Books like The Grass Arena — picked by fans

Well-known American author Jack London experienced a genuine decline into vagrancy in the US during the late nineteenth century.

In his 1907 memoir, he depicts the realities of the vagrant’s life without flinching. The detailed descriptions of begging for sustenance from strangers’ homes, risking death to evade detection on fright trains, and the life of inmates in the state penitentiary are as gripping as they are appalling.

The only US book in this collection of recommendations, The Road confirms very similar experiences and challenges facing the homeless on both sides of the Atlantic.

The go-to book about voluntary homelessness, I always appreciate George Orwell’s amazing writing. It’s hard to put down.

The first half is about his time as a lowly kitchen assistant in the basement of a Parisian restaurant in the 1930s. The brutal divide between the rich and the destitute is better depicted here than in anything else I’ve ever read. The second half describes his time back in England and provides a heart-rending understanding of why homeless people are referred to as tramps and the ultimate emptiness of church-organized aid.

Although Orwell always had the option to opt out, his study of the lived experience of homelessness and the skill with which he captured it afterwards stand out as a colossus of the genre.

The only work of fiction on the list, Nobel Laureate Kurt Hamson’s Hunger (1980) was a game changer for modern literature.

Firmly anchored in the point of view of the narrator, we journey painfully with a man, a writer as a matter of fact, on the way down into the depths of meaningless, despair, and hunger. Adapted into several films, the story reflects how little society values the intellectual capital of people it perceives as the dregs and describes in detail the effects of starvation on the human mind.

A worrying and unsettling read, Hunger remains the best work of fiction ever written about destitution.

With a title good enough to inspire the naming of a famous British band, Welsh poet Davies’ 1908 love letter to tramps and hobos drew directly from his own experience as a drifter in the US in the late nineteenth century.

Davies captures the life of jumping freight trains, joining the gold rush, and paying “boodle” to stay in the relative comfort of American jails. I love this book because it depicts the romanticism of the wandering mendicant without painting over the cracks of the hardships of roofless life (including parting company with one of his legs under a train).

There also are moments of humor (e.g., learning how to sleep standing up!) and the fascinating account of struggling to get his writing published on his return from his travels. It’s a classic.

The brilliance of Shenk’s book is that even someone who didn’t know the basic rules of chess would be enthralled by the backdrops of the game he introduces to the reader. Chess is played around the world by hundreds of millions of people and Shenk delves into the reasons why the game has such perversely addictive appeal. 

As a child fascinated by chess, I devoured chess books about the old masters – colourful, eccentric geniuses who drew me into a world that I’ve never since wanted to leave!

Chess in those days was not just about who was the strongest, but also on a philosophical level about who was playing the “chess of the future”.

Hendriks examines the long rivalry between the first World Champion Steinitz and his challenger Zukertort through their writings – often conducted via fierce polemics in their respective newspaper columns – and their 1886 World Championship match.

It’s a moving human story which highlights that the winner’s narrative (“Steinitz won, and defeated an old-fashioned player with modern chess”) is not always the correct one! 

Until David wrote his book, there hadn’t been a biography of Kubrick in over twenty years. While his book is short, it is very readable, and I found it the most intriguing of the short biographies.

Mikics conducted new interviews and visited Kubrick’s archive in London. His readings of Kubrick’s films are precise and elegant.

This book was my first introduction to One-dimensional Chess. I assumed the idea was as ridiculous as other impossible games in the story, such as Spotless Dominoes, but then it occurred to me that maybe not.

I devised a version with a King, Queen, Knight and three or four pawns facing each other along a single line of spaces and amazingly it does kind of work, though it is probably more of a puzzle than a game. I later learned that there are many other versions of One-dimensional Chess devised by chess fanatics over the years.

Apart from that, the story is a thought-provoking triple fantasy that plays with the notion that perhaps life itself is just a game, a puzzle we have to solve before we can move on.

Sixteen-year-old Dylan has lost everything. His mother has thrown him out of their house and he’s forced to live on the streets, begging for handouts and avoiding the thugs that threaten him daily. During my work as a literacy mentor, one of the teachers I supported taught a particularly challenging group with a ringleader (I’ll call him Sean) who frequently interrupted lessons with unruly outbursts. I suggested that the teacher try ending his lessons ten minutes early and reading a few pages of Theories of Relativity as a reward when the group performed well. A week later when I came to observe the teacher’s practice, Sean stopped me before class and demanded, “Have you read Theories of Relativity?” I pretended I hadn’t and he breathlessly summarized the story they’d heard so far. And during the lesson, he shushed anyone whose behaviour might have interfered with that day’s reading, which… show more.

This book is the first to finally put to rest the blame-the-victim causal explanations for homelessness. Using economic and geographic data, Colburn and Aldern show that homelessness is the result of poverty, but not only poverty; for example, Detroit has low rates of homelessness.

Essential is the existence of economic inequities combined with the unavailability of affordable housing, for example, in New York City. This book makes my teaching about homelessness so much easier.