Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing Shortlist, and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize shortlist
A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
An Ebony Magazine Publishing Book Club Pick!
One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction | One of Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of 2021 | One of Shelf Awareness's Top Ten Fiction Titles of the Year | One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books | One of…
I’ve loved reading novels about strong, quirky women since childhood (Nancy Drew, Ramona Quimby, Harriet the Spy, the heroines of Judy Blume novels, just for starting examples!). As I grew into writing my own stories, I also started studying women’s history. I merged these two interests to begin writing historical novels with strong women protagonists. I love the challenge of researching to figure out the details of women’s day-to-day lives–so many unrecorded stories!–and I love to advocate for the idea (fortunately not as revolutionary as it once was) that a woman can be the hero of her own story and that each woman’s story is important to tell.
Amy Bloom is one of the authors I admire most in the world, and I loved this story of two fascinating sisters, Eva and Iris, not just for Bloom’s enthralling use of language but also for the spiritedness and intrigue of who the sisters are. (While Iris, "the pretty one,” struggles to make it in Hollywood as a B-movie actress, Eva, “the smart one,” gets roped into offering tarot card readings to help support their ragtag family.)
I loved living in the world that Bloom created in a story that crisscrossed the U.S. and beyond in the 1940s, and I loved being constantly surprised by the sisters’ choices and the events that befall them–and by the riveting words used to describe them.
When Eva's mother abandons her on Iris's front porch, the girls don't seem to have much in common - except, they soon discover, a father. Thrown together with no mothers to care for them and a father who could not be considered a parent, Iris and Eva become one another's family. Iris wants to be a movie star; Eva is her sidekick. Together, they journey across 1940s America from scandal in Hollywood to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island, stumbling, cheating and loving their way through a landscape of war, betrayals and big dreams.
Everyone knows what it’s like to be the “odd man out”—the despair of being shunned or isolated or ridiculed by the “crowd.” For some, it can last their whole life. I’ve always been curious as to why this occurs, both from the side of those “pointing” and from that of the recipient. Strangeness attracts us by its very uniqueness, and to me, that’s something to be celebrated and marveled over. To some, it is also feared.
There’s something about the grittiness of turn-of-the-century New York that seems especially well-suited to the different and strange, including the depictions in this novel of the Coney Island seashore, the tenements of the Lower East Side, and a brutal asylum.
The characters include a “night-soiler” cleaning out tenement privies, an undertaker’s wife, and estranged twin sisters, and the way their stories weave together is a Dickens-esque plot full of intrigue, deception, heroism, and forgiveness. Over it all is a sense of magic and possibility, including people who aren’t who or what they claim to be.
'A SKILLFUL TRIUMPH' Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist - 'IRRESISTIBLE' Emma Donoghue, author of Room
New York, 1895. It's late on a warm city night when Sylvan Threadgill, a young night soiler who cleans out the privies behind the tenement houses, pulls a terrible secret out from the filthy hollows: an abandoned newborn baby. An orphan himself, Sylvan was raised by a kindly Italian family and can't bring himself to leave the baby in the slop. He tucks her into his chest, resolving to find out where she belongs.
Odile Church is the girl-on-the-wheel, a second-fiddle act in a…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
In my high school creative writing class, my teacher once said that good writing was a bit like looking at a star. If you look directly at it, it gets a little fuzzy and hard to see. But if you look just off to the side, the star becomes vivid and clear. That, to me, is exactly the power of spooky stories for young readers. We all deal with monsters, to varying degrees, throughout our lives. Even kids. But if we look at it just off to the side, through the angle of a fun, spooky story, those monsters suddenly become much more comprehensible. More faceable. More beatable.
I still think about the setting of The Ash House all the time.
It is so vivid and so real. The eeriness and spookiness of this place starts from the first page, even the first sentence. We know something is off here in the ash house, and we watch as the main character starts being subsumed by the other kids here.
We worry as he starts losing his identity. But this is a powerful and haunting story about listening to yourself and remembering yourself no matter what else is going on around you, and no matter what anyone else believes.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children meets Lord of the Flies in the exciting debut from Angharad Walker. 'A mesmerising other-worldly story that got deep under my skin - I couldn't put it down.' JASBINDER BILAN, author of Asha & the Spirit Bird
'Dark, tense and intoxicating ... Seriously exciting.' LUCY STRANGE, author of The Ghost of Gosswater
A new boy arrives at the Ash House. He can't remember his name - or why he's been sent there.
