Here are 100 books that Germinal fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been a Francophile for as long as I can remember. Something about France and French literature grabbed me by the heart when I was a young man and continues to do so. I’ve lived in France twice–a year each time–and have written about those experiences in books and essays. It’s 19th-century French literature that especially draws me and has deeply influenced my own writing.
We all know the title. It’s become a record-breaking musical phenomenon. The book is a phenomenon in itself. It was a voyage I took for a few spellbound weeks, and I read it in a stone house in a small village in the South of France. It is a book of great sympathy and grace.
Victor Hugo’s heart is large—at least measured by this story of an escaped prisoner who tries to do good with his life but is pursued relentlessly by a police officer, Javert. I found with this book, as the great writers always show me, that character is all. Hugo drew me into the struggles and losses of his people so ably and memorably that I still think of them years later.
The only completely unabridged paperback edition of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece—a sweeping tale of love, loss, valor, and passion.
Introducing one of the most famous characters in literature, Jean Valjean—the noble peasant imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread—Les Misérables ranks among the greatest novels of all time. In it, Victor Hugo takes readers deep into the Parisian underworld, immerses them in a battle between good and evil, and carries them to the barricades during the uprising of 1832 with a breathtaking realism that is unsurpassed in modern prose.
I write historical fiction based on the lives of my ancestors: Agnes Canon’s War is the story of my twice-great grandparents during the Civil War. An Irish Wife is based on their son. I write about the Gilded Age, which is only now drawing the attention of historical novelists and the wider public: the vast wealth of industrialists contrasted to the poverty of the lower classes, scandalous politics, environmental degradation, fear of and prejudices about immigrants. My ancestors lived through those days; I want to imagine how that tumultuous society affected them, how they managed, what they lost and gained, and to memorialize those stories as a way to honor them.
Before there were Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, there was the book that brought them together (in the movie): Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Wharton’s lush, sepia-toned tale of the New York haut ton of the 1870s. Gilded Age society at its best; it won the 1921 Pulitzer for fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Read it first, then stream the movie. I loved its opulent portrayal of the well-heeled society of upper-class New York and its spot-on portrayal of moral hypocrisy. The battles that nineteenth-century women of all classes fought to live their lives with integrity and honesty seem to me to echo today in the ongoing injustices perpetrated against society’s powerless.
Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.
I am the son of Irish rural immigrants who at the age of nearly eighty already occupies several vanished worlds myself: London in the 1950s and 60s, the old world of the European peasantry, and a time when the greatest war in human history was still a daily presence. I spent most of my life as an academic historian writing books for an academic audience. Then, to my surprise, at the tender age of seventy, I discovered that I could write prose that had a certain grace and dignity and which seemed to move people as well as inform them. So, I began a second career as what is called a “writer.”
Josef Roth is now recognized as one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century. As a historian myself, I was entranced by reading it by the way in which the book catches the vast temporal arc of the transformation and then fall of a society that had for centuries been a major force in European history, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now forgotten, this was the world of Vienna’s great resplendence, then fall.
The story is told through the generational story of one family, the von Trottas. Impending loss is conveyed alongside great affection as a whole world is lost in the disasters of the First World War. The book was first published in English in 1933. In the words of another of Josef Roth’s books, “I was there,” which he was.
THE RADETSKY MARCH is subtle and touching study of family life at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in the traditional form of the family saga, Roth nevertheless manages to bring to his story a completely individual manner which gives at the same time the detailed and intimate portrait of a life and the wider panorama of a failing dynasty. Not yet well known in English-speaking countries, Joseph Roth is one of the most distinguished Austrian writers of our century, worthy to be bracketed with Musil and Kraus.
I think Zoroastrianism got it right: there's a constant knife-edge balance between good and evil, with neither quite winning; but we shouldn't be overconfident that one day that balance will tip to the bad side because that is always more dominant. Art in all forms has served dictators and tyrants as well as criticised them; few works have ever actually changed anything. If they have, it's been through literature most of all. Zola's 'j'accuse' and Sinclair's 'the jungle' are two obvious examples, but all the books I have chosen are powerful tools for self–examination, and as someone who is particularly interested in man's inhumanity to man I have found them useful.
