25 Books Like The Pale King

Illusion. Women’s framing. Adrift in a world everyone thinks is perfect. Living the glamorous life others want. Being the thing men desire to have, to own, as long as the veneer holds. Dealing with mental illness that people explain away because all the tinsel is just dressing and sparkles, but if you lean on it, it parts, and you find yourself falling through the space.

Although ‘they’ say they care, they don’t, and no one wants to hear the truth, they only want pretend. Within the first five pages, we understand what’s going on inside her, that she has something to hide, and that she’s willing to lie about who she really is. In chapter one, we discover that her best friend, Doreen, doesn’t really know her name. We see the world through her eyes, interspaced with an actual conversation that calls the world a lie and her own framing… show more.

I find this book's range amazing. This slim but engrossing volume reveals new and invigorating ways of “reading” shadow images as the author discusses topics as diverse as food, cosmetics, architecture, jade, and even toilets.

Tanizaki also tackles the sociological differences in shadow interpretation across cultural divides, lamenting the loss of a more traditional interest in the ambiguous shadow as darkness gives way to a Westernization of Japanese culture that brings illumination in its wake.

While I didn’t always agree with his conclusions, they were always interesting, and got me thinking about why I look at shadows the way I do.

I have read this short section of Plato’s highly influential book, Republic, many times in many different settings over the course of my life and have always found it fresh and thought-provoking.

Are we just dupes staring at the secondhand shadows cast by figures on a wall, or will we escape our cave to find the truth in the light of the sun? Shadows have never been so denigrated! Nevertheless, I feel that Plato’s parable still has the power to make me question what it is I am doing with my life even if it was written over two thousand years ago.

Warning: This book will shock, intrigue, sadden, disturb, and ultimately stimulate you. This African American artist has produced an impressive and unique body of artwork that interrogates the conflicted nature of race in America.

This book provides a survey of her visually stunning work, including her controversial silhouette cut-outs that depict various charged images that draw on stereotypes to challenge and rework them. With shadowy figures that hint simultaneously at sexuality, subjugation, violence, and desire, this fascinating volume is not for the faint of heart or the easily disturbed.

I’m in awe of this author’s trilogy of award-winning novels about Zimbabwe’s colonial history. Haunting and hypnotic, they blend magical realism, epic history, and social satire. Although they form a series with some recurring characters, all are standalone reads.

Her first, The Theory of Flight, won South Africa’s biggest literary award. The second, recommended here, is a sustained act of grace in which the author climbs into the skin of an alpha white male Rhodesian, Emil Coetzee, whose ambitions lead to his running the doomed colony’s sinister secret police. It humanizes him without excusing him in an imaginative tour de force that asks a burning question: why do we sometimes choose evil?

If you love this book (you will), Ndlovu’s third novel, The Quality of Mercy, brings the series to a redemptive close.

I love Pratchett’s work so much in general that it’s really hard to pick just one. His work was side-splittingly funny but also the very best kind of satire. He had pointed things to say about society while also making you care deeply about his characters and making you laugh until your face hurts. Do you know how hard that is?

In this book, the protagonist is a con man forced into trying to resuscitate a dying postal service. He’s petty evil, the kind of selfish who has never thought about what happens to his victims. By the end, you can’t help but root for him to triumph over the much less petty but equally hidden evil of systems and big money. But you also can’t look away from the chaos of ravening stamp collectors, hapless wizards, and a literal avalanche of dead letters.

Dwight Chapin joined former Vice President Richard Nixon’s staff in 1962, in connection with his unsuccessful California gubernatorial run. He functioned as Nixon’s personal aide for the next decade, spending hours and hours as his “body man.” I knew and worked with Dwight for the four years of Nixon’s first term as president, but worked on domestic policy initiatives and never had the “face time” with the President that he did.

Dwight’s book reflects fifty years of musings about one of our greatest presidents, yet one who resigned in disgrace because of Watergate. His stories, his insights, and his understandings of our 37th President are without parallel. 

I adored this book. I fell in love with the male main character, Commander Graham Gore, a Victorian explorer brought into a near-future London via a time travel machine. The author deftly handles how Graham might experience the modern world. His relationship with the narrator is complex and fascinating, and gets very sexy!

Bradley explores themes of colonialism, climate change, and identity within a thrilling time travel plot and swoony romance. I think her style of sci-fi romance—exploring big ideas within interesting, exciting stories with characters you root for—could be the next big thing in publishing. I can’t wait to see what she writes next.

There is an abundance of writing and rhetoric that points out instances of political success that lead to governmental catastrophe. None capture the current breakdown between politics and governing better than Michael Lewis did here.

As a former lobbyist and current political columnist, I try to connect how politics should be all about governing, but the electorate is drifting away from this hard truth.

The transition of the first Trump administration following eight years of Obama reveals the lack of preparedness or even care about the job of governing the new administration had. It foretells what America should have expected the second time around. 

This beautiful book is possibly the most important book of my writing career. I found it in a second-hand bookstore in Dublin on a rainy afternoon and, like the plot, I felt that my finding it was a stroke of providence. I was so moved by the story that I immediately signed up for a writing workshop with the author. That workshop was a defining moment in my life – after it, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Although this story is not directly about art, it shows how a man’s calling, his compulsion to paint, plays a key role in the lives and the destinies of others. The novel has a fairytale-like quality to it, a poetic timelessness that captures the essence of spirituality and love.