Given the name Sol, and troubled by a mystery pain that no medicine can cure, he joins the gang of children living…
I am the author of two middle grade books, and I love writing about kids who may not have much materially but abound in heart and courage. I grew up in a small southern town and my childhood was just like that—low on income but full of love, hope, and friendship. I want kids to know that despite their circumstances there is hope for a better life. Like Wavie’s mom tells her in my book, Hope In The Holler, “You’ve got as much right to a good life as anybody. So go find it!”
Life is tough for Angel—her dad is in jail, her mom is irresponsible, and she has to take care of her seven-year-old brother. Paterson doesn’t hold back in this unflinching look at family brokenness, but as sad as the circumstances are, there is hope! Angel meets some new adults and through their small kindnesses, she learns that she is stronger than she ever knew. It’s a great message for any kid who is struggling with too much responsibility. It has a redemption arc that I also loved.
Angel's dad is in jail and her mum's abandoned her and her little brother at their great-grandmother's crumbling farmhouse. Grandma can't even look after herself, let alone two children, so Angel finds that it's left up to her. In a dreary and lonely world there is only one bright spot - a mysterious stranger who appears on clear nights to teach Angel all about the stars. Katherine Paterson is an internationally acclaimed author who has won the Newbery Medal (twice), the National Book Award for Children's Literature (USA) twice, and the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award.
I believe that laughter is the best way into a person’s heart and also into their head. Life is beautiful, but it is also incredibly fragile. Satire and humor are effective ways to raise the level of awareness of destructive behaviors and/or controversial topics that are otherwise difficult or unpleasant to address. I think satire and humor make it easier to hold up a mirror and look critically at our own beliefs and our actions.
I love this book, which is also a play, for its witty banter and mistaken identities. Oscar Wilde is a master of acerbic wit and putting his characters in situations that fully shine the light on their humanity and also their faults and foibles.
I read this book with a smile pasted across my face from the first to the last page.
Ever since the first night at the St James' Theatre on 14 February 1895, "The Importance of Being Earnest" has been recognised as one of the world's finest comic dramas. Now Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell leads an outstanding cast in this superb new production of Wilde's masterpiece, mounted to celebrate the centenary of the first performance.
Pioneer Paddles of the Colonial South
by
William D. Auman,
Award-winning novelist William Auman, author of If Trees Could Testify..., takes the reader on a time-traveling odyssey featuring 345 bodies of water in six states within the historical context through which they unfold.
Journey into remaining Colonial-era wilderness with stories of pirate treasure, epic frontiersmen, Indigenous Peoples, and Revolutionary…
I’ve always been deeply interested in how people connect to those around them—it is something I write about constantly. My first novel, So Much Love, was about how a community reacts to terrible loss and uncertainty, and my recent book of nonfiction, These Days Are Numbered, is about how my own community—and I—reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic. I am always looking at how humans human, separately and especially together. That is one of the joys of narrative fiction for me—the way we can use it to examine our behaviour and interactions, and how we form relationships and communities. I hope these books enthrall you as much as they did me.
Yes, it’s a Victorian novel but it’s also the slenderest and sweetest one, by my lights.
Cast out from his narrow religious community by the acts of a dishonest friend, Silas Marner flees to a new village and resolves to live a life apart, money his only security. Then along comes a tiny child in need and Silas cannot help but help—even though this new challenge comes on the heels of a devastating robbery.
The man’s generosity has the effect of opening him up to the generosity of others until, little by little, he becomes a part of the community he has lived apart from for so long. There is never a bad time to read this lovely, hopeful little novella about the worst and best of human nature.
Gold! - his own gold - brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away!
Falsely accused of theft, Silas Marner is cut off from his community but finds refuge in the village of Raveloe, where he is eyed with distant suspicion. Like a spider from a fairy-tale, Silas fills fifteen monotonous years with weaving and accumulating gold. The son of the wealthy local Squire, Godfrey Cass also seeks an escape from his past. One snowy winter, two events change the course of their lives: Silas's gold is stolen and, a child crawls across his threshold.
