100 books like Dogfulness

In my defense, I read this book long before Jungkook recommended it, and it single-handedly became my gateway drug into memoir. I had never heard of Japanese Breakfast beforehand, but no matter—hers was the kind of story around food and loss that I found incredibly relatable in feeling, even if not in the actual details. 

Come on, we who slog through loss need a break from other people’s grief. I offer The Cruelest Month as one of my favorite L. Penny books in which to escape.

I escape to the façade of the idyl of Three Pines. Smell the brioche from Gabri and Olivier’s Bistro, dodge an insult from Ruth walking her duck. Despite betrayal and mortal danger, Inspector Gamache is sure to prevail. I need these people.

Death is complicated by human emotional frailty in The Cruelest Month as death is in “true” life. The séance at the evil Hadley House offers hope, for some, of bringing back lost souls. I too sometimes yearn to bring back my wandering souls. Penny has talent with phrasing, braiding of stories within the story, and professorial knowledge of the arcane. All a break from “dealing” with the mire of loss.

I felt a kinship at Schulz’s expression of dislike for the “well-intentioned” euphemisms for dying.

Her visual explanations of what well-wishers really feel and the almost cinematic movement through her experience in losing her father reveal a skilled writer. I’m drawn more to fine writing than trodding through a stranger’s personal journey. The confusion of grief is shared in a scholarly manner including literary references that show loss is a time-worn path.

The self-assignment as torch bearer for our focus of grief is another mantle I recognized. I have found that the legacy of the one we’ve lost becomes a painful need. As with Schulz, keeping the flame burning relieves the ache until the ache burns out in its time. An uplift from the loss is Schulz’s “finding” of love. Hope pushes through the sorrow.

“Bat shit is patient.” Simple, clear, dead on to describe the crazy life-clowns that leap from dark corners as I fend off grief... loss.

I Was Better... may not be a “grief” book, per se, but Fierstein dances us through the fears, struggles, and losses in his journey to live a life he wants. His quote, “Look back, but don’t stare” felt as though he quoted it for me to help deal with many joyous and painful memories of my husband.

I Was Better... is a tropical island where I could escape the squalls of my life of loss. I relished his musicals, strode the flamboyant streets of New York, and was embraced by Fierstein’s poignant and dearly funny honesty. His rage against the night was mine too. He and I kept dog paddling – together.

Another powerful debut on border-crossing, this novel begins with a frame-chapter or a prologue of sorts called “The Trip” that shows a group of Moroccans fleeing to Spain for a better life on a ramshackle boat. The following subsections, “Before” and “After,” zoom into the lives of the characters introduced in the opening chapter to highlight the socio-economic reasons leading them to risk their lives by crossing the Mediterranean Sea illegally, and their gritty fate once the boat fails them, as they’re stranded in Spain or deported to Morocco. Some critics have called the novel a collection of interconnected stories, although the book’s “prologue” is hardly a standalone story; it aligns the novel instead with an alternative structural aesthetic, one that recalls the frame narratives of oral storytelling traditions like The Thousand and One Nights, an obvious influence on the book. 

A page-turning, true-life adventure! The story is told in first-person verse by 13-year-old Ken Sparks whose parents send him from England to Canada at the start of the Blitz as part of the British government’s ill-fated child evacuee program. Five days into the crossing, his ship, the SS Benares, is torpedoed by a German U-Boat, and as it sinks fast, Ken finds himself in a lifeboat with five other boys fighting for their lives. I read this book and loved it from page one. Although they come from very different backgrounds, Ken and Käfer share endearing qualities: pluck, resourcefulness, and a child’s optimistic view of the world. All of which stand them in good stead.

When sharks are circling your life raft, I do not recommend drinking seawater to quench your excruciating thirst. In Albatross, five people find themselves adrift at sea in a small life raft with no food or water. When one of the sailors drinks seawater we see how that can dehydrate the brain and cause hallucinations. Suddenly the sailor blurts out that he is going to get his car to get some beer, and he steps out of the life raft. The sharks are waiting.

Albatross is not only a story of mistakes made, but also of courageous decisions by two survivors, Deb Kiley and Brad Cavanaugh. It is hair-raising, insightful, and might just keep you off the water.

Of all the eyewitness survivor accounts of the sinking of the Titanic, this is the most compelling and descriptive, as well as one of the first to be published. As the Titanic foundered, Gracie was swept into the sea by a giant wave, the undertow of the sinking liner sucking him deeper and deeper below the surface. So long was he underwater that by the time he surfaced, “I could see no Titanic in sight”.  He clung on to a wooden crate which kept him afloat long enough to find an overturned collapsible lifeboat.

Gracie never recovered from his ordeal. He died eight months later, most likely from organ failure caused by hypothermia. But, as a writer and historian, he put every day to good use, writing this gripping eye-witness account – not just of Titanic’s death throes but every moment from the collision with the iceberg to the loading… show more.

The waves were high, and the wind gusting, but it was nothing Steven Callahan’s little 21-foot sailboat hadn’t seen before. He had sailed her across the Atlantic once before and was aiming for the Caribbean when he bedded down for the night. He awoke to a cabin full of raging seawater and had only minutes to escape before the boat he had designed and built went to the bottom. He had an inflatable raft, a small amount of food and water, and a soaking-wet sleeping bag. Not much else. This raw first-person account of surviving alone in the middle of the ocean on a life raft reads like the transcript of the nightmare every sailor who heads out to sea has the night before leaving port. 

The Lifeboat is one of the first-period books I ever remember reading, and I was hooked by it from the first page. Told in the first person we follow Grace, as she retells the horrific incidents that have happened to her during the sinking of the Express Alexandra, becoming a widow, and spending three weeks trapped on a cramped lifeboat. I credit this book with being the first to inspire me in the world of historical fiction, both as a reader and writer.