69 Books Like Things We Never Got Over

If you like reading fast action and involved mysteries, you’ll enjoy Patricia Cromwell’s novel, Isle of Dogs. This action-packed story delves into the historical plots surrounding a small island off the coast of Virginia, where it is said ancestors of long-ago pirates reside, and to this day a sunken treasure remains at the bottom of the sea off their shores. The Governor of Virginia decides to build speed bumps on the small island where the preferred mode of transportation is golf carts. Disarrays begin, so State Trooper Andy Brazel is assigned to investigate and discovers a gang’s intentions to raid the island in search of the treasure.

Lu Ann Bell was a painter in the 1850s who became well known for painting servants. It was actually her housemaid that did the paintings. I liked how the story depicts a lawyer in 2004 that tries to help the housemaids' descendants get what is rightfully hers.

Our history is full of talented people that were taken advantage of because of their status or race. I loved the fact that there are still people today that are trying to right the wrongs of yesterday.

I loved The Waltons, the closeness of the family, and how they solved typical family squabbles. As an adult, I watched every episode again with my kids, so I was thrilled when I actually met The Homecoming author Earl Hamner, Jr. (the real John-Boy Walton/Clay-Boy Spencer) in an online writers’ group way back when the internet was first invented. We became great online friends. His John-Boy character inspired the character in my book, a good-hearted teen who, despite living in modern times, traverses his small southern town on a horse, just as John-Boy rode Blue, his mule.

This was one of the first archaeology books I was assigned when I started studying archaeology, and I only appreciate it more and more with time. I don’t think there is any book the captures so well the fact that real archaeologists actually learn much more from everyday, mundane objects—rather than from the monuments and treasures that archaeology in the movies is all about. 

I still remember, too, the moment this book made it ‘click’ for me that archaeology often reveals secrets that contradict the written record. A plantation owner might say, for instance, that they designed and built their house, but they can’t hide the existence of the front porch and other traces of African architectural and construction techniques.

My copy of this book is riddled with nearly 20-year-old post-it notes, each one representing an epiphany for a budding archaeologist just ahead of her first summer of excavation.

Notes can feel unwelcoming to modern readers. There are jarring tangents and, more troublingly, dehumanizing descriptions of black people. But if you page around, you’ll learn a lot about Jefferson and his new nation. Notes also made a stunning impact, elevating America’s international standing and becoming a big controversy during Jefferson's presidential bids (the first campaign book!). It’s still a fascinating book to browse, and as a bonus, the Library of America edition also includes Jefferson’s brief attempt at writing an autobiography.

You want heartwarming books about man’s best friend? You’ve come to the wrong place. Novels with dogs don’t have to be heart-warming. They can be quite strange, sinister or both.

Here’s a prime example: The Dogs of Babel, which starts as the heartbroken narrator discovers his artsy, Goth wife has fallen from a tree and died. There are plenty of clues that this was not an accident. But there are no witnesses, except for poor Lorelei the dog. What starts out as a heartbreaking account of grief then takes a sharp turn into the bizarre as the narrator tries to teach Lorelei to speak so he can reconstruct his wife’s last hours. It descends into a seething underground, complete with people operating on dogs’ vocal chords to make them speak. Have I mentioned my list isn’t heartwarming? Did I swipe elements of this novel for my book? You bet… show more.

You don’t necessarily have to like an author to admire their grasp of the subject matter and few writers have a better slab-side manner than Cornwell. She knows her stuff and you can perhaps forgive her the smartarsery that she can’t resist. But she does go out of her way to give the victims and their families closure. 

I read Life on the Color Line as a junior in high school. I was amazed by William’s intimate account of having lived, first as a white boy in America, and then, as a Black boy in America. His life story illuminates not only the fiction that “race” is biological and immutable, but the powerful reality of white supremacy. Little did I know when reading Williams’s book that I would one day give birth to a son this society deems to be white. This is, in many ways, a painful book, but it is also one about the power of love and community. The love and community Williams found is what led him to share his story, which is a necessary and crucial reminder to challenge racism at its root. 

This novel traces the coming of age of the only child, a daughter, of a very traditional Episcopal priest. He struggles with depression, a failed marriage, and his work. She struggles to keep up her father’s spirits and tend to his household, as well as with the abandonment of them by her mother and with the question of who she shall be when she isn’t just tending to her dad. Ultimately, she arrives at a calling of her own. It’s a warm-hearted, leisurely novel that also can be quite comical about church people and human interaction of all kinds, but also treats faith seriously. (There’s also a good sequel that takes us into her ministry, Evensong.)     

Landon Carter was a fearsome Virginia tobacco planter, politician, and patriarch, with hundreds of slaves laboring under the lash on his plantation. As I learned from this book, he was also a total headcase. This book is based on the diaries that Carter wrote compulsively, alone, because he didn't have anyone to confide in. (It's lonely at the top.) 

The diaries reveal Carter as an anxious pessimist, constantly going into tailspins because his slaves, his children, and his fellow Virginia gentlemen constantly defied his authority. The icing on this lousy cake was the outbreak of the American Revolution, which upended Carter's world for good. I don't feel sorry for him, but I learned much about power by reading about his struggles and panics.