100 Books Like On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

The Moviegoer was the first novel I read which had little plot and a great deal of meaning. Basically, it’s about one man’s search for meaning in a world which values shallowness and consumerism above all else. It’s as relevant today as it was when written and the prose is amazing!

This book opens with a daughter's death, but it's really about everything that went unspoken long before that moment.

I love how Ng peels back the layers of race, gender, and parental expectation in a 1970s Midwestern family. It's a masterclass in showing how quiet misunderstandings and unvoiced desires can ripple through generations.

This brilliant classic of military history and human folly, first published in 1961, should have been read by America’s “best and brightest” architects of America’s 10-year fiasco. French Journalist and historian Bernard Fall vividly captured the sights, sounds, and smells of the brutal conflict between the French and the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists. I get angry every time I think of the arrogance of America’s leaders who never examined Fall’s insightful warnings of the futility of jungle fighting that would defeat the United States in the bloody years to follow. Fall’s blueprint for disaster graphically shows that even with lethal modern military force, the French could not defeat the hit-and-run tactics, ambushes, booby traps, and nighttime raids that would become drastically familiar to American troops. The final French downfall ended at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Street Without Joy has remained in print for half a century and I stress… show more.

This heartwarming, multigenerational drama about the Korean community in Japan swept me into another time and place. Born and raised in a poor fishing village in Japanese-occupied Korea, Sunja makes an impulsive decision in the pursuit of love that transforms the trajectory of her life.

Thoughtful, resilient, and fiercely independent, Sunja was a relatable character whom I desperately wanted to see thrive. I felt her heartache when she left her beloved Korea and shared her indignation at the discrimination she and her family experienced in Japan. Expertly crafted and keenly observed, Pachinko shows us how history and politics shape the lives of ordinary people, often for generations to come. 

I love this book because it reminded me that creativity isn’t something reserved for a certain type of person, it’s something I get to claim.

This book is for all us types who don’t see ourselves as creative or working in a creative field; it simply lays out our ability to bring creativity to our work.

This book taught me how we need to take risks with our creativity, especially when deciding what we want and how to get it. I connected with its message about imagining more for your work and life.

Read it, bought it for all my friends, and read it again.

Glennon’s writing style is so disarmingly honest, raw, and powerful that it brought me to tears with its authenticity and relatability.

Full of personal stories about being a mother, being gay, leaving a marriage, recovering from addiction, unpacking religion, and being a sensitive human in a hard, messy world, Glennon weaves healing with radical permission in the most beautiful ways.

Poignant and timeless, this book was a sensation when it came out and still hits home with every turn of the page.

A favorite quote: “My emotions. My intuition. My imagination. My courage. Those are the keys to freedom. Those are who we are. Will we be brave enough to unlock ourselves? Will we be brave enough to set ourselves free? Will we finally step out of our cages and say to ourselves, to our people, and to… show more.

Vietnam was a big war, as they say, and though it ended almost 50 years ago, its full story has yet to be told. However, many of its pieces lay in the much-overlooked yet incredibly nuanced reporting that women did in the war. 

Elizabeth Becker’s book explores the legacy of three of Vietnam’s unsung journalistic heroes. Each covered the war with a different angle, sense of purpose, and understanding of its—and their—place in geopolitical history. 

Becker’s vivid writing puts you next to photojournalist Catherine Leroy in the plane as she prepares to jump with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the war’s only airborne assault. Readers can almost hear the glasses clinking with ice around the Hotel Continental pool while intellectual Frances Fitzgerald shrewdly plums the unsuspecting diplomatic class for details that she’ll weave into her groundbreaking long-form reporting on the war. And my only heart nearly stopped the minute Kate… show more.

I love that this book does such a great job of capturing the many incongruities and quirks of life in South Africa, a country with such a complex, troubled history that it is still struggling to reconcile.

It’s a country of immense diversity (racially, politically, and culturally), which leads to some absurd situations. Some funny, some tragic. And it’s set against an incredibly unique and beautiful natural backdrop, and it’s at the bottom of the world, literally representing the global south/periphery. So there’s a ton of dramatic tension inherent.

I also relate with Noah’s story just in terms of the cross-cultural element; growing up with parents from different places and never quite fitting in. And yet he tackles these very serious, very bleak situations and experiences, at both the micro and macro levels, with humor.

This book is an intensely philosophical novel that tackles big subjects, like the nature of love, the limits and desirability of freedom, the expression of sexuality, and the very nature of human existence, while at the same time being immersive and easy to read. The main characters, Tomas and Tereza, are full of love for each other but fail to truly connect because of their personal frailties, which I believe is true of all of us at one time or another.

There are concepts from this novel that have become part of my own philosophy, in particular, that responsibility gives meaning to life. 

Sherry Buchanan takes us on the Ho Chi Minh trail in a riveting and as relevant a journey to study today as it was 50 years ago. She charts new territory - especially in the vivid, often heartbreaking stories of women who fought in the war as teenagers and the forced roles of housewives who stood on rooftops facing death to shoot down US planes that bombed their homes. Buchanan details the countless centuries of Vietnam's perilous path to freedom. But her vivid writing and crystal clear interviews with women--their youthful dreams and present-day realities--shine a powerful light on a war and a previously unexplored dimension that should never be forgotten.