100 Books Like Jack

I loved the balance between the anguish of the family of Gary Gilmore’s victims and his desire to be executed as soon as possible. I was moved by the desperate attempts of his self-appointed lawyers to delay his death, and I’m not sure I’ve ever answered the question for myself whether a killer’s wish to die should be respected.

Wouldn’t a life sentence be an even greater punishment?

One of biologist Heinrich’s books, an extended nonfiction essay, may seem an eccentric choice here, but–like other works of this writer’s–it has had a profound effect on the way I regard the natural world in northern New England, my home territory.

There are life-scientists who write well and ones who command a patent, deep knowledge of their subject matter. None comes to my mind who so magnificently combines a fine novelist’s sensitivity to language with so broad and detailed a scientific awareness as Heinrich does. And he is bold. It takes a mind and writer of his caliber, for instance, to make a thumb-sized golden-crowned kinglet the hero—and a doughty one at that, one obliged to eat thirteen times his body weight to survive subzero nights–of his study.

The particularity of Heinrich’s vision is exemplary, something that I, a writer obsessed with the ecology of the region he shares with… show more.

Set during the 2005 bus-driver strikes in Iran, this book explores imprisonment at nearly every level—from the confinement of a totalitarian regime to the physical and psychological torture of a political prisoner, to the locked doors of one’s own mind, to the escape sought (and sometimes found) in heroine. What sticks with me most, however, is the interior exploration of the main character, Yunus, and the way seemingly small decisions lead to enormous consequences. 

Szabó is another of my all-time favorite authors, and I return to her books again and again. Katalin Street explores the devastating effects of Germany’s occupation of Budapest upon three different, neighboring families. Characters are imprisoned in a variety of ways: Bálint serves time in a prison camp; the Elekes family serves time in the small apartment to which they’re moved during the occupation; everyone serves time in the prison of their memories, including the ghost of sweet Henriette, who haunts the narrative. 

This is the only piece of nonfiction on this list, but the plot is as tortuous and epic as any good novel. This book helped me understand the vast inequities inherent in our prison industry—from mandatory sentencing to privatization to the abhorrent practice of convict leasing, aptly known as “slavery by another name.” If there’s any hope of rehabilitating the country’s prison system, we must learn its history—as ugly and unjust as it might be. This is a hard read, but an immensely important one. 

Alice Munro is, I believe, my favorite living author (written before Alice's death on May 13, 2024). As with Marilynne Robinson, the choice of this particular collection, as opposed to others of Munro’s, verges on the arbitrary. Her capacity to render inner lives–which more often than not are quietly turbulent–seems to me matchless and she achieves her effects without straining for effect. She always seems to find the pluperfectly concise language to draw us into the small maelstroms of a character’s life. 

As one who is persistently intrigued by the way in which pasts and presents can conflict with, interfuse with, and complement a character’s view of her/himself and the ambient world, I am also much taken by Ms. Munro’s frequent recourse to achronological presentation. Her plots tend not to be that in any conventional sense of the word; things seem to happen suddenly and simply, and while these things… show more.

In both my novels I explore the cultural, almost exclusively oral history of Maine woodsmen and -women. An old man now, I knew people who worked as loggers, river drivers, and so on before the advent of power tools, electricity, or motorized hauling.

A non-writer friend told me about this book, which is concerned with the same culture across the New Brunswick border, mere miles from where my novels are set. His evocation of that arduous, raconteur-populated, dangerous world bolstered my own seat-of-the-pants knowledge and offered a wealth of specific physical detail and a sense of storytelling’s central importance in the old logging communities.

The book, then, served as a model for my own explorations of a culture whose likes we will never see again and whose preservation in words is among my own most passionate aims. 

This book contains a pair of novellas, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria. While William Trevor has never to my mind written so much as a clause that’s not worth reading, Reading Turgenev is my preferred fiction here. It is a triumph of Irish realism, lyrical without any straining for effect, a heartbreaking reflection on frustrated love, and a sort of elegy for people who suffer because of that frustration. I read it for the first time in one sitting, so gripped was I by the various, quiet but soul-wrenching emotional dramas occurring, especially between the main character and her male cousin. I have gone back to it twice since and will again, I’m sure.

The novella is rife with social observation, and Trevor’s ear for telling dialect, the depiction of which never makes him sound the least condescending on the one hand or sentimental on the other,… show more.

The gifts Lisa shares inside this book, are practical and powerful with many tips, tools, practices, and resources for harmonious transformation.

You will experience love at a deeper level. You being the subject of life to create the life you deserve and desire. A different perspective that is worth reading. This is the second book to Lisa’s first book Love Is the Seed.

She teaches how you can plant seeds of love in your life to live fully engaged with love, thought, and free will. Practical loving wisdom shared to help you find within you all that you need, a practical approach to self-mastery and loving yourself.  

Lee Miller was the most unlikely of war correspondents. As a fashion model for Condé Nast, a surrealist collaborator of Man Ray, and a celebrity New York photographer, world events never impacted much on her work. But when she moved to London to become a photojournalist for Vogue, she found her own special subject in the war. Among the highlights of this handsome collection is Miller’s vivid report of the battle for St Malo where, as the darling of the US 83rd Division, she and her camera were given unfettered access. No less compelling are her accounts of liberated Paris, her haunting photographs and descriptions of concentrations camps; and one of the most iconic images in this book is the photograph taken of Lee sitting naked in Hitler’s own bathtub as she scrubs off the filth and stink of Dachau.