100 Books Like The Great Gatsby

When I was young and ambitious and dreamed about politics, when I had studied Greek philosophy and ancient history in graduate school, the life of T.E.Lawrence–Lawrence of Arabia as he became known–a young Englishman who had never been in a battle before led the Arab Revolt which helped bring an end to the First World War, made everything seem possible.

Lawrence had his secrets, but some of them he shared. Two of them seemed to my young imagination everything that was needed. Speaking like Odysseus was one of them, which meant tailoring what you say to the audience you have. The other was to make the strength of your opponent his fatal weakness.

I did not realize until much later that the most important thing I learned from T.E. Lawrence was that what is best remembered is what is written, like this book, with clarity and passion.

We humans, for all our accomplishments in science, art, engineering, architecture, and literature, are haunted psychologically by the stark awareness of the reality that we all die. The various individual, group, and collective unconscious ways of trying to deny the reality of death are legion.

Becker stunned me with the way he organized a penetrating discussion of how many domains the effort to deny the reality of death enters. In the process of exploring these roads of travel to deny death, I found myself searching my own efforts to get meaning in my own life and try to prepare for my death.

The perfect crime? Actually not! It was so imperfect that it turned into the perfect crime by just pure luck. No clues were left behind. In fact, there was nothing to trace the murder back to the murderer except his own guilt. 

His guilt turned out to be his biggest punishment. When he finally surrenders, he feels at peace–the long-eluded peace. 

The book resonates with me on many levels. Firstly, of course, I’m a combat veteran, so the military and living through the hell of war are part of my identity. The author and I share an innate connection there.

But on a different level, it delves into the intangible burdens that resonate for years after the experience – the grief, the guilt, the terror, even the longing to return because it’s what you know.

The title is explicit, and I share the load with all my fellow veterans.

Written well after the event, this is a memoir of Orwell’s experiences right in the thick of the Spanish Civil War. What I liked most was the way I got a fulsome, heads-down immersion into the action. Orwell describes with harrowing detail the skirmishes across hostile territory, the injuries of battle, and the comradery, as well as the suffering where food was in short supply and guns did not always fire.

It is only at the end of the book that I had a chance to see all this activity in context, with fifty-three pages of appendices to explain the various factions involved. But you could skip that if you wanted in order to enjoy a record of on-the-ground reporting of the complex conflict that was the Spanish Civil war. 

At age 15, I was captivated by Ernest Hemingway and his depiction of Paris in the 1920s. This book today reignites the enchantment of those years. Hemingway's profound influence shaped my aspirations as a writer. Through his eyes, I can vividly see Paris's cafés, salons, and vibrant social scenes, which ultimately became the backdrop of my dreams.

This book, rich with lovemaking, drinking, writing, betting at the track, and the bohemian lifestyle of so many young artists in Paris, reawakens my desire to immerse myself in that world. Hemingway's narrative voice and his novels continue to speak to me in a language that feels intimately mine, reminding me of the undying impact of his work on my life and aspirations.

This book is full of stories, using case studies that include the lives of Walt Whitman, Saint Augustine, and Russian writer Leo Tolstoy—that I found fascinating. Here psychologist William James challenges what he—and I—were both taught: namely, that religions are primarily childish fantasies (the view of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, in The Future of an Illusion). But after James, as a young man, experienced a terrifying depression, he describes his surprise at what felt to him like a spiritual breakthrough that enabled him to recover. James skips questions about dogma and belief, instead identifies a range of different “varieties of religious experience” that, far more than “belief,” can give rise to spiritual insight. 

Set in Mexico in the 1930s when the revolutionary government engaged in an active campaign against the Catholic Church, Greene’s hero, the so-called Whiskey Priest, is a drunk who has also failed to adhere to his vow of chastity, but his kindness and commitment to worshippers make him an intensely sympathetic figure, as he is hunted by the local police chief determined to put him behind bars.

The book was a revelation to me when I first read it in college. I did not realize that the Mexican government had engaged in this war against the Church so recently. Nor did I realize that a novel so gripping could be told with such literary grace. 

I first read this book in 1987, when I was a fourth-year medical student. This is the book that really sparked my interest in psychiatry.

It opened my eyes to the possibility that even those in the most disturbed state of mind experience meaningful and understandable human dilemmas. It’s as fresh and relevant today as it was when it was first published six decades ago. A deeply humane text that humanizes the most disenfranchised and lost of our human family.

Frank McCourt's classic book, the memoir of his childhood, is proof in the pudding that the origin of humor is the suffering of the low-status character. And that’s only one reason why I love it.

He had me at “Above all -- we were wet.” His descriptions of the impossible and undignified conditions of his childhood, where children had absolutely no control over anything and adults were at the mercy of life itself, brought me so close to him that I think I started believing we were actually related and scribbled him into the family tree as a long-lost uncle.

McCourt captures the hapless quality of gullible, unsupervised children let loose on an unforgiving world with a buoyancy that comes through every sentence and rises above the brutal conditions of his childhood. 

And the truth he finds in the details, from the brutality of religious authority figures to the abject… show more.