31 books like Blind Voices

Oh, Was, how I love your relentlessly bleak, depressing sadness.

This is a strangely inventive novel that twines reality and fantasy into a brutal, desolate, yet gorgeous story of pain and survival. Told from the points of view of numerous characters, each story is tethered in some way to The Wizard of Oz, that venerable fable about good versus evil in the search for home.

Ryman introduces us to a main trio of characters whose lives are all equally harrowing–Dorothy Gael (the imagined inspiration for The Wizard of Oz heroine and the victim of familial sexual abuse), Frances Gumm (who becomes the tragic Judy Garland), and Jonathan (an actor experiencing AIDS-related dementia)–whose stories he intricately weaves together like a master craftsman. And while the novel is not a “happy” read by any stretch of the imagination, what has stayed with me throughout the past thirty years is its… show more.

I defy any reader not to fall in love with The Land of Laughs. Tom Abbey and ‘spirited girlfriend’ Saxony Gardner head to the small Midwestern town where children’s author Marshall France once lived and wrote, with the aim of persuading France’s daughter to approve a biography. They come to realise that the town has a personality that’s unlike any other, as much the author’s creation as his adopted home. Warm, surprising, funny, scary; if, like me, you were ever captivated in childhood by a favourite writer’s imagined world and wish you could go there again, then this is the book for your adult self.

This book arrived in the avalanche of volumes that descended on my house the year I agreed to join the judging panel for the World Fantasy Awards, and for me it shone out. The story’s told by Hans Schneider, who kills a fellow student when a duel goes wrong and ends up working in a low-rent asylum. There he meets the mysterious Dr. Lavenza and joins him in a mission to locate Victor Frankenstein’s formula for eternal life. It’s written with style and wit and a great sense of period. I felt so strongly about the lack of a paperback edition that I later offered to create one for the Brooligan Press. And for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t make a penny from its sales!

Sarah Hall is a phenomenal writer and this is the novel that got me hooked. The Electric Michaelangelo of the title is tattoo artist Cy Parks, a man whose heart, art, and the love of his life are all inextricably entangled. The narrative charts his journey from a Morecambe childhood to a tattoo booth on Coney Island and back again, and it’s another take on the kind of Sideshow Gothic that I love. Hall writes accessible award-worthy novels in prose that’s stripped of any pretentiousness. After reading this and then her debut novel Haweswater I just order whatever she publishes, sight unseen.

What I love about this book is that it offers such a useful and practical approach to dealing with stress and becoming more resilient. The author teaches readers how to become immune to the most common causes of stress, instead of typical techniques to deal with stress like meditation. My work depends on helping people make the best use of their most important resources—not time or money, but body and mind. And stress is an unavoidable part of life that damages our well-being, dampens our energy, and saps our motivation. Stress-Proof Your Life provides solutions to stress based on original research and unique advice, and every busy person needs these solutions.

I devoured this novella for its humanity and its writing. Ted and Rene marry in the ‘frail optimism’ of the 1950s, she to assume the expected role of mother and housewife, he to continue with his career as a ceramics designer in the family firm. Over time, misunderstandings and the inability to talk to each other drive a wide wedge in their marriage. Ted is almost a bystander in this process, helpless in not knowing what to do about it as things get worse and worse. 

A heart-rending, simple, and beautifully told tale of a marriage which slowly dissolves into silences while maintaining the perfect façade.

If you could go back and change something about your life, would you?

The hero of this story inadvertently finds himself returning to his past time and again, each instance trying to follow a different path to success or happiness. But just as he finds what he thought he wanted, the cycle begins again. 

This helpful book digs into the stigma of suicide, how it has been viewed as taboo, and how the bodies of people who committed suicide have traditionally even been denied burial. The people left behind find themselves isolated by their shame and the fear that others will shy away from a topic considered sinful in most religions. This was certainly my experience. Had my father died of cancer or a heart attack, I would have talked openly of his death and received a lot of support. But I felt his mental illness, addiction, and suicide too dark a topic to impose on anyone.

Happy, functional families don’t go through things like this. It was an extension of the shame I’d internalized as a child growing up with socially divergent parents who struggled with mental health issues. Alexander, who lost her own mother to suicide, gives links to survivor support groups,… show more.

This classic text by medical sociologist Arthur Frank was written in the wake of two life-threatening events: a heart attack at age 39 and a cancer diagnosis a year later. 

Frank draws on both his scholarly and personal experiences to guide others who find themselves in similar circumstances. He helps us understand that when we place ourselves in medicine’s hands, we also subject ourselves to their ways of knowing. Their stories bleed into our stories, but they are never the same as our stories because what medicine knows as disease is not the same as what we experience as illness. 

Thus, Frank teaches us: “These two stories, the story of medicine taking the body as its territory and the story of learning to wonder at the body itself, can only be told together, because illness is both stories at once.”

An excellent book on how to find meaning and fulfillment in your career and personal relationships, and to be true to your values even when it’s tempting to make an exception ‘just this once’.

In a surprising change of career tack, Harvard Business School’s Clay Christensen moves from contemplating innovation and industry change to seeking to understand how you truly gauge success.