Here are 100 books that Pay It Forward fans have personally recommended if you like
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Maybe it's me, but the stories I tell are often about people who insist they're absolutely fine. When they're not. Perhaps that's the most British thing in the world: to paint on a smile, say 'I'm fine,' and hope nobody asks again. The novels on my list have stayed with me because they catch people in the middle of pretending. They've made me laugh out loud on crowded trains. And nudge my sleeping husband because I had to tell him what just happened. More than anything, they reminded me that when we stop pretending… that's when the real story starts.
Bridget turns private humiliation into public comedy without ever giving up on her bruised heart.
I like to kid on that I read the classics, and Fielding's book is a true modern classic. Bridget Jones is the uber-loser turned winner. I remember reading this and feeling that delicious shock of recognition: my terrible choices, my doomed self-improvement plans, the way one bad decision always blossomed into five.
What I still love is how Fielding catches the gap between who Bridget thinks she ought to be and first-rate hopeful hot mess.
A dazzlingly urban satire on modern relationships? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?
As Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), she turns for support to four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.
Welcome to Bridget's first diary: mercilessly funny, endlessly touching and utterly addictive.
Helen Fielding's first Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, sparked a phenomenon that has seen…
A haunting portrait of what happens when ambition, grief, and guilt collide. Some books break your heart. Others help you pick up the pieces. A Fine Layer of Dust does both.
After one irreversible moment tears two families apart, everyone must confront the impossible choices that shaped them. This is…
I worked as a paralegal for many years and know how little justice there is in this world. Passion is a requirement if you toil in that legal arena of wit and woe. Even if you lose your case, you must go on. That’s when I had the epiphany that there are other forms of justice. I also realized that the occult does not necessarily mean bad or evil. If I’m losing faith, I pick up a novel about the delicious and refreshing possibilities of justice with a twist. This is a kind of justice where there is not necessarily a courtroom; there are no judges, no lawyers, and no jury.
Seldom do battered women get true justice. In this book, justice is served on a very cold plate.
Two sisters, Sally and Gillian, are witches by heritage. After their parent’s deaths, they grew up with their two aunts, also witches.
Sally was a happily married woman until her husband suddenly died. Gillian has lived a life of independence or what some might consider a wild life style. When Gillian’s boyfriend becomes a mortal threat, she gives him a potion, accidentally killing him. He comes back to haunt her from the grave. That’s when everyone in their family comes together to banish his evil spirit.
*25th Anniversary Edition*-with an Introduction by the Author!
The Owens sisters confront the challenges of life and love in this bewitching novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic, Magic Lessons, and The Book of Magic.
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have endured that fate as well: as children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and…
I love to tell stories, a love I discovered ever since I was a kid listening to my family who love to tell stories. Mine defy genres because the voice and characters guide me into how their tales should be told. I've written mysteries, YA and middle-grade books, a graphic novel, and courtroom drama. My newest book is driven by the character of Margaret Adams, who's seeking a new life after years of being buried alive with sometimes hilarious results. I just had to listen...
Maggie and Ira Moran's daylong trip to a funeral becomes a journey into and through their lives, family, marriage, and, yes, love.
The story is so deceptively simple that you think nothing is going on, but by the end, it left me floored with its humanity. The characters are supremely relatable, so much so that you're in the car with Maggie and Ira for every mile of the trip. When it won the Pulitzer Prize, I applauded.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Evoking Jane Austen, Emma Straub, and other masters of the literary marriage, Breathing Lessons celebrates the small miracles and magic of truly knowing someone.
Unfolding over the course of a single emotionally fraught day, this stunning novel encompasses a lifetime of dreams, regrets and reckonings—and is oftern regarded as Tyler's seminal work. Maggie and Ira Moran are on a road trip from Baltimore, Maryland to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania to attend the funeral of a friend. Along the way, they reflect on the state of their marriage, its trials and…
The House on Mountain Laurel Lane
by
Eileen Goudge,
A widow and mom of two struggles to let go of the past and embrace the future in a powerful novel about friendship, love, and taking risks by New York Times bestselling author Eileen Goudge.
Ever since her husband Sean’s death, Jo Myers just can’t move on. Until she receives…
I love to tell stories, a love I discovered ever since I was a kid listening to my family who love to tell stories. Mine defy genres because the voice and characters guide me into how their tales should be told. I've written mysteries, YA and middle-grade books, a graphic novel, and courtroom drama. My newest book is driven by the character of Margaret Adams, who's seeking a new life after years of being buried alive with sometimes hilarious results. I just had to listen...
