100 books like Americanah

I honestly felt my life had more meaning after I first read this book, as it touched on so much that was close to my heart.

I totally identified with the protagonist’s emotional journey: a childhood imbued with a sense of things lost and hidden, which, in adulthood, he tries to quell with erudition before the past erupts and he learns the truth of his tortured origins.

I found it really haunting and more in touch with the truth about the human condition than most books I’ve read. I’ve read it three times, once with my reading group, and I’m sure I’ll read it again. 

By most accounts, immigrant literature deals primarily with how immigrants struggle to adapt to their adopted countries.

Its readers have come to expect stories of identity formation, of how immigrants create ethnic communities and maintain ties to countries of origin. Yet such narratives can center exceptional stories of individual success or obscure the political forces that uproot millions of people the world over.

This novel simulates the intimacy of immigrant memoir by seemingly giving readers access to his narrator’s interiority; it seems to cater to readerly expectation. And yet this is ultimately a ruse to obtain readerly investment, which Cole then redirects to the global history of forced migration and dispossession.

I love the combination of erudition and subtlety in a novel that, while ranging across three continents, allows readers to think simultaneously about dislocation across history and in our contemporary world.

There are very few books that capture the particular suffering of loving someone and not being loved back.

Greenwell’s powerful debut novel is one of them. Set in the capital city of Bulgaria, the novel begins with an encounter that the narrator, an American teacher working abroad, has with Mitko, a sex worker. It is written in prose whose beauty, beat by beat, is as achingly beautiful as the unrequited love the narrator has for Mitko. This is one to savor slowly.

My copy is heavily underlined. Garth, a trained opera singer, reads like a dream. Accompany your reading with his readings from the work (they’re on YouTube). 

There’s being lost in life, then there’s drunkenly lying about your mother’s death in order to elicit sympathy from a potential love interest. Having bluffed his way into a fellowship in Spain, Adam Gordon, the highly privileged, highly incompetent narrator of this book, spends most of his days getting high and wrestling with the connection between experience and art, questioning his own legitimacy at every turn. Not a lot happens, but that’s kind of the point: the absence of adversity in Gordon’s life is what makes him so insecure and is perhaps saying something on the topic of American decline.

This is my favorite of Toni Morrison’s novels because of the utterly original world she creates in the fictional Ohio neighborhood called “The Bottom.” Every time I read it, I find something new in the friendship between the main characters, Nel and Sula, a kind of relationship I recognized immediately.

I was a rule-abiding, quiet teenager who strived for approval from adults but was always attracted to bolder, less conventional friends. I often think about a scene in which Nel and Sula are walking down the street together, experiencing the sudden sense of power that comes with men’s attention and their whispered words, “pig meat.” I don’t know another book that gets at the threat and the mystery of sexual life so honestly or in such original language.

I loved this book because it tells the story of a young woman in a perilous political situation who doesn’t cave to horrifying violence or conform simply to stay safe. I admire the voice Burns creates for the main character, called “middle sister,” because it’s unlike any narration in any other novel. 

For me, the strangeness of middle sister’s narration gets at the disconnect between the way a young woman sees herself and the way the rest of the world sees her—as inconsequential, as a sexual object, as a target. I love the way that she thinks her way out of the traps all around her, using humor and clear-sightedness to survive ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland during the 1970s.  

I loved this book because it’s the best illustration of the stepmother-stepdaughter relationship that I’ve ever read. Flo and Rose’s conflicts over work, sex, and a woman’s place in the world made me remember exactly what it was like to be a teenager struggling to relate to older women in my life.

Like many of Alice Munro’s celebrated short stories, it’s about a young woman growing up in rural Ontario who strains against the prejudices of her small town, especially about girls’ education and ambition. “Who do you think you are?” is the question that comes up again and again in this novel-in-stories. Used as an insult, it challenges Rose to make a different life for herself without forgetting the women who came before her. 

The British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have an American doctor friend who has a fascinating exercise for his first-year medical school students.

This doctor asks his students to write a speech detailing why the USA has the world’s best health. The students eagerly set about collecting all the relevant data and quickly find themselves absolutely shocked. Among major developed nations, the USA turns out to have the worst health.

Americans also turn out to be up to ten times more likely than people in other developed nations to get murdered or become drug addicts. What’s going on here? Inequality!

The more wealth concentrates at a society’s summit, Wilkinson and Pickett vividly show in this 2009 classic, the worse that society performs on the yardsticks that define basic health and decency. 

I love books about lying! Like a lot of adolescents, Giovanna starts to recognize the lies her parents and their friends are telling and discovers family secrets. The most interesting lies, though, are the ones people tell themselves in order to rewrite their own histories. I love the way Ferrante sets those shifting stories against a girl’s determination to understand her changing face in the mirror and what is really meant by the idea of beauty.

The book also gave me a chance to return to the setting of Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels, the beauty and violence of which she describes with such unrelenting honesty.  

I have always loved Branko Milanović’s way of addressing complex topics in a very accessible and usually highly original way.

In this book, Milanović pays much attention to the rich and the super-rich and devises a way of comparing their wealth across the ages by asking this simple question: how much labour could they command in their own historical period and socio-economic context?

So, for example, Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest Roman of Caesar’s times, could, with the yearly income from his vast possessions, command the work of 32,000 people. But, as Milanović argues, today’s super-rich are richer than past ones–circa 2010, the richest person in the world was the telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, who could command the work of 440,000 Mexicans.