Here are 84 books that The Waste Land fans have personally recommended if you like
The Waste Land.
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As a former writer for Londonist and a non-Londoner by birth, I have come to love the capital with all the passion of the converted–not least my adopted home patch of Peckham in the South East of the city. In recent years, the city has seen great improvement in walking routes, and since the lockdown, I have enjoyed having a good old nosey on foot around so many different neighborhoods. It is all totally fascinating. I truly believe that if you’re tired of London, you must be tired of life. Also, the more I travel, the more I realize that there is nowhere on earth as tolerant and neighborly.
This is quite simply a work of understated tragi-comic genius. Russell Hoban is my favorite author of all time.
As an American ex-pat, he held much affection for London, and it shows in this endearing and enduring love story based in the capital. It is the perfect read for the English or English-loving flaneuse.
Two lonely Londoners bond over a plan to free the sea turtles at the city zoo in this touching novel from a cult-favorite author who has drawn comparisons to J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut.
A wise and touching classic that “crackles with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony,” from the author of Riddley Walker (Time)
Life in a city can be atomizing, isolating. And it certainly is for William G. and Neaera H., the strangers at the center of Russell Hoban’s surprisingly heartwarming novel Turtle Diary.
William, a clerk at a used bookstore, lives in a rooming house after…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
As a former writer for Londonist and a non-Londoner by birth, I have come to love the capital with all the passion of the converted–not least my adopted home patch of Peckham in the South East of the city. In recent years, the city has seen great improvement in walking routes, and since the lockdown, I have enjoyed having a good old nosey on foot around so many different neighborhoods. It is all totally fascinating. I truly believe that if you’re tired of London, you must be tired of life. Also, the more I travel, the more I realize that there is nowhere on earth as tolerant and neighborly.
A cracking and gripping (mostly) Victorian crime drama (although it does admittedly span the Atlantic and several centuries), its creepy tones and vivid storytelling offer one of the best portrayals of the British capital a couple of hundred years ago.
It is all too easy to look at old city streets superficially and to forget that every bit of our metropolis has a history.
In the east end of Regency London, two families lie butchered. Residents of the notorious Ratcliffe Highway, the victims bear the mark of unprecedented brutality.
Panic sweeps the country as its public cries for justice. But these murders stem from an older horror, its source a sea voyage two centuries old. In a ship owned by Queen Elizabeth herself, a young man embarks on England's first venture into a new trade: human souls.
As a nation's sins ripen and bloom, to be harvested in a bloody frenzy on the twisted streets of Regency Wapping, an English Monster is born.
As a former writer for Londonist and a non-Londoner by birth, I have come to love the capital with all the passion of the converted–not least my adopted home patch of Peckham in the South East of the city. In recent years, the city has seen great improvement in walking routes, and since the lockdown, I have enjoyed having a good old nosey on foot around so many different neighborhoods. It is all totally fascinating. I truly believe that if you’re tired of London, you must be tired of life. Also, the more I travel, the more I realize that there is nowhere on earth as tolerant and neighborly.
This is a classic satire on middle-class aspirations–it is timelessly funny and kind of gripping in a mundane bourgeois way. But most importantly it offers a fascinating glimpse of ordinary London life in Victorian times.
I must admit it was really brought to life for me when I saw the stage version with Dame Judy Dench and her husband Michael Williams playing the lead roles: don’t hate me.
Mr. Pooter has read about many people who have kept diaries, and concludes that he too should keep a diary, even though he is not famous, just a nobody.
Mr. Pooter's life is a hilarious mix of comic moments filled with common people, everyday events, bathtub accidents, marriage proposals breaking, peculiar friends, and visitors galore.
In this diary, Mr. Pooter, the bank clerk, chronicles his upside-down life. The events mentioned are comically entertaining, and will make you chuckle, even though they are of a nobody.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
As a former writer for Londonist and a non-Londoner by birth, I have come to love the capital with all the passion of the converted–not least my adopted home patch of Peckham in the South East of the city. In recent years, the city has seen great improvement in walking routes, and since the lockdown, I have enjoyed having a good old nosey on foot around so many different neighborhoods. It is all totally fascinating. I truly believe that if you’re tired of London, you must be tired of life. Also, the more I travel, the more I realize that there is nowhere on earth as tolerant and neighborly.
