Here are 42 books that The Ballad of Falling Rock fans have personally recommended if you like
The Ballad of Falling Rock.
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Requesting that I justify my credentials as a misfit, eh? Okay, then. I personally differ from almost everyone around me in many ways, but most notably with respect to faith, sexual arousal, and use of the intellect. I’ve always sought to cultivate and nourish my spiritual side, but faith-based Western religions never resonated with me—I instead cobbled together a discipline encompassing yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, and Ahimsa—which has served me for over half a century. From the earliest age, sexual arousal has involved scenarios where one person cedes power and the other wields it. And I have always obsessed about any bit of minutia my brain happened to seize upon.
In this classic, heart-wrenching novella, the misfit character is Lenny—a gigantic, strong, but intellectually challenged migrant worker in California in the 1930s. Despite being faithfully chaperoned by his lifelong friend George, who tries his best to keep Lenny out of trouble, it seems fated that trouble will inevitably find Lenny. And when it does, Lenny—who is in truth a huge, confused child in a world of rough, unforgiving men—pays the ultimate price.
This story resonates especially strongly with me because I had a younger brother, now deceased, who was severely intellectually challenged.
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.
Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie have nothing in the world except…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Miyamoto Musashi was the child of an era when Japan was emerging from decades of civil strife. Lured to the great Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 by the hope of becoming a samurai-without really knowing what it meant-he regains consciousness after the battle to find himself lying defeated, dazed and wounded among thousands of the dead and dying. On his way home, he commits a rash act, becomes a fugitive and brings life in
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.
If a book kicks off with someone planning to end it all… at a fancy hotel, in the middle of an influencer wedding… I'm in.
The premise suggests anything but romance and comedy. The Wedding People soon becomes warm, strange, and generous. I've been to a fair few pressure cooker nuptials in my time. Guests ratchet up smiles no matter what.
I loved how, in this book, grief collides with celebration. More than that, I love how the story ends on a hopeful note, rather than trying to leave everything neat and tidy. There's a glorious sense of people behaving very badly indeed, and still finding ways to be happy. And in dark times, that's exactly what I ask of a good book.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A Today Show #ReadwithJenna Book Club Pick
A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.
It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming…
Katie's Gamble is an unexpected, unique story about a young woman who's trying to support her younger siblings by keeping her family's confectionery shop open.
In order to do that, she has to take on her older brother, who's a notorious gambler in Louisiana. Additionally, she has to outsmart Rowdy…
France claimed me early, when I was a teenager. A French major, a Rotary scholarship year in the Loire Valley, and decades of return visits later, I'm still not done with this gorgeous country. Since retirement, my husband and I spend at least several weeks there every year, and in 2011, we lived in France for three months during an adult gap year. My third book, a novel set in Paris and Normandy, is the most recent evidence that France and her food, wine, culture, literature, art and landscapes, have never loosened their hold on me.
This book was my introduction to Kristin Hannah, and she has had me hooked ever since.
The novel follows two sisters in occupied France during World War II. They live separate lives, make impossible choices, but each finds a way to resist. Just when you think the story cannot demand more of these women, it does. I read with my heart in my throat.
The book feels achingly current. Authoritarianism, the fear it manufactures and the humanity it tries to grind down, is as recognizable now as it was in 1940s France.
I loved that the characters weren’t passive victims. They push back at great cost, and the book makes a quiet, powerful argument that will stay with me: resistance is always possible, and that love has a way of outlasting even the worst of what human beings do to each other.
Soon to be a major motion picture, The Nightingale is a multi-million copy bestseller across the world. It is a heart-breakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the endurance of women.
This story is about what it was like to be a woman during World War II when women's stories were all too often forgotten or overlooked . . . Vianne and Isabelle Mauriac are two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals and passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path towards survival, love and freedom in war-torn France.
What an utterly charming book. It's written beautifully, has characters I cared for, and was literary while still being easy to digest and understand. It often delves into the brutality of war but the chapters are so short that you're in the darkness for a brief time before taking a breather. I enjoyed it immensely.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION
A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.'
For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home.…
I am very much typically in the "economics is not a real science" camp, but I do believe that it can still show us useful things - after all, money and goods are motivators by which people live and die, especially under capitalism. This book discusses a bunch of broad trends and how they indirectly affect other inputs, without falling prey to the reactionary free market idolatry that would often poison such a narrative. It's also written in a wonderfully accessible manner, and its discussion of how the legalization of abortion positively influenced crime rates was outright fascinating. (Of course, given relatively recent events, things may not augur well for that trend.)
The legendary bestseller that made millions look at the world in a radically different way returns in a new edition, now including an exclusive discussion between the authors and bestselling professor of psychology Angela Duckworth.
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? Which should be feared more: snakes or french fries? Why do sumo wrestlers cheat? In this groundbreaking book, leading economist Steven Levitt—Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and winner of the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark medal for the economist under 40 who has made the greatest contribution to the discipline—reveals that…
Papyrologist Lisa Emmer's world flips when the Sûreté detains her at her Metro station with news of the savage murder of the esteemed Paris historian Dr. Raimond Foix, her friend and mentor in the study of ancient documents.
Horrified, Lisa finds clues at the crime scene left behind for her…
I’ve been interested in stories about power, exploitation, and female resilience for as long as I can remember. As a former professional dancer, I grew up in a world where the body was watched, judged, disciplined, and expected to perform, no matter the circumstance. My later experience as a physician scholar and as a mother has deepened my interest in the systems that shape girls’ and women’s ideas about their own lives. Finally, as a survivor, I also understand how these experiences can distort a girl’s sense of herself. I come to these books from the intersection of art, medicine, feminism, and lived experience.
For millennia, we’ve heard the stories in Greek mythology about gods who come down to earth to rape women (Zeus got around), women as seductive sirens who lure sailors to their doom, or goddesses and mortal women alike being exiled.
Because of that, I was intrigued to read this book, a retelling of the familiar narrative, but from the perspective of a woman. I found this book to be very empowering.
I identified with the main character, a woman named Circe (in actuality a goddess) who is exiled because of her powers of witchcraft. However, in her exile, she finds that leaning into her power without the judgment of others makes her stronger.
I loved reading classic Greek mythology, complete with all the familiar characters, told from a woman’s perspective.
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. Circe is a strange child - not powerful and terrible, like her father, nor gorgeous and mercenary like her mother. Scorned and rejected, Circe grows up in the shadows, at home in neither the world of gods or mortals. But Circe has a dark power of her own: witchcraft. When her gift…
I re-read the first six books of Frank Herbert’s Dune series this year. I only last read them forty years ago as a teenager. I remember much from the movies and the various mini-series, but had forgotten how these six books are epic masterpieces in and of themselves. They present a much richer and more detailed universe than I ever remembered, or was able to absorb back in my teen years. Herbert’s epic is a philosophical treatise on the nature of political power and a speculative treatise on the nature of humanity’s future. (The first six books are: Dune (1965), Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984) and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985))
Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, there was Dune: winner of the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and widely considered one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.
Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person's lifespan to making interstellar travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world of Arrakis.
Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe.
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Yeah I know, I'm super late to the party. But I wanted to find out what all the hype was about and it turns out it was justified. Amazing book and very topical to current events.
Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. But Katniss has been close to death before - and survival, for her, is second nature. The Hunger Games is a searing novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present. Welcome to the deadliest reality TV show ever...
