100 Books Like Inventing The Truth

What I love most about Bird by Bird is the way that Anne Lamott characterises writing as a gift, a giving over to someone else in a manner akin only to being a parent.

While I am not a parent, I am inspired by this idea that the written word can make a person braver and better by virtue of opening them up to the world and people in new ways. Despite the hurdles and difficulties of the practice, which Lamott deftly outlines, she ultimately decides that a writer is pursuing an act of generosity and openness. I really love this idea.

There is a real lack of pretentiousness to Lamott’s writing, which allows you to take these nuggets and accept what otherwise might be sentimental claims that “writing is life” as simple truths. 

This one didn’t change my life, but it did provide me with a no-nonsense guide to pesky things like conjunctions and clauses, superlatives and synonyms, prepositions and pronouns, and, obviously, alliteration. Ha. 

What I liked most about this book is that it isn’t written like a textbook. I read what is widely considered to be the writer's bible, The Elements of Style by William Struck and E.B. White, and considered giving up on my dream of becoming a writer because the book made me feel as if only someone with an Einstein-like intellect could write. 

But, as Mr. King wrote, the story is what matters; everything else is just dressing. But in saying that, being able to string together sentences helps (I think my jokes are funny, but no one else does), and this book gives a simple explanation of how to make your copy sing.

I loved the voice of this book–it’s the voice of Stephen King, clever, yes, and a brilliant novelist, of course, but also absolutely down-to-earth. King is a perfectionist, continually going back through his writing to hone it–a useful reminder to all of us not to be satisfied with a first or second draft.

The book shows how, in the best writing, both dialogue and plot arise out of character. And I particularly valued his emphasis on cutting, cutting, cutting–dialogue and everything else. He’s made me do that more than ever!

Thomas captured the beauty and mystery of nature and science—how billions of cells in our body work intricately together to form tissues and organs that make us breathe, move, see, think, and fight infections, and how the world itself is analogous to one big cell.

I was amazed to understand the extraordinary complexities of Nature—how ants plan, communicate, and build farms, how our noses smell, how our eyes see and communicate to our brains, and how we hear and appreciate music.

Washington, our first president…Mr. American Freedom himself—was not just a slave owner but a slave hunter. What was his problem, I wondered, as I read about how he and his wife positively obsessed over re-capturing Ona Judge, a woman who escaped from their bondage.

They spent years, money, and some political clout tracking her down and trying to drag her back. They had plenty of other enslaved people! They weren’t short of money! As I read this wild tale of courage and cruelty, I got the message…the Washingtons knew that if a slave could flee the President of the United States, it would demonstrate the hypocrisy of trying to found a nation on liberty that, uh,…..held men, women and children in bondage.

My spoiler for you: They failed. Judge never returned to the Washingtons and lived to tell her own tale about the ugly history of American freedoms. Dunbar’s book… show more.

If you’re interested in nineteenth-century African American activism, then you should read something by someone directly involved in that work. William Still, based in Philadelphia, was involved in a great many social-reform efforts, but he is known today primarily for his work with the Underground Railroad—an institution that was itself a blend of fact and fiction, history and legend. In this book, Still tells the story of a number of individuals who successfully escaped from enslavement, some of them with organized assistance, and others who managed on their own before reaching the networks available to them once they reached Philadelphia and Still’s network of committed antislavery workers.

Since the book is comprised primarily of these many individual stories, and with no discernible organizing principle, this can be a challenging book to read from the first page to the last. But that won’t stop you, and you might find yourself replicating… show more.

This book takes the idea of “badass” to another level of meaning and measure.

Here, Hattie is a mother of twelve children of various stories and in some ways, a stand-in for all mothers who made the migration north from the deep south of the United States. She’s tough but loving and endures the kind of struggles that would knock many people down.

It’s a book that keeps you turning the pages. 

Historians have charted the long, slow process of emancipation in Northern states. But no one has looked before at how children fared during this process. Webster’s ground-breaking work shows that it was virtually impossible for Black children in ostensibly free states to escape politics: as individuals living in a racist society, and as symbols of African Americans’ future, whatever they did or said was invariably surveilled, dissected, and judged. Racist thinking and racialised structures also severely curtailed freedom for the young.

Many Black Northern children were indentured or bound out, often in exploitative labor arrangements that restricted future possibilities. Others were confined to institutions like reformatories or orphanages, usually segregated based on pseudoscientific understandings of race that marked Black children as deviant, violent, or inferior. Circumventing the way Black suffering has been obscured in historical records, Webster manages to piece together archival fragments that show widespread victimization of Black children… show more.

This book couldn’t be set anywhere else. In 1985, a stand-off between city authorities and members of the MOVE organization ended when a state police helicopter dropped two bombs on MOVE’s West Philadelphia headquarters. Eleven people died, including five children, and more than 60 homes were destroyed. Two residents of the house – a 13-year-old boy and an adult woman – survived the conflagration. 

MOVE members believed in racial justice, animal rights, and a back-to-nature lifestyle. The group frequently clashed with neighbors and city leaders. On the day of the bombing, police had gone to the MOVE home to evict those living there. 

As a newspaper reporter, I twice interviewed two police officers on the scene who helped young Birdie Africa as he fled the burning home. The first words Birdie said to the officers were, “Don’t shoot me.” Two decades after the bombing, the police officers were still haunted… show more.

I love how author/illustrator Don Tate re-discovered and brought to life this true story of an office clerk who risked everything to become a conductor, and took it upon himself to be the record keeper, of the Underground Railroad. With his painstaking records, he reunited countless families torn apart by slavery and preserved an important piece of history. “It wasn’t his job to do,” the book says, “but William thought these written records might help someday.” This message—that we often have to step beyond what may be our “job” to help others and make a difference—will linger in the hearts and minds of kids who experience this powerful story.