Books like Running in the Family — picked by fans

Like many people, I’d heard so much about this classic that I was braced for disappointment the first time I read it.

But no, du Maurier’s rich, atmospheric prose gripped me from that famous first line. While I agree about the power of the iconic cast, such as the infamous Mrs. Danvers, I feel that the setting itself is just as powerful a character. I especially love du Maurier’s way of personifying the setting, so that things such as trees, and plants, and buildings come alive with malevolence.

The opening pages, for example, immediately fill you with unease despite the narrator talking about nothing more than the driveway leading up to the house on the estate! From the woods that “crowded, dark and uncontrolled” and the beeches with “white naked limbs” to the hydrangeas “rearing to a monster height without a bloom, black and ugly” and the nettles that “choked… show more.

There is nothing like this groundbreaking memoir—it is as good as it gets—and it has probably influenced every memoir since (including my own).

Kingston is a poet, and I find it impossible not to sink into the striking, gorgeous language and imagery as she describes growing up between multiple worlds: the China her parents emigrated from, the California of a first-generation daughter of immigrants, the ghost-filled China of her mother’s “talk stories,” and her inner life and growing awareness. She weaves family stories, famous myths, and her own girlhood experiences into a beautiful and unforgettable narrative.

I probably re-read it once a year.

When I came across this book, I was on the point of giving up reading modern novels. Everything I had read recently was such a let-down at the end that sometimes I threw the book across the room in reader rage.

At last, in Rushdie, I found someone who did not disappoint. As I approached the end, I became breathless, worrying that the story was going to sink like a soufflé, but it didn’t. It just kept on rising.

Once upon a time in Fairgrounds, there was a contraption called the Hammer and Bell. It was a test of strength to see if you could make the bell ring. Most couldn’t. Most got the marker some way up the calibrated column only to see it hesitate, then begin its descent. Midnight’s Children made it to the top.

What makes a good ending? For me, it is some transcendent statement of… show more.

This book! Condé has based her novel’s titular narrator on a real enslaved woman who was a victim in the Salem witch trials and conjured a first-person account of her life as a free woman born in Barbados to one enslaved in a cold, foreign Massachusetts village.

“I can look for my story among those of the witches of Salem, but it isn’t there,” laments Tituba. She longs for the love of men who don’t deserve her, for the comfort of ancestors far away, for a returned sense of freedom and joy.

I am in love with this magical, tragic story and this defiant narrator full of compassion even when she’s been mistreated terribly. 

If you already know a lot about India and are interested in an unusual insight into the role of temples in the history, culture, architecture, and myths of the subcontinent, then this is for you. It will also introduce you to thirteen writers who include journalists, academics, and authors. Each one was asked to write about one temple, recounting its origins and the mythology and history surrounding it. It’s beautifully illustrated by Mistunee Choudhury. You can enhance the experience by googling the locations. It has introduced me to some must-see places to go on my want to visit list. I visited the unforgettable temples of Khajuraho and they appear in my own book.

This is a book by a former top diplomat of India that lays out in a clear and concise fashion India’s priorities, its interests, and its concerns. Real life examples are cited to explain the choices India made, or didn’t make, and the reasons behind those decisions. As someone who is passionate about foreign policy, and who loves archival research, I loved reading a book written by a practitioner in which he tells you about the challenges they face and the real-life choices they have to make.

Justin Moore, the creator of the Lotus and the Artichoke website and recipe book series, has spent years traveling the globe and joining locals in their kitchens, learning directly from them how to prepare their traditional dishes. All in vegan versions, of course!

This is the book that kicked off the series of cookbooks back in 2012, and it offers a great overview of delicious, authentic vegan dishes from around the world. If you’re interested in a specific cuisine, you may also want to check out Justin’s vegan recipe books on Mexican, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Indian and Ethiopian cuisines.

He’s currently crowdfunding an update to the original book too, so keep an eye out for it when it hits the shelves!

This book is about the most horrifying loss imaginable: the author loses her parents, her husband, and her two young sons all at once, in the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the day after Christmas, 2004. She and her family were spending the holiday in Sri Lanka when the wave hit and overtook the jeep in which they were attempting to flee. I can’t come up with a better justification for suicide than this—she’s lost everyone; she wonders why she was spared, just to suffer these losses every minute of every hour of every day. The book is both a horror story and a testament to human strength. I assure you, you won’t be able to put it down. 

The scale of this ancient Indian epic is off the charts, fusing Hindu iconography with story beats of startling familiarity. Monkeys build a bridge between India and Sri Lanka, an army of demons takes on the vanguard of the gods and the villain is felled by a celestial bow. An influence on storytelling down the ages – notably Star Wars – it’s a tale as exciting as it is charming, with a surprisingly downbeat coda, as Queen Sita discovers that being rescued by her divine husband isn’t enough to survive the prejudices of her age.

Which version to read? Arshia Sattar’s 1996 translation is available in Penguin translation. I can’t testify to its accuracy, but it’s a magnificent read.

I found Rappaport’s book to be a really marvelous example of what is now being called “entangled history.” That kind of history picks up one topic and follows it wherever it leads. Because tangible things are easier to trace than intangible things (like ideas or rumors), commodity history is a lively subject, but this is something larger.

Tea has a chemistry to it that people gravitate toward, but there is so much more to the story about why it is so widely consumed in our world today. Once it was a substance grown and sipped in China, but European trading companies also discovered that markets for it could be created. It was famously a commodity deeply entangled in the opium wars, in the new plantation economies of northeastern India and Sri Lanka/Ceylon, and other systems of production.

But Rappaport has so much more to say about the consumption side, too:… show more.