100 Books Like In a Far-Off Land

I first read this book as a kid, and it’s one of the reasons I became an avid reader. It's set in Puritan New England and features romance, intrigue, and suspense. It has great historical detail, a fun story, and well-written characters.

The protagonist, 16-year-old Kit from Barbados, arrives in the harsh world of early colonial Connecticut and doesn’t fit in—and society punishes her for it! I found myself angry and outraged for her–I just wanted everything to be fair. This story is a light-handed look at how life isn’t fair. Frustration comes from expecting or demanding it to be. There will always be circumstances and people making things difficult. Can it be endured? Yes!

I love the main characters, Kit and Nat (the son of the boat Captain who brought Kit to the colonies). They are cute together. This is still one of my favorite books.

Catherine Marshall’s masterpiece Christy is revered for a reason. This Edwardian-era coming-of-age story about a young teacher in an impoverished Appalachia village is not only a romantic page-turner, but also theologically rich, psychologically astute, and honest about the effects of poverty, violence, and social injustice. I’ve read Christy multiple times and continue to find it engaging and thought-provoking.

I rarely experience “book hangover” after finishing a novel. The Passion of Mary-Margaret was a notable exception. The story centers on a religious sister (nun) and mystic, Mary-Margaret Fischer, who, before taking final vows, gives up religious life in order to marry her troubled childhood friend. The Passion of Mary-Margaret delves unflinchingly into difficult themes—abuse, prostitution, racism and bigotry, absentee parents, and self-sacrifice—with an eye toward grace. After finishing the book, I thought, “Yes. This is what love looks like.” It was so good, I couldn’t pick up another novel for weeks.

Few topics rouse people’s ire faster than women’s issues. Within Christianity we find a wide range of theologies, left and right. Lynn Austin’s Fire by Night, about a Civil War nurse, takes up questions of gender roles and woman as man’s “helpmeet” (cf. Genesis 2:18) and threads the needle between the various schools of thought in a faithful, mature, real-to-life way.

Hardboiled specialist Horace McCoy made his mark as an unsparing chronicler of Depression-era despair with his 1935 masterpiece They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. His 1938 novel isn't nearly as good, but it feels so lived-in and sordid that it tells major truths about the dreamers, users, and big talents who populated '30s Hollywood. In it, Ralph and Mona, two modestly talented beautiful losers, hit Tinseltown hungering for stardom. But Ralph, 18 years before the doomed screenwriter hero of Sunset Boulevard, winds up providing stud service to a wealthy older woman and Mona finds her own private hell. The novel is a bleak meditation on exploitation, failure, and corruption in a town where, as one character observes, “Morality never crosses the city limits.”

I always like books that trace the origins of a political movement, because they almost always go farther back than we think.

This one follows the suppression of radical activity in Hollywood from the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time that also saw the founding of the Writers’ Guild, a union that gave writers some actual power in an industry that ran on power and often regarded writers as disposable. But even the Writers Guild couldn’t defend those accused of communist sympathies by their government.

It is significant in our current era that no Hollywood Communist, even the real ones, was ever linked to espionage or sabotage, and that evidence of the supposed subversive indoctrination planted in films was nonexistent. 

The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson is another book that will make you laugh and cry. What I love most about it is its wondering tone which makes me feel like I’m trying to figure out twelve-year-old Revie Bryson’s world right along with him. Why did his mother make up lost episodes of the Bible that made him feel like he just might be the second coming, why did she leave him and his dad in Paris, Indiana to pursue her dreams of Hollywood—and where is God, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be able to count on Him to make things right? 

When I read this book, I was relieved—at long last, a book that underscored the behind-the-scenes contributions of working women in the 1930s and 1940s. J.E. Smyth’s fascinating study brings to light new dimensions to screen legends Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and fashion designer Edith Head, but also women less known to the greater public—the intrepid editors like Barbara McLean and Margaret Booth, three-time Screenwriter Guild president Mary J. McCall, and producers like Joan Harrison and Virginia Van Upp.

I like how this book provides a counter-history to the male-dominated narratives of Hollywood. Smyth shows that women found other ways outside of directing to leave their mark on Hollywood in the twentieth century.

Ted Sennett is one of the most prolific and widely-read writers about Hollywood and this book on 1939 is one of his very best works. It is filled (one might even say, stuffed) with behind-the-scenes stories. The writing is sometimes critical and analytical rather than gushing as in some of Sennett's many coffee table books. He concentrates on only seventeen 1939 movies so one doesn't get a full picture of that amazing year of movies. It's good to see some lesser-known classics like Midnight and Angels Have Wings included in the seventeen.

“You never really succeed,” Andrew W. Marlowe tells the editors of Tales from the Script, “You always fail at a higher level.” So: first you can’t finish your script, then you can’t get it read, then you can’t sell it, then you can’t get it made, then it’s made – but badly. Or, in Marlowe’s case, it’s made into Air Force One and you’re asked to repeat the trick. “Even when you get to the top there’s this realization: ‘Okay, the view is great, but tomorrow I gotta get up and start climbing the mountain again.’” If you find that depressing, don’t be a screenwriter. If you see it as a challenge, read on…