24 books like Effi Briest

Reading this book made me feel as if I was watching a great magician perform several impossible tricks.

It is both clever and funny, it teems with wonderful characters but never seems overstuffed, and it does what very few historical novels manage to do. We absolutely believe that the people are living their lives in the past (this really is Germany in the 1790s), but we also recognize them as our contemporaries.

I find it a magical book, lighter than air, a poignant, gorgeous love story that also satisfies the historian in me.

This is the best book I know (even better than a complex spy thriller!) about what the Berlin Wall meant to individual East Germans.

I first read this novel about divided lovers in a West German edition back in the 1980s, when the “other” Germany still existed. I have often used the book in classes since then because I like it so much, enjoying it more and more as I peeled back the layers, admiring how cleverly Christa Wolf interweaves the personal and political.

She talks about “this strange stuff called life,” and that is one of the things I most love about the book: how it makes things that are apparently obvious and familiar seem strange. 

If I were allowed to have only one novel about German culture and the coming of the Nazis, this would be it. And, if I were allowed only one novel about the price paid by those who create great art, this would also be it.

I have never read a better fictional account of what it means to make music, and there is something truly thrilling (but also quite chilling) about the story of the composer Adrian Leverkuhn’s Faustian pact with the devil.

I was also captivated by the way that Thomas Mann has his narrator tell this story, from the recent German past, from the “present” of bombs falling on Germany at the end of World War II.

I came to this book much later than the others. My wonderful editor sent me a copy, and I was instantly smitten. The historian in me loved the scathing indictment of the early Federal Republic, with its obsessive materialism and its idealistic narrator surrounded by a world of political opportunists and sleazy lobbyists.

But it’s the language of the book that made me sit up, the strange, almost uncanny mixture of urgent, tumbling, staccato thoughts, but at the same time, an extraordinary lyricism. I found that I wanted to taste the words, to roll them around in my mouth; this may be a book to read out loud. I found it melancholy yet somehow energizing. 

Many could argue that picking the most mind-bending Philip K. Dick book is an impossible task. His imagination spawned some of the best science fiction books of his era, which inspired several groundbreaking films (Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc.) I agree: it’s impossible to pick one.

But I love this book because it explores an intriguing idea from drug-induced psychosis—that of cross-chatter, or the notion that the brain’s two hemispheres can keep secrets from each other. The story follows the hapless Bob Arctor, an undercover narcotics agent trying to spy on himself and his junkie friends who are addicted to the mysterious Substance D. 

Dick conjures a mesmeric psychedelic tale, at turns hilarious, unnerving, and a poignant farewell to real-life addict friends who died too soon.  

I am recommending George Eliot’s novel (published in parts 1871-72) because I believe it is as good as any of the great Russian novels and probably the best novel written in English. Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) was herself a revolutionary person. In 19th century England, she worked as an independent woman, lived with a married man (she eventually married him), and later married a man a lot younger than herself. Her novel is set in the early part of the 19th century when the aftereffects of the French Revolution were strongly felt in England, and there was even fear of revolution among the English aristocracy. The 1832 parliamentary reforms gave political power to the new middle class, and change was underway. Middlemarch is a fictional town, where the banker, mayor, and other middle-class professionals are rising in influence.

At the center of the novel is a medical doctor… show more.

A complex magic realist novel. Two Muslim Indians are on a highjacked plane that explodes over the English Channel. As they fall into the sea, Bollywood superstar Gibreel Farishta, turns into the Archangel Gabriel, while Saladin Chamcha, a voiceover artist, metamorphoses into the Devil. They struggle with their new identities, with rivalry, with life in Britain, and in Gibreel’s case, with mental illness. Like all Rushdie’s work, it is a post-colonial perspective on the metropolis and the identity crises of the ex-colonised. There are long dream sequences about an Arabian prophet called Mahmoud—who resembles the founder of Islam. The Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Rushdie to death for blasphemy for this. This all sounds deep and portentous—and it is—but it’s also unfailingly funny and original. And brave. An inspiration. 

I loved this book because it made me cry with its emotional impact. It opened my eyes to the mistreatment of Native Americans and the Spanish/Mexican inhabitants of southern California when the territory was annexed by the United States after the Spanish-American War. 

This is the love story between the mixed-race orphan girl, Ramona, and Alessandro, the head of the Native American sheep shearers. When they fall in love, knowing her aunt, who took her in and owns the rancho, will never let her marry a Native American, they elope. But Alessandro’s tribe is soon driven off their land by American settlers flooding the area, and he and Ramona are thrown into poverty as they travel from locale to locale, desperately trying to find a place to call home. 

I enjoyed Mafouz’s marvelous retelling of the Thousand and One Nights. Although Mafouz sets the time in mediaeval era, the novel is a political fable with contemporary overtones for any authoritarian government.    

Arabian Nights and Days, tells the story of the Sultan, Shahriyar, and his entourage of rotating police chiefs, spies, and informers. Many of the same characters from A Thousand and One Nights appear in his version: Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin, Shahrazad and her sister, Dunyazad. And characters do tell stories to one another, but Shahrazad is not as prominent.

Anyone who’s ever taken drugs (or drunk an energy drink) will know that the high always comes at a price: you are not being given new energy; you are just borrowing tomorrow’s energy, and you will pay for it later. 

This book tells the story of a man who lives a life of hedonistic depravity but sails through it all, apparently untouched by experience, his face as young and innocent-looking as ever. But all his guilt and fear show up on the face of the portrait of himself that he keeps in his attic. I can’t think of a more perfect example of the novel-as-metaphor.