I think this is a better book than MME Bovary. It's quite in the tradition of Marivaudage but Flaubert has such a light though ruthless touch that at times you just don't know where your sympathies lie. If Flaubert has been a surgeon he's have been an expert with the smallest, finest scalpels! His technique stands in great contrast to the work of Hugo and Zola, and he certainly outmanoeuvres Balzac! I often wish he'd written more, but what he's left us is pure gold. You might like to compare this book with Fontane's Effi Briest – another stunning novel–of–manners. I was hard put to it to make a choice between these two novels for my 4th choice.
"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation—or, more accurately, the history of their feelings," declared Gustave Flaubert, who envisioned "a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays—that is to say, inactive." First published in 1869, this novel fulfills Flaubert's conception with a realistic, ironic portrait of bourgeois lives played out against France's tumultuous revolution of 1848 and the founding of its Second Empire. Frédéric Moreau, a law student in Paris, dreams of achieving success in art, business, journalism, and politics. His aspirations take a romantic turn upon a chance…
Life is stories, man. Telling stories. Listening to stories. One day, somebody had the brilliant idea to start writing these stories down. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. Trading yarns. Figuring things out. Reading and writing. I wrote my first story in middle school. My first novel in college. My first published novel (This Way Madness Lies) in my late twenties. Now it’s thirty years, twenty-five novels, fifty short stories, and three books of poetry later, and I’m still as obsessed with and passionate about storytelling as I was as a young buck backpacking around Europe with a notebook and a beat-up copy of Down and Out in London and Paris stuffed into my leather satchel.
I was on an extended trip to Eastern Europe, back when Eastern Europe was not such a dandy place to visit, and I found myself with nothing to read. In a used bookstore in Prague, I found a tattered paperback, translated into English, of this next pick. It was falling apart, the pages stained by coffee and God knows what else. I bought it anyway.
And over the next few weeks, I was, for the third time, blown away by words on a page, by an author’s imagination. It’s been said that Don Quixote, written around 1600, was the first novel ever written. It may also be the greatest novel ever written. Adventure. Humor. Pathos. Crazy amounts of imagination. The Whole Damn Human Condition.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.
I write historical fiction based on the lives of my ancestors: Agnes Canon’s War is the story of my twice-great grandparents during the Civil War. An Irish Wife is based on their son. I write about the Gilded Age, which is only now drawing the attention of historical novelists and the wider public: the vast wealth of industrialists contrasted to the poverty of the lower classes, scandalous politics, environmental degradation, fear of and prejudices about immigrants. My ancestors lived through those days; I want to imagine how that tumultuous society affected them, how they managed, what they lost and gained, and to memorialize those stories as a way to honor them.
Two volumes, nearly a thousand pages—but don’t let that put you off. This is the background story of the Gilded Age in small-town America, a microcosm of all that was best and worst in the era. Coal mines—a theme running through much Gilded Age tale-telling—and vast riches, sexual misadventures in a time when Victorian straitjackets were loosening, neighborly battles, far-reaching strikes, religious convulsions, political shenanigans. They’re all here. You’ll get lost in them.
"...encompasses thirty-five years in the life of the small Ohio town of Paradise Falls, from the end of the Civil War to the tumultuous opening of the twentieth century."
I write historical fiction based on the lives of my ancestors: Agnes Canon’s War is the story of my twice-great grandparents during the Civil War. An Irish Wife is based on their son. I write about the Gilded Age, which is only now drawing the attention of historical novelists and the wider public: the vast wealth of industrialists contrasted to the poverty of the lower classes, scandalous politics, environmental degradation, fear of and prejudices about immigrants. My ancestors lived through those days; I want to imagine how that tumultuous society affected them, how they managed, what they lost and gained, and to memorialize those stories as a way to honor them.
