Books like The Red Pony — picked by fans

Here is another masterpiece.

It purports to be historical fiction set in the Old West, following one of the last great cattle drives. Yet within a few chapters, it begins to feel like a series of episodes from Grimm’s fairy tales.

I remember at UC Irvine, where I earned my Fiction MFA, several fellow writers were reading this novel alongside me. We kept stopping each other in the hall or at cocktail parties to relive this or that chapter, struggling to understand how it could be both so entertaining and so good.

The fact that it is long—a real doorstopper of a book—adds to its “too-big-for-one-genre” feel.

This ranch-centered book puts a human face on the cost of war.

A best in the West (or at least his small Nevada town) bull rider is physically and mentally torn apart by war. He can’t see the future he envisioned for himself anymore. But the story is really about his younger brother, Cam. I love Cam’s humor most of all, but his devotion to his idolized big brother is what makes this more than a story about a skateboarder turned bull rider.   

This book is about family in an opposite way from The Red Pony it confirms the safety net family can provide. 

I’m still not satisfied with delayed gratification! In great words and pictures, this book sums up that rebellion against getting great stuff later. A little boy is repeatedly told he can ride a horse along with his cowgirl mom and rancher dad “someday.”

I grew up with chronic asthma that was aggravated by running, playing, dust, and horse hair. Doctors told me that I’d outgrow it "someday." That didn’t help. On television and in books, I soaked up the free-wheeling freedom of riding. And wanted it. I longed to ride so much that–like the boy in this book–my parents saw it was important. About once a month, my parents rented a horse that I could ride along the (now cement-lined) riverbeds of Southern California.

Yes, they’d be up all night with me, wheezing. No, they weren’t giving in to me. They satisfied my need to be myself–not a cowgirl, but… show more.

This book isn’t fiction, but it feels like it. I am wrapped in the reality of the frontier through letters, diaries, recipes, and great old photos–every time I pick it up. And that’s often.

I first gave this book to my mother, but my husband paged through it so many hours each time we visited that I gave him his own copy. Cooking on the trail, on cattle drives, in camps, and finally, on hardscrabble ranches and farms isn’t easy. The book is full of struggles, and I feel for the women who wrested survival out of the earth daily.

They write about being driven crazy by the relentless wind, shortages, and loneliness, but there are plenty of jolly–it’s the best word for their beaming faces–pictures. I love what those old photos show: an appreciation for nature, family, and farm animals, and their determination to have tea parties and make… show more.

I read this book years ago but it’s always stayed with me.

The teenage protagonist, 13-year-old Jason from Worcestershire, England, has a stammer: a speech difficulty that haunts him and has him performing all kinds of manoeuvers to avoid saying certain sounds in class. This would only add embarrassment onto all the other embarrassments he feels as a boy going through puberty.

He calls his stammer ‘Hangman’. As well as this daily struggle, he realises his parents are arguing, and he gets bullied at school.

As a reader, I was touched by his resilience and doggedness. David Mitchell has admitted that the book is semi-autobiographical and this adds another layer of poignancy. 

This story has a Huck Finn flavour to it, recast on a 1950s road trip by bus.

Orphan Donal goes from the frying pan into the fire when his grandmother, his guardian, gets sick, and he is farmed out to a nasty-tempered relative he has never met.

After all the talk of Donal having no family, his salvation comes first from Herman, a non-relative who helps him escape back onto the bus that brought him there. The two light out for the West and cobble together what will feel like family in a ragtag bunch of misfits.

Sometimes, I just want an uncomplicated novel with endearing characters who can entertain me without spinning me with florid words or energetic action pieces, characters who can capture my imagination with simple goals and relatable decisions that become catalysts for major life transformations because I want to believe such simplicity can always lead to such beautiful and unexpected outcomes as those that happen in this book.

When even the shallowest of characters can demonstrate such depth and growth over such a short span of time after pursuing what, on the surface, seems like a shallow goal through shallow means and doing so properly and hilariously, I’m hooked. This is my second favorite book of all time.

Truman Capote’s 1948 debut novel holds a special place with me because it was my introduction to Southern Gothic when I was thirteen. A coming-of-age tale, it takes place at Scully’s Landing, a decaying mansion in Mississippi.

Rich with place and atmosphere, the book follows lonesome thirteen-year-old Joel Harrison Knox, who travels to live with his father, an emotionally unavailable presence who abandoned the boy at birth. Replete with a cast of the peculiar and grotesque, this book holds firm with literary merit and thematical relevance. 

A mix of coming of age in the first half of the twentieth century, and Bradbury’s peculiar brand of very earthly oddness and sci-fi strangeness, Dandelion Wine is full of all sorts of magic. It reminds you of what it is to be a small human again, when everything seems possible, and aliens and monsters are as likely (and as important) as long summer days spent outside, barefoot and sunburnt and a little feral. Even when we don’t recognise the details of the childhood described, we remember the feeling, and it reawakens a sense of wonder that’s incredibly precious.

Edisto was the first coming-of-age novel I fell in love with as an adult reader and the book that showed me the tremendous literary potential of the genre. Padgett Powell endows his protagonist, twelve-year-old Simons, with what comes across as precociousness, but in fact reflects the depth of thinking that many young tweens and teens have. Simons wrestles with his narcissistic parents’ competing visions of his future—although neither bothers to ask him what he wants—while hanging out on the sultry island of Edisto off the coast of South Carolina with an enigmatic older acquaintance, Taurus, who offers him tastes of adult life and the kind of attention his parents are incapable of providing. Powell’s deft prose and realistic dialogue make it all fully believable, and at times riotously funny. Edisto is nothing short of brilliant.