Here are 100 books that Notes to John fans have personally recommended if you like
Notes to John.
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From political economist, cabinet member, beloved professor, media presence, and bestselling author of Saving Capitalism and The Common Good, a deeply felt, compelling memoir of growing up in a baby-boom America that made progress in certain areas, fell short in so many important ways, and still has lots of work to do
"Important and galvanizing.” —Senator Bernie Sanders
"Essential reading for understanding this moment in American history.” —Molly Jong-Fast, New York Times bestselling author of How to Lose Your Mother
A thought-provoking, principled, clear-eyed chronicle of the culture, politics, and economic choices that have…
Jo Jackson believes she has put behind her difficult childhood with a charismatic but sometimes violent father. One day, however, out of the blue, she is moved to write about him. Immediately she comes unstuck, face to face with things that don't add up, and a growing sense of mystery…
A revelatory biography of Robert Redford, written in close collaboration with the extraordinary actor and director himself, revealing the complex man beneath the Hollywood façade.
“As incisive a biography of Redford as there is ever likely to be.” —The New York Times
Among the most widely admired Hollywood stars of his generation, Redford has appeared onstage and on-screen, in front of and behind the camera, earning Academy, Golden Globe, and a multitude of other awards and nominations for acting, directing, and producing, and for his contributions to the arts. His Sundance Film Festival transformed the world of filmmaking; his films…
Born to a Tibetan mother and an American father, I was raised in the U.S. As a girl, I wondered why things were always changing: the seasons, people, and places I loved. Growing older, I became fascinated with how to find happiness in a world where nothing lasts forever. After college, I lived in India with my Tibetan grandmother, learning about Buddhist “bardo” perspectives on life’s ephemerality. I realized that though we resist change, accepting impermanence allows us to live happier lives. I publish widely on impermanence and host a Tricycle interview series about bardo, with guests including David Sedaris, Elizabeth Gilbert, Malcolm Gladwell, Ann Patchett, and Dani Shapiro.
Some years ago, my father fell ill and I barely made it to his bedside in time to say goodbye.
Written after her husband’s sudden death, Didion’s book has not only helped me come to terms with losing my father, but has also shed light on our all-too-human response to endings. Didion is committed to analysis yet acknowledges our irrationality in the face of loss—like when she keeps her husband’s shoes, believing he’ll need them if he returns.
I can relate to this: when my father died, I kept one of his favorite shirts and his birding binoculars, thinking he might want them later. Didion doesn’t offer closure, just a portrait of the grieving mind and heart that I find consoling and, in the end, life-affirming.
From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life - in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve -the Dunnes were just…
Lerner's memoir of approaching adulthood in the mid-sixties is deliciously readable, but deceptively breezy. His family is affluent, his school engaging, his friends smart and fun. He has his first car, and drives with abandon. The American moment promises unlimited possibility. But political and cultural upheavals are emerging, and irresistible.…
I’m the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once. I often say it’s a book about being a mess in your twenties, but to speak more personally, writing it was a necessity, a way to make sense of both the intensity and mundanity of my own experiences. I love a book where you can palpably feel the author working to make sense of their own life, through language—and, in turn, sorting out what it is for any of us to be a person. Books like these are essential reading when life feels thorny, beautiful, and impossible to make sense of, and all you can do is try to write it down.
I still remember, in the year 2010, reaching the end of the essay "Goodbye to All That" where the date of publication is noted—1967—and how startled I was to realize something that feels so contemporary and alive had been written decades earlier. As in so much of her work, in this collection Didion offers vivid details from her life and brings her extraordinary powers of analysis to understanding their meaning.
As she once put it herself—in another essay, "Why I Write"—"Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”
Joan Didion's savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were
In her non-fiction work, Joan Didion not only describes the subject at hand - her younger self loving and leaving New York, the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion…
When I was a young adult, I lost someone whom I’d loved intensely. In the aftermath, I experienced a grief that would not subside for more than a year and interfered with my ability to function. This is known as complicated grief. As a result, I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject, looking for books that present complicated grief in a humane and understandable manner. While there is a place for self-help books, I’ve found creative literature to be more helpful, especially books written in the first person that offers a metaphorical hand to the reader. I published a detailed essay in Shenandoah on this topic.
C.S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia books, but the book of his that sticks with me the most is this one, a first-person contemporaneous account of the famed fiction writer’s mourning for his wife. He began a journal shortly after she died and stopped when he reached the end of the notebook and then published it.