Three generations of the Foster women, Grandmother Maxine, Mom Grace, and granddaughter Abbie, share not only blood but also waiting for love, for adventure, for life to start. They are all very human in their follies, hopes, and virtues.
I especially love Maxine and her obsession with getting to Graceland. You laugh and cry with them, despair and find joy with them, and in the end, you have become a member of the family.
Three generations of Foster women–senior citizen Maxine, attention seeker Grace, and aspiring artist Abbie–think they are nothing alike. But they all share a secret. They wait. For love, for attention, for life, for death, for Idaho’s warm, but promising summer to return. In their journeys between despair and happiness, they learn there are worse things than being alone, like waiting for the wrong person’s love. With sensitivity and humor, WAITING carries readers into the hearts of three women who learn that happiness comes from within.
When I was growing up, my favorite books were about kids getting lost in the wilderness. Now, as an artist and writer, I love to create stories about people’s connection to land and the plants and animals that inhabit natural spaces. The inspiration for my picture book biography, Alexander von Humboldt: Explorer, Naturalist & Environmental Pioneer, came after hiking many of the volcanoes that Humboldt had climbed some 200 years earlier in South America. Besides hiking, I occupy myself with drawing and watercolor painting, climate activism, and looking at bugs and rocks with my daughters. I’ve published four graphic novels, two picture books, and a cookbook about rice.
This book reminds me of my neighborhood in Brooklyn, with its sweltering summer streets and “empty” lots overflowing with weeds. Of course, as Lala discovers, an empty lot is rarely actually empty.
Lala develops a deep friendship with the plants in one patch of dirt and concrete—her own urban secret garden. When her mom makes her stay inside one especially hot day (“Stop playing with weeds and leaves!” her exasperated mother cries), Lala mourns not being able to visit her beloved garden. But her care and kind words have grown something magnificent… And I adore the loose, brushy artwork in this book.
Winner of the 2022 Ezra Jack Keats Illustrator Award!
From debut author-illustrator Gracey Zhang comes a timeless and timely picture book that celebrates the unassuming power of kind words.
Oh, there goes Lala! She carries a pot of water around the corner, down the block, and over the fence, to a patch of dirt and concrete where tiny weeds sprout. "Hello, hello, friends!" she whispers. Lala waters the plants every day, but it is her kind words that make them sway and nod.
Lala's wild nature and quiet compassion enchant in this evergreen story about the power of kind words…
The first twenty-five years of my life appeared to be atypical for an inner-city African American boy from a large family. Only a small number of children were bused to more “academically advanced” schools. I earned that honor by frequently running away from the local school. Overcoming the challenges of being a minority in a demanding, predominantly Jewish, school district eventually benefited me greatly. In the early 1970s, my parents did something unprecedented for a working-class African American family from Queens: They bought an old, dilapidated farmhouse in Upstate New York's dairy country as a summer home. What other unusual life experiences that impact people of color have taken place on the American tapestry?
This beautiful homage to a father from “The Greatest Generation” reads like a sermon with several urgent messages: To be kind, timely, and disciplined. Make helping a regular part of life, do every job right, listen and learn. Be a person of impeccable character, and stand strong even when times are tough.
After his wife died, Rick Rigsby was ready to give up. The bare minimum was good enough. Rigsby was content to go through the motions, living out his life as a shell of himself. But then he remembered the lessons his father taught him years before- incredibly simple, yet incredibly profound.
These lessons weren't about advanced mathematics or the secrets of the stock market. They were quite straightforward, in fact, as Rigsby's father never made it through third grade. But if this man's instructions were powerful enough to inspire one of his children to earn a Ph.D. and another to…
It might be a stretch to call me an expert in ethics, but I have taught ethics for more than 30 years and I’ve read deeply in the field of behavioral ethics. I'm proud of the work I’ve done with the Ethics Unwrapped video project, though most of the credit goes to filmmakers Cara Biasucci (co-author of Behavioral Ethics in Practice: Why We Sometimes Make the Wrong Decisions) and Lazaro Hernandez (producer ofEthics Unwrapped). My passion for this topic is driven largely by the fact that I want my two daughters to live in a world where most people are trying to do the right thing most of the time.
I know and admire Paul Woodruff, a noted philosopher at the University of Texas. His worldview has been shaped by his experiences as a young soldier in the Vietnam War and he has spent much of his professional life trying to make sense of those experiences.
The book begins with Woodruff remembering a time, 50 years ago, when he was lying in ambush in Vietnam, pondering the question that he attempts to answer in this book: “What makes the difference in a human being between acting ethically and not? Specifically, in a soldier, between committing atrocities and holding back?” He realized at that moment that all his philosophy training at Princeton had not helped him answer that question.
