Fans pick 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!

The only male author on this list, Coleman Dowell’s Southern Gothic tale is included because it contains some of the most nuanced writing of female characters I’ve ever encountered. Too Much Flesh tells the narrative of a well-endowed farmer named Jim, his petite wife Effie, and a young man, Jabez, whose mutual obsession with Jim leads to, well, something of a frenetic climax. A story within a story, the tale is told to us by a “spinster schoolteacher” (the book was published in 1977), Miss Ethel, who channels her sexual repression into this story of the farmer.

Neither Miss Ethel nor Jim’s wife, Effie, come across as one-dimensional—they feel and act like real people on the page. Dowell himself was gay and deftly handles this queer narrative in a way that is somehow both quiet and stunning, and makes an interesting case study for the time period and genre. And… show more.

A bit of a curveball entry, but go with it. One of the subplots in Smith’s impressively sprawling historical novel involves do-gooder Baptists who really are doing good! They’re in Anglican England to agitate for the end of slavery in the British colonies—and they’re ahead of their time in other ways, too.

They help to platform the voices of freedmen and escaped slaves, acting as allies, essentially. It’s in the main character of Eliza that the larger novel takes up this search for a liberatory truth, nominally Christian but really entrusted to anyone who can see the suffering of others and refuse to look away.

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.

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.