Books like The Underground Railroad — picked by fans

This book was my introduction to Kristin Hannah, and she has had me hooked ever since.

The novel follows two sisters in occupied France during World War II. They live separate lives, make impossible choices, but each finds a way to resist. Just when you think the story cannot demand more of these women, it does. I read with my heart in my throat.

The book feels achingly current. Authoritarianism, the fear it manufactures and the humanity it tries to grind down, is as recognizable now as it was in 1940s France.

I loved that the characters weren’t passive victims. They push back at great cost, and the book makes a quiet, powerful argument that will stay with me: resistance is always possible, and that love has a way of outlasting even the worst of what human beings do to each other.

This book is part odyssey, part ghost story, and part passion play. Toni Morrison is one of the patron saints of American literature whom I was fortunate to discover at an early age. This is her masterpiece, an example of what is possible when a writer’s heart, mind, and spirit are aligned.

The fact that the unfathomable sacrifice around which Beloved is imagined is based upon an actual event speaks volumes about the innate horrors of slavery. In matters of race, America’s skeletons are buried in shallow graves.

Another bell-ringer is this wonderful novel which upturned everything I’d thought about Shakespeare’s wife. 

It so deftly weaves what is known with what is imagined. Away with Anne Hathaway! Meet Agnes Shakespeare. The ending of the book was terrific, and they managed to capture that in the film.

I first read Orwell’s dystopian nightmare as a teenager and have gone back to it several times since.

Apparently, it is such a brilliant description of life under totalitarianism that, during the communist era, some Eastern Europeans refused to believe that an inhabitant of a democratic country could have written such a book. 

Even today, I find the book very relevant, as Orwell develops themes of truth, propaganda, doublethink, and the misuse of language that you can find in Homage to Catalonia, written a decade earlier. And the ubiquitous and intrusive telescreen has a parallel in our age of surveillance capitalism and the way the Chinese authorities are using information technology to cement their rule.

A gruesome story of murder and desire that also happens to have the most vivid olfactory descriptions of any genre.

Suskind’s preternatural ability to summon odor from the page makes you feel as if you are there beside him, walking through the flowered hillsides of Provence, or in the back room of a perfume shop on the Pont au Change. His twisted use of classic perfume techniques is as accurate as it is chilling.

This remains one of the most haunting novels I have ever read. I cannot shake the character of Judge Holden, a formidable man both physically and intellectually, who deploys his insidious intellect to justify acts of abject violence seemingly only for the sake of violence itself. I was mesmerized by a world where “all covenants were brittle.” This was no straight-up Western as I had expected. It was something more.

McCarthy pushed the boundaries of the classic Western by challenging the notion that good will ultimately overcome evil and the hero will save the day. There was no hero here, and the day was truly lost to forces beyond the characters’ control, hallmarks of the Southern Gothic tradition. I was hooked on this curious blend of genres!

What does it mean to enslave another human being? Sometimes a novel is the only way for me to get at the emotional heart of a horrible truth. That’s why I loved this book–an imaginary region of Virginia before the Civil War introduced me to Henry Townsend, a freed Black man who owned an entire plantation of other Black men, women, and children.

I couldn’t stop thinking of Moses, Augustus, Celeste, and all of the people who fought their way through to, finally, emancipation. Some people compare Edward P. Jones’ work to Faulkner's in the way he creates a complete and completely convincing world.

Many an idealistic young law student like me felt that jolt in our spine early on when we saw up in the balcony of that courthouse a sleepy Scout being told, “Stand up, Jean Louise. Your father’s passin’.”

The movie is as faithful to the novel as the medium would allow. The novel is told entirely from Scout’s POV and not only focuses upon the racism of the time and place, but also upon her coming of age as a tomboy and being told to act “As a little girl should.”

The book offers more to those of us for whom the rule of law and not of men is a passion, especially in Finch’s closing: “There is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of Rockefeller, a stupid man the equal of Einstein… That institution, gentlemen, is a court.” 

I was amazed by the delicate and perceptive description on ritual scenes and the protagonist’s unfailing pursuit of love, which are rooted from unique Japanese culture.

The book was an eye-opener for me, and it was one of the reasons why I became fascinated by Japanese traditional aesthetics and ideas. 

Before I was an author, I was primarily a national magazine copy editor, a job I finally scored after eight years of climbing up the magazine journalism ladder.

I wrote once in a while, but this mostly meant TV recaps by the time I was entrenched in magazines. But one day, an article about a safe-driving activist crossed my desk, and soon I was speaking with him in high schools.

Around the time I checked off “swim the width of a river” from my father’s bucket list, I also read Huckleberry Finn, as the setting seemed only right. I wrote a tribute to it in the second chapter of my book. My dad’s favorite author was Twain, but what I appreciated about him was that he wrote the novel as veiled propaganda. It’s a book that professes Twain’s anti-racism perspective. He just put his cause into a novel.

I… show more.