Much of his discussion in this book, written half a century later, finds useful guidance by focusing on the psychological influences of behavioral ethics rather than the philosophical musings of Socrates.
In Living toward Virtue, Paul Woodruff shows how we can set about living ethically through self-questioning, which enables us to avoid moral injury by getting clear about what we are doing and why we are doing it. Self-questioning also helps us recognize the limits of our knowledge and so to avoid the danger of self-righteousness. Using real-life examples, Woodruff shows how we can nurture our souls, enjoy a virtuous happiness, and avoid moral injury as much as possible.
This is in the spirit of Socrates, who urged everyone to commit to a lifelong activity of self-examination. By contrast, modern philosophers…
I’m a Canadian writer living in southern British Columbia. When I was young, most people thought I was too small and frail to do awesome things. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand that my love for wild places and adventures was at the heart of who I was, and I began to see that I was much stronger than I thought. These days, I hike, climb, kayak, cross-country ski, and snowshoe – anything that gets me outside in nature. And I've done some awesome things out there! I want to change the way people see nature, not as something to be conquered, but to be treated with affection and respect.
This is one of the scarier disaster novels I’ve read, targeted at young adults rather than middle-grade readers.
People die in frighteningly believable ways in this story about a severe water shortage in California. I live in a semi-arid region that has been experiencing more frequent droughts in the last few years, so this novel’s premise felt plausible: the taps are literally turned off.
As well, the various characters’ reactions to the crisis reflected people I know, from preppers to climate changer deniers to those who dig deep and find kindness no matter how bad things get.
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What is this book about?
“The authors do not hold back.” —Booklist (starred review) “The palpable desperation that pervades the plot…feels true, giving it a chilling air of inevitability.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The Shustermans challenge readers.” —School Library Journal (starred review) “No one does doom like Neal Shusterman.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
When the California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, one teen is forced to make life and death decisions for her family in this harrowing story of survival from New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman.
The drought—or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it—has been going on for a…
I have been passionate about continuous learning and understanding why people act the way they do. The books I recommend cover the topic of continuous growth across different states and areas of life.
I started following Guy Kawasaki because of some of his ideas on communication, work, writing, etc. Wise Guy is an easy-to-read book in which Guy Kawasaki shares some of the things he has learned across different areas of life (work, relationships, mentorship, etc.).
I really enjoy the personal stories shared in the book, which have led the author to grow both personally and professionally. It also made me reflect on my personal stories and how they have contributed to the person I am today.
Silicon Valley icon and bestselling author Guy Kawasaki shares the unlikely stories of his life and the lessons we can draw from them.
Guy Kawasaki has been a fixture in the tech world since he was part of Apple's original Macintosh team in the 1980s. He's widely respected as a source of wisdom about entrepreneurship, venture capital, marketing, and business evangelism, which he's shared in bestselling books such as The Art of the Start and Enchantment. But before all that, he was just a middle-class kid in Hawaii, a grandson of Japanese immigrants, who loved football and got a C+…
I’ve been obsessed by the story of Anne Bonny and Mary Read since I heard about them in an Adam Ant song "Five Guns West". I know more than is good for me about pirates and wanted to share some of the fantastic books that inspired me when I wrote the novel Bonny & Read. Eighty years before Pride and Prejudice was written there were women armed with cutlasses roaming the Caribbean looking for ships to plunder – I want to give everyone the opportunity to learn more about this incredible hidden history.
A pirate ship was a place where the whole crew got an equal share of plunder, and where every man (or woman) had a voice.
They tore up the rulebook and made a better one that served them better. These two truths form the foundation of a business movement – Be More Pirate – which uses the theme of ‘making good trouble’ as the basis for better work/life satisfaction and building successful businesses.
It also makes the case that Anne Bonny via Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the Masses is actually the model for The Statue of Liberty. How great is that?!
Whatever your ambitions, ideas and challenges, this book will revolutionize the way you live, think and work today, and tomorrow.
Pirates didn't just break the rules, they rewrote them. They didn't just reject society, they reinvented it. Pirates didn't just challenge the status-quo, they changed everyfuckingthing. Pirates faced a self-interested establishment, a broken system, industrial scale disruption and an uncertain future. Sound familiar?
Pirates stood for MISCHIEF, PURPOSE and POWER. And you can too.
In Be More Pirate, Sam Conniff Allende unveils the innovative strategies of Golden Age pirates, drawing parallels between the tactics and teachings of legends like Henry…