Because Matt’s a mate–but also one of the funniest, cleverest writers I know. He is one of the editors of Londonist, a fascinating raconteur, and a fount of useless information on every topic. Ironically, he is from Yorkshire, but I doubt whether many Londoners could match his knowledge of their city.
Thanks to Matt, I enjoyed around five years of writing for fun for Londonist (back in its amateur, less corporate days) and met so many of their very talented contributors. Many of us remain friends to this day.
A highly entertaining read for anyone with even a passing interest in London's history.
This myth-busting book takes you on a great ride through history and the city's character. Think that the tower that holds Big Ben is called St Stephen's Tower? Think again - it was called the Clock Tower until 2012 when it was renamed the Elizabeth Tower. Think that the Union Flag flying over Buckingham Palace means the Queen is home? Think again - it means that she's elsewhere, doing other Queenish things.
Packed with details on real London history, it explodes a range of myths from…
I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. I believe that her long poem, The First Water Is the Body, the centerpiece of Postcolonial Love Poem, is The Waste Land of our era.
Lyrical and fierce, beautiful and scathing, it is both a cry from the outside and a spiritual lesson. After reading that poem, go to Snake Light and Ode to the Beloved’s Hips. I was led to her work by her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, which recounts the despair into which her brother, a drug addict, had placed her family.
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
Natalie Diaz's highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award
Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages―bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers―be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let…
I have spent my life both in the classroom (as a university professor) and out of it as a passionate, committed reader, for whom books are as necessary as food and drink. My interest in poetry dates back to junior high school, when I was learning foreign languages (first French and Latin, and then, later, Italian, German, and ancient Greek) and realized that language is humankind’s most astonishing invention. I’ve been at it ever since. It used to be thought that a writer’s life was of little consequence to an understanding of his or her work. We now think otherwise. Thank goodness.
Every English major in the 20th century (maybe even in the 21st!) came to grips with T.S. Eliot.
People remember J. Alfred Prufrock and his love song. And The Waste Land has just passed its 100th birthday and readers are still scratching their heads over it.
T. S. Eliot was the man—along with several others—who made modern poetry “hard” and complicated, and he was quite a complicated figure himself.
Lyndall Gordon gives us Eliot in all his complexities and shows how he became our age’s Dr. Johnson.
In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full the issue of Eliot's anti-Semitism as well as the less-noted issue of his misogyny. Her account "rescues both the poet and the man from the simplifying abstractions that have always been applied to him" (The New York Times), and is "definitive but not dogmatic, sympathetic without taking sides. . . . Its voice rings with…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Science fantasy uniquely combines elements of science fiction (advanced technology, futuristic settings) with those of fantasy (magic, mythological creatures, and supernatural elements). This fusion creates rich and versatile storytelling that often comes with a deep sense of mystery beyond what science fiction or fantasy achieves on their own.
This blend also requires greater “buy-in” from the reader to believe in the world we’re being presented. As readers, we often accept dwarves in fantasy with little to no explanation. We do the same with spaceships in science fiction. But dwarves in spaceships require truly creative storytelling to achieve a much higher buy-in threshold. The author who can pull this off has my attention.
Set among the post-apocalyptic remnants of a far-future earth, this book combines the “forgotten technology” trope common to science fiction with archetypal fantasy characters.
Civilisations relying on technology so advanced it’s incomprehensible to them, is one of my favourite concepts in science fiction. Harrison uses this to create a world I thought was magical, melancholic, and nostalgic–effecting a tone more common to epic fantasy.
However, it is the imagery that sets this book apart, with Harrison depicting battlefields and blasted landscapes with a colourful yet eerily retro and forlorn beauty. It was like reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in a 70s disco, complete with knights fighting among rusted metal swamps, with lightsaber-like baans, against brain-eating bioengineered creatures from humanity’s former technological apex.
