100 Books Like Love

This literary rendering of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century comprises fifteen stories. Whenever I read them, I can feel Joyce’s adoration for this city—and the last story, "The Dead," is glorious.

The final line always slays me: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”

This stunning short novel captures everything about the deep ties that both religion and family have on the Irish experience.

As a boy, I remember my grandmother’s deep religious devotion and how it fueled her way of life. The story touches on this, including an affection for the land, love of community, and the power in doing the right thing. Its moodiness reflects both the story’s unspoken depth and its sublime tenderness.

In Small Things Like These, the protagonist struggles with what he should or should not do after hearing rumors about the local convent and the young girls who live there.

Keegan is a master at delivering the below-the-surface emotions that drive men and women through life’s difficult decisions.

Very few writers capture the longings of young men trapped in small towns, struggling to escape to new and better worlds than does Donal Ryan.

I grew up in an Irish-German neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where few people ever left. I knew those kinds of men. 

This book has many of the same elements of Ryan’s past work, yet it brings with it a profound take on Ireland itself. The novel is divided into several sections, each focusing on seemingly unrelated narratives, until the final section when the stories of the men in the novel heartbreakingly come together.

Throughout, Ryan captures the essence of Irish history—the good and the bad—and combines it with the country’s always-present profound and unexpressed emotions, and its beautiful yet curious contradictions.

What stands out most after reading this story is the writing itself—simple and direct, unadorned, yet the narrative is complex and nuanced.

O’Callaghan is the author of several books of poetry and his prose is dripping with beautiful language. In this story, a frightened girl bangs on the door of a home and after she is allowed to enter, nothing is ever the same with an air of mystery surrounding her life and her family.

The novel is strange, unsettling, and beautiful. And although at times it is a bit perplexing, leaving you wondering what is real and what is false, its magic lies in the attention it gives to the complexities of human emotion, the said and unsaid, the complicated divide between trust and suspicion, and how it asks the question of whether it is better to listen to your head or to your heart. 

This is my favorite novel of all time, bar none.

The sweeping saga of two seemingly socially disparate boys caught up in the volatile world of early 1900s Ireland from which springs forth the Easter Uprising. As a writer and a reader, I am amazed at the historical details and language that are completely immersive, as well as by the structure and control O’Neill wields over the book. Yet he never overwhelms with the “history,” nor does he ever lose sight of the true story, the true heart of his stunning novel.

The love story between the boys is timeless and beautiful and, of course, tragic, as is so often the case with gay love stories from our history. It has haunted me since I first read the novel some twenty-two years ago. It is yet another book I often come back to reread, and I am astounded all over… show more.

This book has a forbidding reputation, but I was lucky enough to come to it in my teens, not knowing I was supposed to be intimidated by it. Instead, I fell instantly and irretrievably in love with the mind-expanding potential of language and story.

It's about a city (Dublin), about a single day (June 16, 1904), and about a million other things besides. It’s a game, a challenge, a marvel, and I particularly love the way it uses time as a constant motif, as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom weave their way through Dublin across the course of the day, their interior monologues wandering likewise between past, present and future.

This was one meaty book! Ken Liu has thrown away all the rules of writing and has yet written an absolute masterpiece of fantasy fiction.

I don’t remember being this thrilled, terrified, angry, and chuffed with scene after scene, battle after battle. I am a sucker for sprawling epic fantasies. Give me intricate maps, dozens of characters, multiple POVs, betrayals, puppeteering gods, and a complex plot that ties them all together.

The Grace of Kings is all that and more in its rich and silken reimagining of the Han dynasty and the Chu Han Contention. Imagine my delight when I found out there are three more books to this saga, each meatier than the previous.

I’m pretty sure this was the first story about gay guys that I ever read. I had a book of Annie Proulx’s short stories I’d been meaning to read and stumbled across this particular one by accident. I only saw the film a long time later and that bowled me over too. The story is beautifully written, though find it so sad to read (and watch). Individuals struggling to come to terms with the way they feel is the essence of so many romances and this opened the door to all those that followed. She’s a brilliant writer.

There’s something deliciously attractive about this book.

The language Bradbury uses draws me in every time I visit it, and it keeps me hooked. This was another book I found as a kid, and it left its hooks in me from when I was young.

Is it morbid? There are definitely morbid parts to it. And it deals with life-and-death situations, but it’s just so good. I never wanted it to end.

The devastating story of two boys unjustly sentenced to serve time in a nightmarish juvenile reform school, The Nickel Boys won a Pulitzer Prize and became a New York Times bestseller.

It is a must-read for anyone sampling literary works featuring Florida. The boys in the story, Elwood and Turner, endure and witness hellish abuse at the Nickel Academy. The boys’ haunting story, exquisitely told by Colson Whitehead, is based on Florida’s real-life Dozier school where thousands of children were tortured, raped, and murdered for more than a century.

Whitehead’s unflinching descriptions of terror and abuse can be tough to take, but they serve an important purpose, by forcing the reader to confront the hellish reality that was America under Jim Crow laws. Long after the last page is turned, if ever, this novel won’t leave you.