100 Books Like The Lottery

This is a short story collection I return to every few years. There are four novellas in this collection, but each of them was delivered directly to my cerebral cortex. I can recall passages from each story. And I can see the locations.

I feel King is at his best when he's twisting his way through novellas and short stories. After reading "1922", it was weeks before I stopped seeing the well. And weeks before, I stopped shaking my head at what Wilfred James did or the grit of Tess in "Big Driver" or the pettiness of Dave Streeter. This is worth reading every year.

I love this book first and foremost because it is essentially the OG of madwomen narratives. Written in 1892, it is a super-creepy, sensory, trippy exploration of one woman’s sanity slowly being shredded by male medical “expertise”—in this case, a doctor’s prescription for postpartum depression: utter isolation in a bedroom with no intellectual stimulation... in order to alleviate postpartum depression (?!). Unsurprisingly, rather than “recovering,” the heroine drags readers down a terrifying rabbit hole of hallucination, self-destruction, and—ultimately—murder.

It’s a masterful, Hitchcockian deep dive into psychosis written over a half-century before Psycho. But it’s also an extremely satisfying example of feminist revenge-writing; Perkins not only drew on her own experience after suffering this “treatment” but sent a copy directly to her practitioner after its publication. Pow!

In this classic, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, famously wakes up one morning to discover that he is a gigantic vermin.

Interpretations of the book range from Kafka trying to say that modern life reduces us all to being bugs, to the idea that Kafka was really writing about art, and how, since the artist cannot ever be understood, he might as well be an insect.

I read it as Kafka's attempt to reconcile two philosophies - that of Nietzsche, who claimed that the human will is a force that leads to happiness, and that of Schopenhauer, who claimed that the will is just about survival.

In Kafka's hands, metamorphosis is both life-affirming and life-denying. 

Each one of these stories is a mini-novel, which are the sort of stories I love. Black never leaves you hanging, like some writers do, and you will feel like you’re right in there watching the story unfold. The writing has been called pitch-perfect and I agree. Every word is right, every moment fits and every character is trying to make sense of the world as we all do, every day. She deftly explores the emotional DNA passed from generations before and what that means for each of our lives going forward. So you get a great tale well told. and a lot to think about at the same time. Exactly what I love to read and what smart modern women are drawn to. 

Joseph Wood creatively uses landscape, settlement patterns, and the built environment to challenge a fabled view of the Currier and Ives New England village. The compact village center, with a steepled church, tidy white homes, and quaint shops surrounding the village green has too long colored our historical imaginings about an idealized New England past. But these forms, Wood convincingly argues, do not describe our colonial past. They are a 19th c invention that both romanticizes and obscures the actual colonial landscape of scattered farmsteads, meadows, and pastures. Early New England was shaped by a land-hungry people who sought competency & security in an expansive countryside. Richly illustrated with maps and images, this book is a model of how to use unusual evidence to recover the past. 

Jack Larkin, former historian of Old Sturbridge Village, befriended me when I was a research fellow at the Village years ago. He was one of the most generous and original scholars I’ve ever known. Though deeply versed in the primary sources of the Village’s rich research library, Jack’s understanding of the past was richly informed by his immersion in the living history of the Village. He knew the past intimately – how it felt, looked, smelled. For Jack, being “in the room where it happened” had a different meaning: he knew their homes, barns, workshops, meetinghouses. He married this rich evidence with his knowledge of village life – family and neighborly dynamics, the growth of material desires, popular politics, and religious revivalism. This book engagingly preserves Jack’s rare understanding of daily life in the early Republic. 

The sheer command of the English language displayed by John Updike is something I marvel at, but he is at the height of his powers in this novel. What’s more, it’s a sexy book in the old-fashioned sense of men desiring women and women wanting to be desired by men.

I consider this Updike’s best novel because the story moves ahead at a great pace and is filled with tension between its characters. If someone told me it is largely about the computer revolution, I would have been suspicious. No need to be. Owen, the main character, starts as a young boy, goes into the computer business, finds success, has seemingly endless dalliances with women, and eventually meets his end. I found it to be a great ride.

Quabbin is a relic of a lost world – both figuratively and literally. In his old age, Francis Underwood remembered his childhood village, the buildings, the personalities, their dress, manners, and speech, their faith and their passions for reform, their old social customs and their emerging middle-class sensibilities – and most of all their stories. But it is a world, as Underwood knew, that was passing away. His secluded old New England village was opening to the world, and its agrarian ways were soon to be eclipsed by the industrial village. What Underwood did not know, but we do, is that his childhood home has literally disappeared, under the flooding waters of the Quabbin Reservoir. This is an extraordinary testimonial to that lost world!

I love a New England mystery, especially one that includes recipes.

Katherine Hall Page fills the bill with her twenty-six delightful Faith Fairchild mysteries. Faith is a high-end New York City caterer who falls in love and marries a minister from a New England village. Will she be bored? Can love conquer all?

It turns out that this sleepy New England town has murders aplenty, but luckily, Faith is on the scene. I have tried her recipes, and they are wonderful!

This is one of the nonfiction books I read as a teenager that convinced me to become a professional writer. The author, Sebastian Junger, doesn’t just describe the titular storm (which hit the U.S. East Coast in 1991) in terrifying detail—he also manages to assemble all of the weather-driven chaos into a real, gripping narrative. We don’t know a lot about what actually happened to the Andrea Gail, the fishing boat at the center of the narrative, but Junger recreates its final hours in a way that feels bracingly real—and heartbreaking.

Even if you don’t like nonfiction books, The Perfect Storm has the pacing and heart of a novel. I consider it one of the finest—maybe the finest—disaster narrative ever written, and it’s a perfect choice of book if you’re trapped inside by a raging storm.