Books like Meshugah — picked by fans

Patrick O’Brian’s beloved Aubrey-Maturin novels are as much about music as they are about the navy.

Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin meet at a chamber music concert in the opening pages of this first novel in the series. The scene prefigures the way they will one day play duets at sea on their cello and violin.

I love how the opening scene uses music to establish their contrasting personalities. Jack, who is all enthusiasm, can’t help himself but beat time to Locatelli’s String Quartet in C Major. Stephen insults Jack by telling him he is ruining the concert; if he’s going to beat the measure, he should at least not rush. What could have led to a duel ends in a lifetime of friendship.

Many of us writers are subject to the terrible cliché of substance abuse, none so much as Charles Bukowski. Having dabbled in the debauched myself, Ham on Rye sadly reflects what life could be like if the idiocy of adolescence continues into adulthood. This book is hilarious, vulgar, shocking, and oddly insightful. Not only is this my favourite Bukowski book, but it’s the book that introduced me to his work and changed my writing forever.

This is one of those books that I had to put down a couple of times previously because the protagonist’s flaw hit too close to home. Jim is so ashamed of his past cowardice that each time his identity is found out, he will travel farther away from the spreading Western colonies. A Western marauder eventually invades the Malay and Bugis community where he lives, and Jim has to bear the consequence of speaking up for the man in good faith. After so many years, this book is still one of my top favorites because Jim finally stops running and faces his fear. He ultimately becomes the hero that he has always wanted to be.

Palace of Desire came out in 1957 in original Arabic and got translated to English in the early ’90s, and that’s when I read it. I’m not sure why NY waited so long, except that Naguib Mahfouz couldn’t get the right connection for those years. Your request for reasons that I chose this book made me take another look, and I’ll reread it soon. Thumbing through it now, it still flows with classic narrative, a form still vibrant in 1957, before books in English lost that traditional flow and began to read with a sameness, like most authors went to writing seminars or demanded their rights as women with feelings. I.e. Mahfouz reaches for nothing but the moment, which happens to be in a Cairo neighborhood populated with everyday Egyptians carrying on with life. It’s a slice unavailable to readers like me, revealing a reality far away and compelling, sitting… show more.

The Cloister: A Novel by James Carroll (Anchor, 2019) is a gripping, magical novel that dramatizes the connections between the medieval and modern worlds. Father James Kavanaugh meets Rachel Vedette at the Cloisters, the famous museum and gallery in upper Manhattan dedicated to the art of the Middle Ages. He is a parish priest with doubts and worries; she is a Holocaust survivor; and their relationship brilliantly conjures up the forbidden love affair between the medieval philosopher and “rock star,” Peter Abelard, and Heloise, an immensely talented nun. James Carroll, a former priest, is also the author of Constantine’s Sword, a memorable non-fiction book about the history of the Church and the Jews. The Cloister paints convincing pictures of Abelard and Heloise and creatively blurs the line between modernity and religious tradition.    

Though it is set just after the war, the characters in this novel cannot escape from their memories of the Holocaust or guilt at having survived. Yet they are also stuck in a comic scenario—through a complex series of events, the Jewish protagonist Herman has wound up with three “wives,” his first wife from before the war who he mistakenly assumed dead, the Polish Catholic peasant who hid him from the Nazis and he married out of gratitude, and his mistress and fellow survivor he met upon relocating to New York. The novel is both hilarious and heart-breaking—a potent reminder of the impossibility of ever leaving behind the worst horrors of this war.   

There are two reasons I picked up this book. Firstly, that title. I’m a happy sucker for oxymorons. Secondly, and embarrassingly, more importantly, someone I really fancied recommended this book to me. And I have no regrets. 

Anyone with a more sensitive constitution is easily offended and can’t find humour in darker subject matters is kindly invited to stay away. This book hilariously tackles the moral quandary of how to deal with someone you -- and the world -- thought dead. Worse still when they are an awful roommate who you desperately want out of your house.

The son of the protagonist wrote this book. His father Harry Haft was born in Poland under a different name, fought against the Nazis, got deported, and became a boxer in a subcamp of Auschwitz.

He won almost all of his fights, his nickname became The Beast of Auschwitz. Harry Haft survived the war because of his boxing skills, emigrated to the US, and made a name for himself as a professional boxer. Incredible story about determination, luck, and surviving. 

During the years immediately following World War II, around a quarter of a million Jewish Holocaust survivors gathered in displaced persons camps and other places in Allied-occupied Germany. Atina Grossmann examines the complicated and unexpected interactions between those Jewish refugees and their German neighbors and American occupation soldiers, exploring political and ideological questions as well as details of everyday life, with a particular focus on the role of gender and sexuality. Paying attention to multiple voices and perspectives, Grossmann brings to life the hardships, dilemmas, ironies, and hopes of postwar displacement and reconstruction. 

This is a Cold War chronicle of homesickness and identity change, written by a Polish woman who came to Canada as a child with her family.

Hoffman had to learn not only how to live in a radically new culture, or how to speak a new language, but also how to get used to a new name and to a new lifestyle. This book showed me how to make a potentially cheap sentiment, nostalgia, into a tool of lucid introspection.

As an immigrant myself, I learned from Hoffman to not feel like I must choose between loyalties—to my previous self, before I left my country, and to who I am now, in a new culture. In key moments, Hoffman likes to imagine who she would have been if she had stayed in Poland, not to compare to who she is in North America but to find a third, middle point… show more.