100 books like Home before Dark

I read this book long before Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was the first of her books that I read, and I was so seized by her style of narration that I proceeded to read with devotion everything she had written.

In one of the early pages of this book, Ernaux declares that in writing about her father, she didn’t want falsity or an overblown style, no artsy attempt to produce something “’ moving’ or ‘gripping.’” The style she followed was true to the life she was describing as a working-class man with minimum education. Here is a book that pays tribute to life but also enacts a credo for what Ernaux calls a “neutral way of writing”: “no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony.”

A year before my own father died, I had read Blake Morrison’s tragicomic memoir about his father. I had marked several passages but the page I had book-marked with a card from a London restaurant contained the following lines: “I’ve become a death bore. I embarrass people at dinner parties with my morbidity. I used to think the world divided between those who have children and those who don’t; now I think it divides between those who have lost a parent and those whose parents are still alive.”

That line haunts me even more powerfully now, and I cannot think of a more true line.

A writer’s book about a writer-father. In this remarkable memoir, Amis pays tribute to Kingsley Martin. The book is truthful about the anxiety of influence and about the collision of ambition, the competitiveness between writers, even when they happen to be father and son.

What made the book touching was Martin Amis’s love and sorrow not only for Kingsley Martin, his biological father but also for his literary father, the novelist Saul Bellow. Bonus: Amis’s probing, ruthless, but always burnished sentences: “The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental, and ineluctably trite.”

Every Father’s Day, someone or the other on my social media feed will post Robert Hayden’s wonderful poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The poem takes me back not only to the many acts of kindness and unheralded small sacrifices that my father made but also to the ambition and the anxiety of Seepersad Naipaul on behalf of his son away at Oxford and starting in life as a writer, a writer who later in life will win the Nobel Prize.

The poignant part of this drama is the father’s own ambition and anxiety about making it as a writer. It doesn’t happen. Instead, the son receives a telegram with some terrible news. He sends his family a telegram in return: “= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO”

Ruth Jones is a new author for me but she packs a punch with this family saga and story of four generations and their relationships.

I particularly identified with the matriarch and grandma (not that I am one!) in this, Grace, who is the all- seeing and all-knowing thread that knits the other family members together.

Told in mainly present day, the novel also time-slips back to the 60s to give another angle on the family dynamic – and dysfunction. One of the most outré of all the characters is Alys, a recovering alcoholic but some of the situations Jones has put her in will have you laughing.

I also love the minor character Soozi. Just read it to see what I mean.

This is the first book I read by a mom admitting to alcoholism after I stopped drinking. It was recommended to me when I only had about 30 days sober under my belt, and I devoured it in one sitting.

I found it revelatory to hear someone say the things out loud that I was holding inside too embarrassed to share. Her writing style is conversational yet lovely, and made me feel like I wanted to find her and make her my bestie.   

This book revolutionized the way I perceived alcohol addiction. It presented a groundbreaking view that alcohol is just as addictive as tobacco, affecting everyone.

The Easyway method breathed new life into curing my old belief that alcohol was addictive to only a select few. I felt inspired to break free from the clutches of alcohol because I realized I was not defective and that there is a full easy cure, just like a past cigarette smoker.

I love this book for its revolutionary approach and the genuine hope it offers in ‘easily’ setting us free from the alcohol trap.

I love this book because it showcases the essential goodness of people. In these times of hate-filled words and dishonesty, that’s an affirmation we all need. August is a teacher on an RV trip to national parks to scatter his son’s ashes—a trip he wants to take on his own, in grief and bitterness. Instead, because he’s just a good guy, he ends up with three tag-alongs—a pair of boys, wounded by their father’s neglect and self-absorption, and a dog. The trip—and the kindness they inspire in each other—helps them all heal. It’s a trip that changes them all forever for the better.

A beautiful story written beautifully. I was enamored with Miller’s deft use of lyrical prose set within an epistolary framework to tell the story of one man’s struggle against the demons of his past, and the consequences that followed, all in search of redemption.

Though fictional, Miller manages to avoid the usual veteran tropes in creating his character. It’s an intimate account—and one with which I’m intimately familiar—that feels truer than nonfiction. I’ve found few more realistic accounts of living with the moral injury that comes from our errors in judgment, how those errors cause unintended, though no less harmful, secondary effects on those we love, and how life remains yet salvageable.

I found it to be, at once, an inspiring, endearing, and threatening read.

One alcoholic helping another is the way the 12 Step program works.

This book explores Steps 6 and 7 from the personal experiences of others in recovery. It helped me examine my defects, you know, the rocks I held that were sinking me. But I am not alone in my quest to drop these rocks.

This book includes personal stories that let me know how others have overcome the same roadblocks as myself. They talk to me, addressing my need to spiritually surrender my shortcomings. Various insights help contribute to my sobriety which, after all, is what I strive for in a clean and sober life.