I was hooked by the setting and drawn along by knights, queens, and old warriors interacting with androids and futuristic weapons as they attempted to save their…
The first book in the Viriconium series: In the distant future, a medieval system rises from the ruins of a technology that destroyed itself. Armored knights ride their horses across dunes of rust, battling for the honor of the Queen. But the knights find more to menace them than mere swords and lances. A brave quest leads them face to face with the awesome power of a complex, lethal technology that has been erased from the face of the Earth--but lives on, underground.
Librarian Note: This edition has ISBN 0380000571 printed on the inside cover.
I am a British poet living in the Peak District in Derbyshire, which is perhaps why I can’t stop the natural world from coming into my poems. My writing shed at the top of the garden looks out over a field and up to a limestone outcrop with a stand of beech trees. When there are no poems, I sit and watch the birds and wait for the sheep to trundle down the hill at the end of the afternoon. I read poems about nature because those are the ones I love best–poems that might capture something I’ve noticed but that put it into a beautiful and startling new language.
This beautiful collection stopped me in my tracks. In many ways, it’s a quiet book – the poems celebrate moments of observation and intense connection with the natural world. Many are in the first person, a speaking ‘I’ or ‘we’ caught up in a tender encounter with creatures, stones, water, and grass.
In the words of one of the poems, “the world comes in by the ear,” and these delicate poems echo with music and the simple language of everyday speech. One of the things I love is the way our human lives always hover close – the worlds of work, of love, of our children growing up and moving away. All is brought closer by the quiet lessons of the natural world.
In Earth House, Matthew Hollis evokes the landscape, language and ecology of the isles of Britain and Ireland to explore how our most intimate moments have resonance in the wider cycle of life. Beginning in the slate waters of the north, the book revolves around the cardinal points and the ancient elements: through the wide skies of the east and the terrain of a southern city, to the embers of places lost to us, to which we can no longer return.
What emerges is a moving meditation on time and the transformative phases of nature that calls many forces into…
I am a cultural historian, film critic, literary critic, editor, and essayist–and a closeted fiction writer–fascinated by ‘the fantastic’ in art or in life. And Christmas seems to me the perfect example of a time that unites realism and the strange–the time of ghost stories and nativities. I wrote a book on It’s a Wonderful Life (2023) because it triumphantly succeeds at bridging the connection between ordinary life and the marvelous. I have also edited anthologies of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories, The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (Penguin, 2010), and Victorian Fairy Tales (Oxford World’s Classics, 2015), both of which include many seasonal classics.
From 1927 to 1931 (and again in 1954), T. S. Eliot would send out a short poem as a Christmas greeting. There are only six of them, but they encapsulate the mystical and religious side of Christmas in ways that yearly move me.
From The Journey of the Magi to The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, Eliot reflects on the spiritually unsettling aspects of Christmas, where the cozy clashes with the necessity to change, and where reminiscence comes up against the mystery of our future, and we see how life brings up moments of spiritual vision.
'Each year Eliot's presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble.' Ted Hughes
Poet, dramatist, critic and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as The Waste Land and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m a poet, lover of great literature, and an English professor who has served as faculty advisor to my university’s student-run literary journal. I caught the bug as a teenager when I first started reading and memorizing poems that moved and intrigued me. Since then, reading and writing poetry—and having the pleasure of teaching it to students—has been my best way of checking in with myself to see what’s most important to me that I may have lost sight of in the daily bustle. It’s also my best way of going beyond myself—allowing my imagination to carry me to unexpected places.
I also love Eliot’s poetry (and his comments on the creative process) because of how different they are from Wordsworth’s—and equally profound. In essays including Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot argues that keeping your poetry “personal” artificially limits your material. And I think he’s right: some of my own best poems come from imagining my way into someone else’s mind.
Eliot’s own poetry, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, illustrates the value of this approach in how it crafts its titular character. Eliot can also write deeply intellectual poems like The Waste Land that transcend purely “personal” concerns by exploring history and that repay many re-readings. In addition to their thematic richness, Wordsworth’s and Eliot’s poems are also beautifully musical.
An indispensable collection of the Nobel Prize winner's most renowned works
“In ten years’ time,” wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel’s Castle, “Eliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English.” In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize “for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry.”
This book is made up of six individual titles: Four Quartets, Collected Poems: 1909–1935, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and The Cocktail Party. It offers not only enjoyment of one of the great talents…