When I read it, I was dealing with intense grief that I felt no one around me understood, and reading Lewis’ journal/memoir made me feel like someone living in the same headspace had reached out his hand to me. One of the early statements in the book struck such a chord with me that I remember it to this day, more than 30 years later: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
The perennial classic: this intimate journal chronicling the Narnia author's experience of grief after his wife's death has consoled readers for half a century with its 'sensitive and eloquent' magic (Hilary Mantel)
'An intimate, anguished account of a man grappling with the mysteries of faith and love ... Elegant and raw ... A powerful record of thought and emotion experienced in real time.' Guardian
'Raw and modern ... This unsentimental, even bracing, account of one man's dialogue with despair becomes both compelling and consoling ... A contemporary classic.' Observer
'A source of great consolation ... Lewis deploys his genius for…
I love reading about life experiences, however raw or unflinching they get. Many of the books on this list inspired me to be just as honest in my own creative work. While writing Alligator Meat, which began as my English honors thesis and became my memoir, I kept coming back to these books for guidance.
This book remains the pinnacle of memoirs, in my opinion.
Didion’s ability to weave biting social commentary with vivid, unforgettable anecdotes continues to inspire me. I’m grateful to my creative nonfiction professor, Michael Hofmann, for assigning this book. Her language is rich, precise, and full of wit, and it kept me hanging on every word until the very end.
Joan Didion's hugely influential collection of essays which defines, for many, the America which rose from the ashes of the Sixties.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.
In this now legendary journey into the hinterland of the American psyche, Didion searches for stories as the Sixties implode. She waits for Jim Morrison to show up, visits the Black Panthers in prison, parties with Janis Joplin and buys dresses with Charles Manson's girls. She and her reader emerge, cauterized, from…
Winner of the Robert F. Lucid Award for Mailer Studies.
Celebrating Mailer's centenary and the seventy-fifth publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book illustrates how Mailer remains a provocative presence in American letters.
From the debates of the nation's founders, to the revolutionary traditions of western romanticism,…
The concept of whether a woman can truly be the subject of her own life has always fascinated me. It was an invisible struggle I didn’t know I had. Until I set out to finish the 54 unmet dreams of my late father, whose life had been cut short in a car crash. It wasn’t until I looked at the world through main character lenses, the kind that just seem to come more naturally to men, that I was able to see myself truly. This is just one lesson from my book. If you’ve ever felt different, remember: you’re not. You just haven’t seen yourself as the main character yet. These books will guide you.
This book was an integral resource when I began to write my book. It helped me shape the structure of my book.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”
This, and other books I've read, did this. My favorite books of all time have inventive structures. And reading these helped me find mine.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the…
Written in Joan Didion's unique, razor-sharp style, Play It as It Lays snapshots 1960's Hollywood and explores the nihilistic, uncaring and frankly depressing illusion that was and probably still is much of tinseltown. Centred around Maria Wyeth, who some say was at least partly autobiographical, the cast of characters are beautifully depicted, their vicious interactions and intentions carefully laid bare.
I knew little about the author and her work before picking up this slim volume, but polished it off in an afternoon and was left wanting more, much more.
A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking.
Benny called for a round of Cuba Libres and I gave him some chips to play for me and went to the ladies' room and never came back.
Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to pain and please, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires…
I grew up in a woman-centered household, the youngest with two older sisters. I was the only child of my mother’s second marriage, and a space of ten and twelve years separated me from my sisters. My sisters and mother always felt like an intense unit that didn’t include me, and that yearning and outsider status defined my life and made me a lover of books about mothers and daughters and the female world.
This book is an elegy to the author's daughter, who died in 2005 at age 39. What compelled me was how Didion pieced together fragments of memory, little snapshots of vivid detail that evoked powerful feelings.
I found the writing raw, unpolished, ragged, and endlessly revealing; one might say heartbreaking. She created a kind of lyricism that struck a deep part of me more than any narrative and has stayed with me.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Richly textured with memories from her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion is an intensely personal and moving account of her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness and growing old.
As she reflects on her daughter’s life and on her role as a parent, Didion grapples with the candid questions…
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes a new way to look at American history: through the lens of giving thanks.
Author Denise Kiernan tells the fascinating story of Sarah Josepha Hale, a widowed mother of five who campaigned…
COVID killed my father early on during the pandemic. Every day, I blogged about him. First, when he was in the ICU and I was begging the universe to save him. Then, after he died, as I grieved in a world that seemed cold and lonely. I wrote about Dad, telling stories of happier times, to keep him alive through my memories and to share his life with others. Soon, friends started recommending books about grief. In reading, feeling, and absorbing the pain of others, I somehow felt less alone.
Even though Adichie’s father did not die from COVID, it happened during the pandemic when the world shut down. To this, I could relate all too well.
I spent the pandemic, and months afterward, grieving my father’s death, and I found comfort reading the stories of other daughters whose dads have died.
A personal and powerful essay on loss from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun.
'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language'
On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria.
In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father.…