And now to nonfiction. For anyone who savors the study of history as a prelude to the present, this is the book to read. The Gilded Age, rife with economic and technologic disruptions and the clash between the ever-richer and the always-poor, driven by industrial juggernauts and riven by raucous, violent politics—to understand the era and see the roots of many of today’s issues, this book is a must.
A penetrating, character-filled history “in the manner of David McCullough” (WSJ), revealing the deep roots of our tormented present-day politics.
Democracy was broken. Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. At the century’s end, reformers finally restrained this wild system, trading away participation for civility in the process. They built a calmer, cleaner democracy, but also a more…
I write historical fiction based on the lives of my ancestors: Agnes Canon’s War is the story of my twice-great grandparents during the Civil War. An Irish Wife is based on their son. I write about the Gilded Age, which is only now drawing the attention of historical novelists and the wider public: the vast wealth of industrialists contrasted to the poverty of the lower classes, scandalous politics, environmental degradation, fear of and prejudices about immigrants. My ancestors lived through those days; I want to imagine how that tumultuous society affected them, how they managed, what they lost and gained, and to memorialize those stories as a way to honor them.
Delicious fact that reads like fiction and tells a story of Gilded Age power politics. Presidential scandals? Nothing new here. The tale of the illegitimate son of the 22nd and 24th president and the boy’s defenseless mother perfectly illustrates the sexual upheavals of the era and the workings of a society steaming along in an effort to keep pace with the changes of the new industrial era.
The child was born on September 14, 1874, at the only hospital in Buffalo, New York, that offered maternity services for unwed mothers. It was a boy, and though he entered the world in a state of illegitimacy, a distinguished name was given to this newborn: Oscar Folsom Cleveland. The son of the future president of the United States-Grover Cleveland. The story of how the man who held the nation's highest office eventually came to take responsibility for his son is a thrilling one that reads like a sordid romance novel-including allegations of rape, physical violence, and prostitution. The stunning…
My experience as a teacher of history, literature, art, and music placed me in close contact with young people and their friendships, passions, worries, and joys. Then I had children of my own. Teaching and parenting also made me more deeply aware of my own youth, and of the importance of relationships in the formation of the young. Each of my chosen books highlights these qualities through beautifully crafted prose. Their stories, characters, and settings have a special place in my heart, and have inspired me as a writer. And whenever I reread them, I realise I still have a lot to learn.
A touching and intimate account that brings me to tears every time I read it. I love how its simple narrative is infused with poetry and how you can hear the gentle Welsh lilt.
All this brings the story to life, and makes its hopes, joys, and tragedies so very poignant.
All six episodes of the BBC adaptation of Richard Llewellyn's classic novel set in a Welsh mining community at the turn of the century. Gwilym (Stanley Baker) and Beth Morgan (Siân Phillips) work their hardest to provide for their children, but these are the years before the unions improved the miner's lot, and times are very hard indeed. However, the community in which the Morgans live is a close-knit one, and they are grateful for all the help they receive, especially from the Rev. Gruffydd (Gareth Thomas).
I'm a labor journalist. I've spent the past 20 years writing widely about inequality, class war, unions, and the way that power works in America. My parents were civil rights and antiwar activists in the 1960s and 70s, and they instilled in me an appreciation for the fact that social movements are often the only thing standing between regular people and exploitation. My curiosity about power imbalances in America drew me inexorably towards the absence of worker power and led me to the conclusion that the labor movement is the tool that can solve America's most profound problems. I grew up in Florida, live in Brooklyn, and report all over.
The most gaping hole in most people’s knowledge of American history is labor history. Everyoneknows the wars and the civil rights movement, but few people know the bloody, grindingstruggles that went into giving us all the eight-hour workday and basic protections on the job.
Erik Loomis’s book builds a coherent vision of how major strikes have shaped this nation everybit as much as better-known movements have. This is one book that will open your eyes to thebattles that went into many things we all take for granted.
Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labour, unions, and American workers.
