Books like The Guermantes Way — picked by fans

The Victorians were scandalized by Sterne’s hilarious account of his childhood and his family, retaliated by calling it “satire.” There’s no shortage of humor, from Tristam’s explanation of how he knows when he was conceived to his narrow childhood escape to misundertstandings about the location of his uncle’s war wound. But it’s a brilliant interpretration of Locke’s argument about how the mind works, specifically in the association of ideas. The same deep insight that was the basis of the methodology of psychoanalysis conceptualized Sigmund Freud. The former isn’t an inference: Tristram explains it perfectly in the novel, and the complexity of his account is up there with Proust’s, Every time I re-read it, it gets not just funnier, but more profound.

Musil’s novel, like Proust’s, is at top off the world’s greatest modern novels, as well as being an extended meditation on the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like War and Peace, it takes us a while to get into it, and by the same token, Musil, like Tolstoy was deeply interested in how history happens., and if anything, his insights are more profound. Like Goethe, Musil was a master of the complexities of the German language. So both pose the translator with immense difficulties. But it’s a pleasure to recommend this translation, which is not only remarkably good at untangling Musi;’s complex sentences, but making them eminently readable.

This is, of course, considered to be one of the great books, but I have noticed that not a lot of people I know have actually read it.

I was apprehensive that it might be a bit slow, but I was surprised, in fact, thrilled to find it a great read, an amazing journey through the internal life of both the narrator (recalling events from his childhood) and of Swann and Odette.

The descriptions of both place and of emotion are exceptional, and Proust’s rendering of the characters’ psychological and emotional states, how we perceive their meaning, and how it affects their lives is phenomenal.

The book feels fresh, inventive, and modern, and although it is the first volume of seven, it easily stands alone. 

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.

What I love about this book is what it reveals about a writer’s process.

Ellroy’s theme, in books like The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, is the dark, violent, seamy underside of post war LA, particularly as it relates to prostitution and the exploitation and abuse of women. Before I read his memoir, I had no idea about the event in his past that foreshadows his subject matter, the grisly, unsolved murder of his mother, and his efforts to solve that crime, or at least understand it.

Perhaps it is too obvious to draw a direct line from his experience to his writing, but frankly, his memoir changed my perspective on his other books. 

I loved the voice of this book–it’s the voice of Stephen King, clever, yes, and a brilliant novelist, of course, but also absolutely down-to-earth. King is a perfectionist, continually going back through his writing to hone it–a useful reminder to all of us not to be satisfied with a first or second draft.

The book shows how, in the best writing, both dialogue and plot arise out of character. And I particularly valued his emphasis on cutting, cutting, cutting–dialogue and everything else. He’s made me do that more than ever!

In his tragicomic novel The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s thickheaded narrator John Dowell trolls, over and over again, through the detritus of his life, searching vainly for the origins of his predicament—namely, that he has been duped by his wife and her lover, his supposedly best friend and the “good soldier” of the novel’s title. When Dowell finally succumbs to the utter hopelessness of his situation, he turns away from his audience in a brash attempt to bargain with a misbegotten universe, and his dreams of an impossible reconciliation with the world become our own: “Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?” In his greatest moment of anguish and uncertainty, Dowell grasps for the poetry of language to sate his weary soul.

It is a profound and unsettling dive into societal decay that feels terrifyingly prescient. Atwood’s brilliance lies in the details—how she exposes the weaponization of language and the stripping of individual identity until even a birth name becomes a forbidden memory. Offred’s internal act of storytelling is a breathtaking form of rebellion; it’s a reminder that even when we are silenced, our internal narratives and small acts of defiance are what keep us human. It isn’t a "feel-good" read, but it is an essential one.

When it comes to finding inspiration in our memories, Marcel Proust is literature’s gold standard. The French novelist devoted the balance of his life to the art of refracting his memories through the lens of his writerly self. Proust understood implicitly that our memories are triggered by sensory experiences—sights, sounds, smells, and touch, to be sure—but most especially through the pleasures of the text. In Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of his epic À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust interrogates the ways in which memory is catalyzed by the senses, while comprehending, at the same time, the manner in which the reality of our memories becomes shaped by the ruinous work of nostalgia, of a sentimentality that exists beyond our ken.

This book is so intelligent that it gave me chills, but it’s also a literary page-turner. I adored the married couple at the center of the story for trying to use their very big brains to solve the problem of the emptiness they were feeling, which, spoiler alert, didn’t work, but it did lead to clever dialogue and some profound observations.

One of the themes in the book has to do with time, and the quote that haunts me the most is, “How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” Somehow, this nihilistic book left me marveling at the preciousness of life.