100 Books Like Memoirs

Joubert (1754-1824), was not published until 114 years after his death. These notebooks are neither diaries nor memoirs, neither essays nor aphorisms, but enigmas worthy of much ponder. He was uncompromisingly seeking an afterlife for the source of his writing and language, and he pretty much discovered that in the cracks of insight. For example: those who make laws can’t plant crops. One has to apply names to things: I have many forms for ideas, but not enough forms for phrases.

He is a writer’s writer, since he insists on close and silent and above all, slow reading. 

I just love the way she is so contemptuous of people telling false “stories”. Her writing falls between every genre imaginable, a collage of well-researched facts and the indelible list of the horrors of war. She makes lists as monuments to dead victims; she names names; she calls out nationalism and racism. Wry and ironic, she has composed a battle-hymn against the barbarity of the Yugoslav wars between 1991 and 2001. To my lasting regret, I missed meeting her in Melbourne not long before she died. 

Someone once said that novels were for light summer reading by bourgeois ladies. W.G. Sebald may have shared this opinion. The latter preferred letters, notes, fragments and diaries. Similarly, Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-born, of Sephardi ancestry, German-speaking and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature, only ever wrote one novel. But his aphorisms, both long and short, are remarkable. He unearths forgotten writers, important ones that he had met, and he meditates on literary gossip and the remaining time in his life. Here’s an example: Klaus Mann’s last proposal: a mass suicide of writers (of the great names).

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, Annie Ernaux is one of France's best-loved writers. 

She writes through details. Collaging phrases, photographs, lines of songs, objects, advertising jingles, fragments of film, radio and TV programs, and the words of men in bed at night, Ernaux writes the history of modern France via an intensely personal memoir. Dien Bien Phu, the Algerian War, the May '68 revolt, 9–11 are all here, as seen through her eyes and told in her unmistakable voice. 

As one critic wrote, Ernaux "transforms her life into history and her memory into the collective memory of a generation." At once richly evocative and utterly unsentimental, this is one of the most original and impressive books I've read in a long while.

This elegantly written biography helped me to know my subject.

It was especially vivid on what it was like to be the child of an Edwardian hostess, the minimal effect of WW1 on the day-to-day life of Great Britain and the effect of this on later life. It is a model of what a biography should be: thoughtful, clear, interesting, and perceptive.

With a title good enough to inspire the naming of a famous British band, Welsh poet Davies’ 1908 love letter to tramps and hobos drew directly from his own experience as a drifter in the US in the late nineteenth century.

Davies captures the life of jumping freight trains, joining the gold rush, and paying “boodle” to stay in the relative comfort of American jails. I love this book because it depicts the romanticism of the wandering mendicant without painting over the cracks of the hardships of roofless life (including parting company with one of his legs under a train).

There also are moments of humor (e.g., learning how to sleep standing up!) and the fascinating account of struggling to get his writing published on his return from his travels. It’s a classic.

Where do you go when all the political and social circuses have taken the last ounce of energy you can muster? Mountains and Rivers! This is where my book began. In fact, I can still see the cherry blossoms that fell into the central book margin while I read the twisting, turning, makes-meaning-in-any-direction-you-read “Star Guage” by Su Hui.

What mind conceived this brilliance? And West Cove on Orcas Island became miraculously superimposed by the natural world of Wu Wei! The Chinese poets opened a door, and now there’s no going back. The only way forward is The Cabin at the End of the World. Create it! Read it!

Joe Gould first came to the world’s attention when Joseph Mitchell published two articles about him in the New Yorker in the mid-twentieth century. A self-described bohemian, he was an eccentric denizen of Greenwich Village who claimed to be writing “The Oral History of Our Time,” a massive, revolutionary book that Gould said would be read by generations yet to come. Or, was he really just a heavy drinking raconteur who ingratiated himself among some of the leading artists, poets, and writers of his day? Jill Lepore pushes Gould’s story beyond Mitchell’s original version, finding darker truths behind it.

On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found… Who could resist that?

I was glad I found this book and its author Evie Woods. She seduced me with her lovely writing and compelling characters. I loved the magical moments when a tree takes over a bedroom just to supply the occupant with books the tree thinks will help her.

I like the idea that no matter what baggage we carry—betrayal, abuse, lost love—we can grow, face our personal truth, and step into a wondrous world.

In his hundreds of poems, Frost wrote about a lot of things, but almost always about the fluid nature of the world and our efforts to give it shape and meaning. The very form of a poem, he believed, embodies those efforts. The question always remains: What form do we find, what form do we impose, and what self do we construct in doing so?

Start with “For Once, Then, Something,” in which he adapts the meter of classical poetry to the cadences of the English language and the ambiguity of modern life. Take a long look at the long poem “Home Burial,” in which a grieving couple clash over incompatible ways of understanding nature’s apparent indifference to human desire. Re-read “Mending Wall,” in which two people disagree about the meaning of the form they cooperate in imposing on the landscape.

And don’t neglect the letters in which Frost acknowledges… show more.