100 Books Like Sun Don't Shine

This book takes on class, gender, and addiction, plus a host of other contemporary issues facing rural America and the nation—and Smarsh still manages to craft a compelling, human memoir.

This book might be the antidote to all the easy, anodyne, partisan conclusions the talking heads offer about rural America. As someone who grew up in rural America but now lives in a small city on the West Coast, I felt challenged reading this memoir.

Smarsh is the best kind of rabble-rouser; she’s telling it straight no matter who is listening. 

I am always looking for books for the middle-grade kiddos in my life, and this book is the perfect book for a fierce youngster. It follows the story of Tessa, a somewhat mouthy (in the best way) young teen who is dealing with a host of issues, including the recent death of her mom.

The minute I met Tessa, I was rooting for her. She's angry and grieving but also charming and tender-hearted. When her aging cat leads her to an abandoned house in the neighborhood, a whole new realm opens to her–one with ghosts, goths, and unexpected allies.

This book is my new favorite gift!

This was such a fascinating read for me. It’s an epic tale told over the lifetime of a woman warrior named Akmaral that interweaves fact and folklore into a mesmerizing story about matriarchal power, the ferocity of love and hate, and the alternating currents of battle and peace.

I was so absorbed in the beautiful language of this book that I couldn’t put it down. The novel recreates the expansive, unforgiving world of 5th-century Central Asia, a setting firmly rooted in the natural and spiritual worlds and the struggle to survive.

While being dazzled by the writing, I felt like I had a crash course in ancient history as well!

Miriam Toews has an incredible writing style that is somehow whimsical and also serious, and this book is no exception.

I fell so in love with the characters in this book that I didn’t want the story to end. The novel follows young Swiv, a quirky and fierce kid who is dealing with a lot of very grown-up issues as she navigates an absent father, a feisty grandmother, and a single mother.

While this might sound like a Young Adult novel, it is very much a book for adults, which just shows how talented Toews is at using the voice of young protagonists to unearth some very heavy and serious adult topics. Still, even with the heavy content, Swiv’s special spirit gives the book a welcomed lightness. 

Linka’s art-thriller is smart, compelling, and almost impossible to stop reading. Not only does it tackle being a first-year student in an art school in Los Angeles, it examines a subject that is often glamorized without being scrutinized: living in poverty as a homeless-at-times college student and artist. The myth of the starving artist is torn apart in this contemporary, empathetic, and intriguing story as we follow Sabine Reyes into the world where she thought she belonged, only to find out it’s not as picture-perfect as it seems. There’s some good romance in here, too and Linka’s sharp, penetrating stare at the character’s choices makes us, as readers, question what would we do? Who would we trust? And what happens when we’re wrong?

I was lucky enough to read this book when it was still a manuscript. It’s the story of 10-year old Hastin, driven by poverty but also by his impulsiveness and youthful optimism. Running away from home to make money to help his mother and sick sister, Hastin ends up far from his village in India, and in the clutches of a cruel circus owner. He also becomes keeper to a baby elephant, Nandita. As an outsider to the setting of this book, Lynne Kelly dug in, persevered, and did the hard work of writing the story with respect and care. The baby elephant is a pure delight. 

I liked this book immediately, and not just because it is written by someone I know and have worked with for decades and greatly respect. The book includes parts of the author’s early iconic work on homelessness in New York City, which, when published as a report in 1981, first focused public attention on the then-growing crisis.

The book includes stories of homeless New Yorkers that the author encountered when he lived for a period on the streets, in shelters, and flophouses as part of his research—an approach I found fascinating—as well as scholarly analysis. It’s a rich resource I return to again and again for insight, understanding, and, as needed, inspiration.

Booth is an extraordinary writer and Tyrell is her signature story. Tyrell is a young man living under incredible pressure with a family that needs him to have both feet on the ground. But he's always on the verge of going the wrong way. Will the need for fast money put him in prison like his father? Booth is in complete command of her characters, story and pacing here. A marvelous book that will make you grateful for your own choices in life.

From the moment I picked this up, it gripped me.

Virginia Eubanks writes in an incredibly immersive and engaging style, making her book as compulsive as a work of fiction—and equally hard to put down. It exposes the deeply toxic consequences of the way automated decision-making increasingly dominates our public institutions, creating a sort of “twenty-first century digital poorhouse”.

This automated inequality denies citizens their humanity and any sense of agency, condemning them to the sort of negative moral judgments and cycle of decline and despair that would have been familiar to Charles Dickens in his day. 

I love how we can catch glimpses of Irish women’s lived experiences because sources from particular moments in their lives have survived the decades. Although this social history of letters written to the archbishop of Dublin is not specifically a women’s history book, many of those who wrote for help were women and so the book offers a glimpse of their often-difficult lives.

I love how Earner-Byrne privileges the ‘voices’ of letter writers in her book, exploring what they put in writing, as well as what they implied and their silences. I found this a very thought-provoking analysis, pushing me to think about the ways that people frame their narratives and how what they choose to include or exclude about their lives informs historians.