Here are 2 books that You Exist Too Much fans have personally recommended if you like
You Exist Too Much.
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I don’t know why I stopped reading this quartet of novels after the first one, My Brilliant Friend, which I loved.
Maybe it was the hype? A few years later, I finally picked up Book Two of the Neapolitan Novels and could NOT put it down.
The breadth and depth of the world of Naples in the 1960s-70s, the violence, the patriarchy, and the deep and conflicted friendship between Lila and Elena, who need and hate and love each other, is impossible to summarize. In this story, Lila gets married, and Elena pursues her education—but so much more!
Sheer life is portrayed with such force that my lived experience pales in comparison. Suffice it to say, I did not take a hiatus after finishing this book, and I moved immediately on to the next one and the last one. Now, I want to reread them all.
The Story of a New Name, the second book of the Neapolitan Quartet, picks up the story where My Brilliant Friend left off.
Lila has recently married and made her entree into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighbourhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Before this, I had not read anything by the Irish writer Sally Rooney.
At first, I didn’t find her characters or the slow pace of the plot very appealing. But I stuck with the novel because I liked the two main characters—brothers who have recently lost their father. The older brother is a civil rights lawyer who is often very uncivil, both to his brother and to his several lovers. The younger brother is a chess prodigy who is on the spectrum and lacks any social skills.
Not only did I find the characters and Rooney's style to be compelling, I appreciated how she drew me into the plot by slow degrees. This is one of those books that requires the reader to be patient, a patience that will pay the reader with a powerful story of brotherly love.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A National Indie Bestseller
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family―but especially love―from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties―successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women―his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
