100 Books Like The Rum Diary

Simple, lyrical, beautiful.

Siddhartha is the story of an epic journey of a man traveling through ancient India, with life lessons subtly woven through the narrative.

Ultimately, this book is about how all things are connected through nature, and more specifically, how attaching too much weight to individual events—good, bad, happy, sad—misses the totality of appreciating how those events work together to make a more joyful, meaningful life.

This book hit me as both tragic and strangely hopeful.

Chris McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness with little more than a backpack and a stubborn streak, and people have argued ever since: was he brave, reckless, or just plain stupid? But his compulsion isn’t as rare as we might think. In my book, Cole feels the same tug—escape the sterile shoebox apartment and the $8 lattes. This can’t be all there is.

What drew me in wasn’t the verdict but his hunger for something real—stripping away every layer of artifice most of us cling to. Krakauer tells it with empathy and curiosity, letting you wrestle with the questions instead of handing you neatly typed answers. I recommend it because it forces you to stare down your own compromises: freedom versus responsibility, idealism versus pragmatism.

Admire Chris or dismiss him, you won’t forget him. And the story lingers like a… show more.

A deserved, all-time classic, this book seems to transcend time to capture the spirit of wanderlust. I was young and impressionable when I read it for the first time, and it inspired a sense of profound restlessness to explore, grow, and hit the road to see for myself. 

Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac are wild, occasionally unhinged protagonists, and their journey consists of hustling, romance, and drinking their way to a good time. Kerouac’s writing made me long for similar misadventures, where life is simple and finding the road is all that matters. Subversively, the novel promotes a full life and whole human experience, which makes working 9 to 5 that much more difficult.

This book takes a comic yet piercing look at espionage. 

Jim Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Cuba, is recruited by MI6 out of desperation and fabricates his spy reports. He invents agents, sketches of weaponized vacuum parts, and absurd clandestine plots—all to keep the money coming and satisfy his daughter’s extravagances.

What makes the novel shine is its satire of the spy apparatus—how credulity, vanity, and bureaucratic inertia turn fiction into danger. Greene balances light humor with real human stakes: financial strain, moral compromise, a man pretending to be something he is not. Even decades after its writing, Our Man in Havana remains sharp, funny, and deeply relevant in its critique of power, truth, and illusion.

This is both your main course and palate cleanser. Absolutely riveting!

This is the spy thriller that started it all! I was a huge fan of the Matt Damon trilogy and had always been an avid reader, so naturally, I gravitated toward the original novel, which was far better than the film.

Popular action thrillers tend to suffer from one of two diseases: “soldier syndrome,”—meaning the author knows what he or she is writing about but isn’t a master of the language—or from “poser-itis,” which is when the writer is good with a pen but would be too scared to use it to gauge out an eye if he or she had to.

So it’s a rare wordsmith who can understand the deepest, most primal parts of the human psyche and then put it into a literary form that delights the eyes and ears. Ludlum is one such writer.

Some people will argue that of all the movies adapted from books, the book will always win, but in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I believe the film adaptation is more alluring than the original short story, but it would not be fair to discredit that this film was influenced by Fitzgerald’s original satire of a child born aging in reverse.

While the movie veers away from the short story in time period, setting and character development, the short story draws more into the philosophical questions I believe we ourselves as a society are subconsciously thinking—even today, nearly a century after it’s writing as to how we contradict the specific wisdom that comes with age while also relinquishing it due to natural mental decline and end up treating our elderly like children.

Unlike the film, the story takes place just after the American Civil War and draws a… show more.

Elvis Cole is the first-person narrator of a classic private eye series set in Los Angeles.

It is fun and unpretentious while being full of sociological truisms. The novels are first and foremost crime thrillers, but the comedic voice and observations make for a somewhat genre-bending experience every single read.  

Real-life P.I. Ethan Brown pulls no punches with this wrenching exposé of deep-South police corruption.

Murder in the Bayou parts the curtain on inescapable connections between eight women killed in a rural Louisiana parish between 2005-2009..

Clocking in at less than 250 pages, this one is thick as swamp fog with the backgrounds and rap sheets of all players, indicted and unindicted. Brown's boots-on-the-ground approach to this story is evident in the interviews he scored with the central characters of this backwoods underworld.

The result is not just a triumph of journalism; it's a triumph of courage. I was inspired by Brown's devotion to the story and, more importantly, to the families and friends of these marginalized women.

Seek finds Johnson mining his own humanity through true tales of Alaskan gold prospecting and the manhunt for a serial bomber.

He loses himself in fungus at an Oregan hippie festival and searches for God at a Christian biker rally in Texas. His travels take him to the sometimes-literal frontlines of the news, including the hellish delirium of the Liberian civil war and conversations with Constitution-toting Montanans bent on the overthrow of the United States government.

Johnson's writing in this compilation of essays was absolutely searing and a revelation to me. This stuff belongs in the home library of anyone who's ever aspired to pick up the pen.

Believe it or not, this irreverently titled gem was recommended to me by a pastor.

Charlie LeDuff is no saint, but his sermons on racial unrest, politician-class hypocrisy, and the poisoned water of Flint, Michigan should evoke some Old Testament outrage in any red-blooded American.

LeDuff shrugs off the tired tropes and narratives for a God's-honest odyssey of the U.S. to document corrosions within our culture and society. I dig his style and, more critically, his clear-eyed examination of the problems average people are facing across the country.

Sh*tshow! is a fun and refreshing read, sure to help recharge the batteries of even our most cynical.