100 books like Hit Man

My son’s a young adult now, but I treasure the memories of the hours we spent reading together. We went down all the well-trodden paths and shared countless joyful hours with J.K. Rowling and Dav Pilkey and The Mysterious Benedict Society, but the creativity of this book is exceeded only by its humor. Also, it clocks in at around 700 pages, so it’ll entertain you and your children for a good while. I always enjoy a laugh as a reader, and if my work elicits a chuckle from you, then I feel my mission is complete.

This is THE book for neurotic hypersexuals. It set the genre. I think it’s wild, brilliant, horny, thoughtful, introspective, delusional, and absurd at the same time. I mean, for the love of God, there’s no plot! It’s the protagonist (Alex Portnoy) rambling to a psychologist about his clear Oedipal Complex. The man is torn, trying to be a good Jewish boy who betters the world, but he has some nasty sexual desires (and messed-up feelings about his sexual partners) that are holding him back. 

This book is one of my obsessions. (It’s fitting, given the obsessive nature of the book.) Ironically, I felt really seen and sane while reading it. No, I’m not as neurotic and horny as Alex, but boy, do I struggle with some of the same obsessive thought patterns as that man!

I was surprised to learn that John Hersey won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for a novel—in fact, his first. I had always thought of him as mainly a journalist for The New Yorker. One of my students recommended this. He was the grandson of the model for the main character, an Italian-American US Army major. My student was proud of his “nonnu,” the Allied military governor of a Sicilian village, for his efforts to help the starving villagers.

What they wanted more than food, though, was to replace the church bell that Mussolini had requisitioned to melt down and make into weapons. Spoiler alert: in the novel (and in real life), he succeeds—despite opposition from a superior officer, a thinly disguised General George S. Patton.

I’m both inspired and depressed by this book. Yes, the book itself is on the depressing side, but what truly saddens me about it is that I’ll never write as well as Richard Yates. He packs so much into this 57,000-word work that it almost defies logic. Still, he’s an inspiration as a writer, and I will always use him as a guidepost. No one’s ever going to confuse me with Michael Jordan, either, but I’m still going to shoot hoops (poorly) in my driveway.

Moonflower Murders shows what can be done at the boundary between genre and literary fiction. This is a writer at the top of his form with twisty plotting, mellifluous prose, and the sheer joy of storytelling. Realistic? No. But that’s not the point. This is an insane murder mystery within a murder mystery. A sequel to Magpie Murders, it features retired publisher Susan Ryeland, who now runs a small hotel on a Greek island. But running a small hotel on a Greek island isn’t for everyone, and Susan is beginning to miss her old life in London.

She is pushed into returning when two of her guests inform her that their newlywed daughter had been in dangerous proximity to a murder back home and had now gone missing – hours after reading a murder mystery Susan herself had edited in her old life. The book holds the key to… show more.

My selections are based on good writing and authenticity, even Fleming peppered his Bond books with elements of the real thing that no one but insiders would know, like ‘M’ writing his memos in green ink on blue notepaper. Alan Judd who served as a British army officer before joining MI6 has written a series of books about Charles Thoroughgood, a former army officer who like Judd himself ‒ his real name is Alan Petty ‒ then joined MI6. Every one of them is a gem, reeking of authenticity. A former colleague of Judd even told me that one of his books was based on a real case. He knew because he shared an office with the author at the time! Judd is by far the best of the current bunch!

I love a good mystery and a good story within a story. This book has both. Estranged sisters, Meredith and Nina, have never been close with their mother, Anya, until they finally have a chance to understand what made her so icy. As a deathbed promise to her husband, Anya agrees to tell their daughters her story, but it is so difficult for her that she must tell it little by little and as a fairy tale. From frozen, war-torn Leningrad to modern-day Alaska, the story changes this family forever. 

For anyone who has secrets, or has someone in their life they just can’t understand, this powerful book helps you see that there is a way through. It also reminds us that everyone has a story that can thaw the hardest of hearts.

The Horse and His Boy is the story-within-a-story of The Chronicles of Narnia that baffles some readers of the series but is beloved to others. I am one of the latter. I have always, since I was a kid, loved this story of longing, coming-of-age, and enemies to friends to lovers—all couched in a race against time to warn Narnia about a coming invasion! Shasta and Aravis are a perfect quarreling couple as they both leave home and comfort to set out into the wide world, and the profound changes they undergo along the way add just the right depth to the classic tale. From start to finish, this is fantasy Bildungsroman at its finest.

You don’t have to travel far for very bad things to happen to you, as the main characters in this book discover when they ignore local warnings about fishing in a nearby creek. I consider this a masterwork in any genre, and I’m actually re-reading it right now, even though it kinda broke me the first time. 

It’s a Lovecraftian, cosmic horror story that also creates a kind of allegory for grief. Having lost my parents in my late twenties, it felt like a fantastical yet unnervingly accurate reflection of the experience. 

The best way to start a list about books that are part of bigger universes is to start with a book about building universes! The ambiance of this book, the intrigue, and the worldbuilding! Oh my goodness, the worldbuilding! Tie-in novels often get a bad rap, so one can be forgiven for thinking that this book might not be great because it’s based on a video game. But the story of the D’ni civilization that literally crafts worlds with their words that they write in magical books speaks to my author’s soul.

Something that I feel is necessary for a universe to have weight is that there must be an appropriate cost for everything that happens, and every choice that the characters make must follow Newton’s Third Law of Motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction). This is reflected so beautifully in the way Atrus learns… show more.