Books like Subdivision — picked by fans

In this genre-bending novel, Ricky Rice is working as a janitor in an upstate New York bus station when he’s sent a ticket to Burlington, Vermont, with a note that reminds him of a promise he made years ago—a promise no one else could know about because he made it only to himself. There are a variety of crimes in the book, as well as several mysteries that unfold—not the least Ricky’s quest to understand the organization where he finds himself working.

As he does, he must sift through his past, including the narratives he’s grown up with and that he has used to understand and survive his world. I won’t tell you what the big machine is or how it works, but I loved this book and Ricky and the world he’s trying to (re)make. 

A reader begins a book only to discover that the same sixteen pages are printed over and over—so begins a journey across the beginning of novels and through continents. This is a book that breaks rules and taught me how to read it page by page—and I love that feeling.

Though first published in 1979, Calvino’s novel is remarkably timely with respect to the impact of data science and artificial intelligence on literature, as well as the “author’s position with regard to Trends of Contemporary Thought and Problems That Demand a Solution.”

Some might not consider this detective fiction, but I think—like The Aspern Papers (James) and The Savage Detectives (Bolaño)—the quest to find an obscure or missing text (or artist) fits within the genre and, indeed, is one of my favorite kinds of detective stories. 

This book is a traditional, hardboiled mystery about a young poet that goes missing at a writing program in Australia…except the whole thing is written in verse. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, mournful, insightful, and full of sinister characters like poetry professors who go on too long at readings.

It’s the kind of book you can read in an afternoon, though certain lines and images from the various poems have stayed with me long after. It also includes an Australian dictionary at the back with words like “lairy,” which means “visually loud; excruciatingly colorful.” What a word. Don’t tell the poets. 

The crime scene generally occurs near the start of a mystery—something incomprehensible and threatening the reader and detective will endeavor to explain by the book’s end. Sometimes, though, the world is the crime. In almost painfully beautiful language, this book sets us down in a frightening fairytale forest. We’re traveling with a failed detective looking for a runaway wife, but much of the investigative work emanates from the reader attempting—and often failing—to break through the atmosphere, through the visceral but unmappable feelings of danger and loss the text produces in order to find something that can be named, explained, neutered.

This is the kind of book that affected me sidewise; I never saw it coming, but it got me over and over again. The Spanish edition includes illustrations, the English a suggested playlist.

This book is a deeply researched account of one of the most famous women-only hotels, the go-to place for ambitious, aspiring career women from writers like Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath to actresses like Ali MacGraw and Jaclyn Smith. It is my favorite kind of history, a journey through the twentieth century told through the lives of fascinating women.

As a writer of feminist myths, Kartika Nair’s exquisite poetic retelling of the Mahabharata from the women’s perspective felt like it was written for me. The title is from the African writer Chinua Achebe’s words, "Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." Using formal poetry, free verse, and prose, Nair has created a palimpsest of the great Indian epic of kingship and warring dynasties which is several times the length of The Iliad and The Odyssey combined. Here the mothers, wives, sisters, and lovers of the protagonists tell their stories, providing a counterpoint to the much-quoted verse from the epic: "All that is found here can be found elsewhere, but what is not here can be found nowhere."

It has been years, and I cannot stop thinking about the visual this book left me with: a young woman sleeping in a makeshift plastic bubble under the sea's surface, tethered to a walkway across the Indian Ocean. I love when a speculative fiction book dives deep into exactly how a futuristic technology looks, feels, smells, integrates into life, and doesn’t just fill a plot point—which is probably why I was left with such a vivid image of this tent-bubble-habitat-material.

I am also an avid camper and know what it’s like to trust techy material in inhospitable circumstances. Take that feeling of trying to sleep while rain pours on a tent you hope is as waterproof as advertised. Now multiply it by 100 and add a violently undulating walkway across the Indian Ocean, and you get why I love this book. 

Wanderers is not a memoir. Andrews, who is a professor of literature in the UK, presents ten chapters on ten famous women writers who also walked.

I found it interesting to learn how some of the women left town before dawn to walk so that they would not be seen. Society at that time felt it was not safe for a woman to walk by herself. I was amazed at some of the distances that they walked; for example, in the early 1800s Ellen Weeton walked 35 miles in a day. 

I found the interconnection of walking to help writing and writing about walking fascinating. I will return to read this again and again. 

I may have admired Kincaid as a person even before I read her novel about a young woman who must find her way in life after her mother dies during childbirth. I admired Kincaid’s determined journey to become a writer: she left home as a teenager, worked, found a job as a staff writer for The New Yorker, then began writing stories and novels, even changing her name in the process.

Reading Autobiography—one of several of her books about the mother/daughter relationship—gave me a meaningful connection between the story being told and the language/syntax being used to tell that story. Kincaid’s amazing sense of honesty is only eclipsed by her lyrically perfect prose. I knew that if I found myself writing in that same beautiful style, I, too, might be able to tell my own stories as they should be told.

I also admired Kincaid’s ease in writing… show more.

I found this book fascinating. The guilds of early modern London were a male-only ‘closed shop’. But Laura Gowing’s pioneering study shows how resourceful women found ways to exploit loopholes and carve out a role in the world of skilled trades and crafts.

A guild member’s widow was permitted to continue her husband’s trade (provided she didn’t remarry), and she might take on a female apprentice and use the signing-on ‘premium’ to grow her business. Once the apprenticeship was completed, the young woman would now have the skills to set up on her own in the suburbs or provinces where guilds had no control.

I liked the case-studies where Gowing has been able to reconstruct individual lives to bring this new world vividly to life.