Why am I passionate about this?

I read a lot of first-person books because I write a lot of 1st person books. I was a creative writing teacher for twenty years and I wanted my students to ā€˜ownā€™ their materialā€”to write about what they saw and felt and empathized with and loved and feared. These book recommendations below are only a handful of immensely brilliant books that have strong character/narrator voices that put you inside the skin of the narrator. These are the books that are recklessly beautiful and ruthlessly genuine-- and by example teach you how to write honestly and how to capture your own readers.


I wrote

Hole in My Life

By Jack Gantos,

Book cover of Hole in My Life

What is my book about?

When I was in high school I was a smart kid, a reader, and I lived in a welfare roomingā€¦

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

The books I picked & why

Book cover of This Boy's Life: A Memoir

Jack Gantos Why did I love this book?

I admire this book because the teen character is deeply honest with how he describes the difficult, contentious world around him, and the world within him. He gets it, and he uses the language in a plain prose style that lets the voice, the action, the images, and the drama hit home inside the reader. Once you enter this book, and are captured by the beauty and authenticity, then you canā€™t put it down because it holds a mirror up to your own interior life.

By Tobias Wolff,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked This Boy's Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

ā€œA classic of the genre.ā€ā€•New York Times

The 30th anniversary edition of Tobias Wolff's "extraordinary memoir" (SF Chronicle), now with a new introduction by the author.

Thirty years ago Tobias Wolff wrote a memoir that changed the form. The ā€œunforgettableā€ (Time) This Boyā€™s Life is the story of the young, tough-on-the-outside but vulnerable Toby Wolff. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother travel from Florida to Utah to a small village in Washington state, with many stops along the way. As each place doesnā€™t quite work out, they pick up to find somewhere new. Inā€¦


Book cover of The Car Thief

Jack Gantos Why did I love this book?

I knew Ted Weesner. We taught creative writing at Emerson College. This is Tedā€™s first book which still gives me chills because of how filmic the prose isā€”as in stepping into a filmā€”only it is not only visual, it is visceral. You feel every part of this book and feel it deeply, sympathetically, and even though the main character is making mistakes his mistakes are your mistakes, his disappointments are your disappointments, his hopes are your hopes and thus his tragedy is yours to keep.

By Theodore Weesner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Car Thief as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Hailed by The Boston Globe as "so poignant and beautifully written, so true and painful, that one can't read it without feeling the knife's cruel blade in the heart," The Car Thief was first published to enormous popularity, and sold over half a million copies. Alex Housman is a kid who at the age of sixteen has had fourteen cars, harbors many hurts, and seems to fade into his environment while raging inside. His father is an alcoholic, losing his grip on life even as he wants the best for his son. The Car Thief explores the love Alex andā€¦


Ad

Book cover of Suddenly that Summer

Suddenly that Summer by Lori Handeland,

Set during the same tumultuous era as The Women1967: They called it the Summer of Love...

For small-town Wisconsin siblings Billy and Jay Johnson, itā€™s a summer of change, confusion, and self-discovery. 

From the voice of New York Times bestselling author Lori Handeland, a heartfelt, coming-of-age story thatā€¦

Book cover of The Basketball Diaries: The Classic about Growing Up Hip on New York's Mean Streets

Jack Gantos Why did I love this book?

This is the New York City ā€œclassicā€ rock-n-roll, basketball-playing, bad behaving, love life chasing, down and dirty poetic feel-good like a young god book. You have to read this whip-smart, live life to the fullest, see-it-all book set in NYC. After you read this book you will move there because youā€™ll be addicted to the literary electricity in this book.

By Jim Carroll,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Basketball Diaries as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The urban classic coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, and basketball

Jim Carroll grew up to become a renowned poet and punk rocker. But in this memoir of the mid-1960s, set during his coming-of-age from 12 to 15, he was a rebellious teenager making a place and a name for himself on the unforgiving streets of New York City. During these years, he chronicled his experiences, and the result is a diary of unparalleled candor that conveys his alternately hilarious and terrifying teenage existence. Here is Carroll prowling New York City--playing basketball, hustling, stealing, getting high, getting hooked, and searching forā€¦


Book cover of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Jack Gantos Why did I love this book?

The most engaging, genuine, soul-crushing, holocaust/concentration camp book Iā€™ve ever read and Iā€™ve read them all. And read his bio, too. Crisp, clear writing allows all the horror of the concentration camp to roll over your soul. You have nowhere to hide when you read this bookā€”the honesty is pure and brutal. Yet, the soulful fallout never really leaves you fully crushedā€”otherwise, you would never feel the agony of humanity over and over again.

By Tadeusz Borowski,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes. Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.


Ad

Book cover of Notes of Love and War

Notes of Love and War by Betty BoltƩ,

Set against the backdrop of the flourishing musical community during the 1940s in Baltimore, Notes of Love and War weaves together the pleasure of musical performance with the dangers of espionage and spying.

Audrey Harper needs more than home and hearth to satisfy her self-worth. Working as a music criticā€¦

Book cover of The Street of Crocodiles

Jack Gantos Why did I love this book?

Simply put: the writing is magnificent. Beautiful, poetic, surprising, surreal, and yet exceptionally real. Itā€™s a book of short stories that reads like a novel. Set in Poland during WWII. Schulz was a genius at capturing the world of his Nazi-occupied town and all who lived there. This book exists as if it were its own universe in a glass orb. Itā€™s a ā€œpush-pullā€ read: you want to live Schulzā€™s life and you want to avoid it in equal measures.

By Bruno Schulz, Celina Wieniewska (translator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Street of Crocodiles as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A novel that blends the real and the fantastic, from "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick) 

The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should beā€¦


Explore my book šŸ˜€

Hole in My Life

By Jack Gantos,

Book cover of Hole in My Life

What is my book about?

When I was in high school I was a smart kid, a reader, and I lived in a welfare rooming house in Florida. I worked in a grocery store. I had great friends and I led a fast life. I graduated and moved to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. To make money on the side I sold drugs. Then I joined a team of British smugglers and sailed a yacht with a ton of hashish to new york city. It was a glorious sailing adventure.

But it didnā€™t work out as well as I had imagined I wanted it to, however. I was caught and I was given six years in prison. This book is my personal story about how reading books saved my lifeā€¦and how I became a writer.

Book cover of This Boy's Life: A Memoir
Book cover of The Car Thief
Book cover of The Basketball Diaries: The Classic about Growing Up Hip on New York's Mean Streets

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

2,008

readers submitted
so far, will you?

Ad

šŸ“š You might also likeā€¦

Book cover of God on a Budget: and other stories in dialogue

God on a Budget by J.M. Unrue,

Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in theā€¦

Book cover of Performance Anxiety

Performance Anxiety by Jonathan Lerner,

Lerner's memoir of approaching adulthood in the mid-sixties is deliciously readable, but deceptively breezy. His family is affluent, his school engaging, his friends smart and fun. He has his first car, and drives with abandon. The American moment promises unlimited possibility. But political and cultural upheavals are emerging, and irresistible.ā€¦

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in childhood, Poland, and concentration camps?

Childhood 200 books
Poland 123 books