100 Books Like The Pickwick Papers

In elegant prose, Nien Cheng, a Shell Oil Company in 1966, recounts her life in Shanghai in 1966, when Chairman Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Mao’s Red Guards ransacked Cheng and her husband’s bourgeois home and then delivered her to No. 1 Detention House in Shanghai where she was held in solitary confinement of 7 years until her rehabilitation and release after several struggle trials.

Her work is prescient as the United States in under attack by a radical woke ideology. Many Americans have been cancelled or have been made to attend struggle sessions.  

Nein Chen is a heroic woman, a brilliant writer, and an example of how one courageous woman can stand up to a totalitarian regime. 

Flannery O’Connor’s saturnine stories of the American South are jewels of American literature.

They are laced with humor and violence but are at the same time deeply spiritual. In fact, the Catholic Church banned her work until it was discovered that her stories were written to show Grace in the lives of her parochial characters.

In Everything That Rises Must Converge, a story from A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories published in 1955, O'Connor writes about Julian, a young college-educated writer who lives with his mother in a decadent neighborhood that lost its prominence as the Old South faded.

His mother who believes she must uphold the dignity of her family's antebellum name insists on "keeping up appearances." For instance, she likes to tell folks that Jason's first job as a writer "selling typewriters" was a good sign because "Rome wasn't built in a day."

She… show more.

What I love about this short story collection by a true master of the writing craft is how psychedelic it is, without any actual references to drugs or counterculture.

Every story is a mind-bending trip delivered straight to the dome through innovative language and upended logic. I love the rabbit holes Borges sends his readers down, like the first story’s development of an entire other human civilization through the discovery of its never-ending encyclopedia.

The title Labyrinths is so fitting – reading these stories is like making your way through a literary maze with psychic surprises and twists around every turn of the page. 

The Mysteries of Paris was so popular that Alexandre Dumas’ publisher wanted him to write a similar novel. The result was this book (1845), which focuses on Edmond Dantès, who is unjustly imprisoned by his enemies. Upon escaping and finding a great treasure, Dantès disguises himself as the Count of Monte Cristo and begins to exact his revenge.

The novel enters the criminal world of both Marseille and Paris. The count creates mystery by being a master of disguise and manipulating events without his victims knowing his identity or why their lives are crumbling. At the same time, the count is not without compassion and questions the morality of his own actions, thereby raising the novel to the status of true literature.

Becky Sharpe is a character impossible to forget.

Through all the twists and turns of this plot, Becky shows herself to be both conniving and resilient in her quest to use those around her for her own gain. While not an attractive rendition of human nature, she forever has a wolf at her door and does what she thinks she must to stay one step ahead.

One gets whiplash from sympathizing with her one minute and being appalled by her lack of scruples the next, but, like all the characters she hoodwinks, we are captivated by her as someone who is never boring. She hops from one doomed circumstance to the next, and we are along for the ride.

This is a great book without a great title. It refers to Spinoza’s Ethics and speaks to the strength of emotions.

Philip Carey has it rough from the outset: he’s disabled, he’s an orphan, and the story traces his travails—bullying, neglect, career misfires, and romantic and other calamities—along with his triumphs. These include some of my very favorite topics (beauty and belonging) along with the questions of adolescence that never leave us.

You could never get away with a book like this now—a 600-page chronological coming-of-age with one POV and narrator, swelling with social commentary and philosophical musings? But it’s a classic for a reason, and it saved my life during the pandemic (I listened, whereas I usually read).

It’s an inspiration and a great ride if you can slow down and savor.

This poem was published anonymously in 1823. It’s such a Christmas staple that it’s hard to imagine how ground-breaking it was, but the simple plot – a family sleeps on Christmas Eve while the father hears a noise outside and sees Santa Claus in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer – was the first to set that quintessential Christmas scene. A friend of the author was charmed by the poem and sent it anonymously to a New York newspaper. The author finally owned up to it in 1837, confessing that as a Professor of Oriental and Greek Literature, he had been uneasy about being associated with “unscholarly verse” that he had written only to amuse his children. But this “unscholarly verse” made his name and charms us still.

This book made me realise that a great novel could be largely plotless. The Tree of Man simply describes the lives of a husband and wife in Australia—a sort of echo of the Garden of Eden set in the Outback. I can’t claim that I remember many details about it now—I read it years and years ago, but I do know that it made me feel that I too could write a plotless book, based on simple, everyday human experiences. 

This novel was a massive influence on me. Rutherfurd takes the city of London as his subject, and follows the life of the city through the centuries, taking in Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans etc…right through to modern times. I don't have quite such a huge canvas in my book, but I do follow a series of historical events in a manner which is somewhat reminiscent of Rutherfurd. Rutherfurd takes you on a wonderful journey. 

John Steinbeck wrote the Working Days... journals while writing The Grapes of Wrath.

The intent of the journal was to establish a schedule, including a completion date for the novel. What he reveals about his self-doubt is tonic for any writer who is haunted by the same malaise.

Here is the entry for June 18, "…I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty to it… If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time."

Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity…John Steinbeck’s honesty and humility remind me that self-doubt is a part of the creative process.

I sometimes read entries from… show more.