98 Books Like No Biking in the House Without a Helmet

I was stunned by the similarities between the men in Gupta’s life and my own. This book laid bare the violence of the model minority myth and how it erases pain, demands silence, and turns belonging into a performance.

I saw so much of myself in her unraveling of that narrative. They Called Us Exceptional reminded me that telling the truth about our families isn't betrayal, it’s a form of generational care. Prachi writes with a kind of fierce compassion that made me feel seen, especially in the messiness.

If you've ever felt the pressure to be exceptional at the expense of being whole, this book is a balm, a reckoning, and a quiet act of rebellion.

Hard to imagine a memoir about suicide can be entertaining but, honestly, it was.

Sean Dietrich’s father shot himself when Sean was a child. The book is a roller-coaster ride of emotions Sean experiences as he comes to terms with that event. While the backdrop of the story is that sad beginning, the details of Sean’s life lived along the way are often funny.

His description of math and why he hates it is downright hilarious: “Math is one of those things the good Lord allowed on this earth to remind mankind that the devil is real,” that paragraph begins. Sean details his journey from being a high school dropout to becoming an award-winning, hugely popular author and columnist with brute honesty, a distinctly Southern perspective, and a wit that puts him right up there with Will Rogers.

There is so much wit and humor in this memoir that touches upon the immigrant experience from the perspective of the first-generation adult child. Deb goes on a journey to learn who his parents are as individuals and gains a perspective that is often difficult to achieve in the Indian community because parents don’t often share with their children who they are on the inside. The vulnerability with which Deb shares his childhood desire to blend into the white community in which he was raised was so relatable because I’d had a similar upbringing in another part of the country. This book made me laugh hard, think more deeply, and want to know my parents better.

Dionne’s book speaks to me on such a personal level. The story follows her journey of uprooting her family to West Africa and shares the stories of the women she meets along the way, navigating extraordinary circumstances and hardship. I, too, did this.

In 2012, my three sons and I landed in Kigali, Rwanda, where we lived for a year. Having experienced firsthand the resiliency and tenacity of women, such as those Dionne encountered, I can’t recommend In Pursuit of Disobedient Women enough to learn more about the challenges and triumphs for women across Africa.

This hugely enjoyable book introduced me to the work of Nellie Bly, and for that alone I will forever be in debt to David Randall. Nellie Bly is just one of 13 great reporters discussed – others include William Howard Russell and James Cameron – but it was her exploits that most captured my imagination. She specialised in going undercover to expose wrongdoing, and her targets included those in positions of power responsible for everything from unsafe factory conditions to the inhumane asylums in which women were locked up for suspected insanity. Her stories were written in straightforward language but were genuinely sensational, raising awareness and helping to change social conditions for the better. As Randall concludes: "Nellie Bly was the very antithesis of cynicism."

I promised my publisher, who edited Kapuscinski, a book as elemental, pure, and wild as Kapuscinski's seminal account of the Angolan independence struggle in 1975.

Though I’m not sure I succeeded, Breakup is that book.

I was inspired by this classic of reportage for its simple and profound observations of the city, and countryside, trying to make sense of the chaos and what Angolans, in Portuguese, called confusão.

Most of Found Audio takes the form of a transcribed interview with an “adventure journalist,” whose story—even without the book’s surrounding architecture—is riveting. He seems to have discovered something mind-bending about the nature of dreams. But this interview is being delivered to the reader by a writer named N.J. Campbell, who received it (on cassette tape) from an audio engineer, who in turn received the tapes from a shady stranger, who refused to say much about them. The book’s overlapping narratives and absence of any “central authority” create a mobius strip. I love fictions that follow the advice of the sculptor Robert Smithson: “Establish enigmas, not explanations.” And Found Audio may be Exhibit A. 

This is a memoir by a 32-year-old Iranian-American journalist who, in 2009, was accused and sentenced to 8 years in Evin Prison for being an American spy. Paraphrasing my review in The San Francisco Chronicle, Saberi's skillful reconstruction of dialogue leads to a spot-on chronicle of the paranoia and utter buffoonery of the Iranian government and its apparatchiks. I was especially impressed by the way she survives her time in solitary confinement – the resources of her mind that keep her sane. Beyond that, this memoir is a kind of coming-of-age story for those of us in the diaspora who can be a bit naïve about how safe we are as journalists and US citizens in dictatorships. Saberi is freed after 4 months, thanks to international pressures, but she’s haunted by those she met in prison who are left behind. 

The first time I read David Rosenfelt’s Andy Carpenter series, I immediately thought that Groucho Marx had moved to North Jersey, gone into law, and adopted a rescue dog. Rosenfelt’s reluctant lawyer hero goes at his oddball cases with a collection of even odder associates. Dry, witty, and a little self-effacing, Rosenfelt’s style brings to life a cast of characters that made me reluctant to put his books down. I started the series with the third book, Bury the Lead, first but quickly caught up. The first book in the series is Open and Shut. Mystery and animal lovers will find a place in their heart and funny bone.

Neil Ansell is such an honest writer. I came to this book because I loved his other writing about nature and followed him back through time to the five years he spent living alone up a Welsh mountain, seeing no one for weeks on end, exploring and working in the woods and hills around him.

It’s a rich and deep description of place, but more than that, it’s a gradual unfurling of Ansell’s sense of self. In a later book, he writes of that time of prolonged solitude, ‘You slough off the skin of self, all self-awareness, and are left with pure sensation. Nothing has a name; it is only itself.’

Ansell is a slow-burning writer who I trust completely to take me, however slowly, to a new understanding.