100 Books Like The Transit of Venus

This book was published years after mine, but I wish it had been around when I was going through my life upheaval. The author writes about relationships and has an intelligent and thoughtful take on marriage. You might not agree with her philosophy, but her book is eye-opening, will challenge your assumptions, and shares information that might help people as they rebuild their lives after widowhood, infidelity, and divorce.

I fell in love with this book from my first reading of it when I was in college many, many years ago. Each character was vibrant and perceptive. The writing was beautiful and portrayed images that have stayed with me all of my life.   

This book opened my eyes to class differences and privileges. It led me to evaluating my own life and values.

I grew up in the suburbs of a big city in an Italian American family that valued the “American Dream.” The path to success was marked by academic achievement and financial gain. These were among many tacit beliefs and stories, right alongside what it means to be in a marriage and to have children, that led me on a decades-long journey straight into the mid-life collapse of all I’d worked towards.

Frangello’s account of conditions, events, and an underlying, perilous terrain of female identity and romantic ideology treads so close to my own experience of catastrophic relational collapse and betrayal. As in my own life, the crisis extends backward and forwards in time, unearthing the buried ground on which I inadvertently founded my dreams and built my life. This book is a lens that reframed my history and refocused my future.

This book, published in the 1870s, is sometimes considered the best English novel ever written.

It is a monumental work, and while I found it very impressive, I have to admit that reading the long and detailed text felt heavy going at times.

Set in a provincial town with a large cast of characters, it depicts a middle-class way of life very different from that of today, and addresses various social and political questions of the time. One major theme is the psychology of marriage as analysed through the relationships between two ill-matched couples.

I loved this evocative and moving novel, winner of the Voss Literary Prize, for its accurate portrayal of the personal conflict that doctors often struggle with (particularly female doctors) as they try to balance the demands of work and family life.

It follows a day in the life of pregnant family physician Dr. Dina Ronen as she attends to the diverse needs of her patients and her young family while struggling to reconcile with the demanding ghosts of her personal and collective past. This is a beautifully constructed and visceral work from Australian family physician Leah Kaminsky.

Give me an array of spicy Indian food, a handsome hero, and a good Bollywood movie, and I’m set for the evening. But this book transported me to a different period in Indian history. I teetered on a cliff's edge as the intrigue and drama of Lin’s tale unfolded. 

The story moves from one heart-stopping incident to another as it transitions through the gritty criminal underworld, congested streets, and overcrowded slums of India in the 1980s. It gripped me from the beginning and kept my earpods glued to my ears until the end. It was one of the most compelling biographies I’ve ever listened to.

I’m not really a fan of Australian fiction, but I did enjoy Alan Marshall’s books.

Crippled by polio himself, Marshall had first-hand experience, which I found helpful for writing my book, especially since I Can Jump Puddles is also set in the early decades of the twentieth century.

More importantly, I find his gutsy approach to life in a tough rural environment, his no nonsense attitude, and his humour inspirational. 

As a writer, I found so much to admire in The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally. Simply put, it’s epic. I was blown away by Kenneally’s Tolstoian precision of narrative and by the drama of two sisters who leave their confined lives in Australia and serve as nurses in WWI, first on a hospital ship in the Mediterranean and then on the Western Front. Keneally recreates a full sense of the times, showing how individuals can become enmeshed and shaped by huge historical events. The sisters confront not only the terrible effects of war but also a secret that haunts them. This is a stunning, multi-layered novel by a master, The Daughters of Mars has earned numerous accolades—and no wonder. It’s beautifully written and deeply affecting.  

I read this story in my teens and as a result, spent years wanting to join the navy. (That did wear off!) Having read it again recently, it seems a much darker story than I had remembered. But the mystery at its heart won’t let you go. Nevil Shute was a great storyteller and like many writers of his generation had many experiences to draw on. The story is quite slow-moving, but poignant—heartbreaking in fact. Gradually, he unfolds the mystery of Jessie Proctor, an Englishwoman working for a family in Australia. It begins with Jessie’s suicide and we uncover the events that have haunted this young, ex-servicewoman’s life. As Shute says, "a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over."  

Every Sunday night for nearly a decade between the mid-70s and early 80s, most young Australians could be found in one place – in front of the TV, watching Countdown. Countdown was the most powerful force in the local pop/rock scene, the maker and breaker of hits. Published in 1993 in the afterglow of the show’s long run, Glad All Over, by former Age journalist Peter Wilmoth, is an appropriately loving tribute, which includes acknowledging the many (like me!) who loved to hate the show but still always watched it! As mostly oral history, it’s a sparkling story, and if the Countdown phenomenon still begs harder analysis – because as much as it was a great booster for Australian music, it actually blocked just as much – that’s the nature of a new historiography: the field has to get opened up first, and then is subject to increasingly… show more.