Fans pick 100 books like It's Kind of a Funny Story

There’s a driving intensity to this book's narrative and atmosphere, which remains as compelling and fresh today as when I first read it years ago. Part of its power derives from Eugenides’ use of first-person plural narration through the collective voice of a group of neighborhood boys still haunted, years later in adulthood, by the untimely deaths of five adolescent sisters in 1970s suburban Michigan.

Part-detectives, part-elegists, they piece together their memories of not only the girls but of a particular place and time now vanished. I’m always struck by the book’s deft melding of pathos and humor and by the way that what is essentially a personal suburban tragedy gradually begins to speak to a wider malaise that calls into question the American dream itself.

This book is gorgeous. It’s about a group of spoiled-rotten high school friends who have started to drift apart after attending college. There’s an interesting backstory to this novel, too: Ellis wrote the first draft in eight weeks while high on crystal meth (don’t believe me? Read the Rolling Stone interview).

The minimalist prose and haunting theme of how overindulgence leads to chronic emptiness make a nihilistic meditation on excess.

This coming-of-age novel has everything: love, grunge music, angst, and a slow revelation of past trauma. I don't think I speak for everyone with mental health issues, but I know that having a traumatic childhood is a common, shared factor amongst people with serious diagnoses. I read this one before I understood why I identified so strongly with it.

Charlie lives on the fringes, barely dipping a toe into the social melee that is high school life, yet, with courage and determination, he carves out a place for himself. While his new friendships allow him to find himself, they also allow him the safety to confront the wounds of his past, wounds too large for even his teenage self to come to grips with. 

Even though my last manic episode was over sixteen years ago, I am only recently doing the real work of processing and understanding the traumatic experiences… show more.

As a bad boy protagonist, I’ve always loathed Gene Forrester and love to loathe him. He starts as a quiet, intellectual student whose best friend and roommate is charming, self-confident, athletic, and a daredevil without being arrogant. Gene even seems to admire his roommate for having all those qualities until we learn the truth. He resents him. 

Like Gene, there were times in my life when playing wingman to a vastly more popular friend could be frustrating, doubly so when they made terrible decisions. Yet, Gene’s journey to the heart of darkness helps put things in perspective. There is no better warning against envy and jealousy than the one immortalized by John Knowles.

This book amazed me with its bravery: Bradley takes on child sexual abuse and a teen suicide attempt, and she presents this story, as hard as it is, in a way that young readers can understand and process.

The voice of the narrator, 10-year-old Della, is a big draw for me: She’s tough, candid, and funny, and her personality propelled me through the book. I love that this story ultimately shows a child fighting back effectively in the darkest of circumstances.

Della begins by saying she has a “big mouth” and has been told to keep quiet and edit herself. But in the end, Della’s mouth and her refusal to keep quiet about horrible things done to her big sister get them both to a better place.

A fascinating, revealing, and sometimes difficult trip into the mind of Caden Bosch, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder, and his wildly creative and disconcerting forays into an alternate reality while suffering an episode. As if trying to navigate high school and family life weren’t hard enough. Co-written with the author’s son who suffers from this mental illness, the novel won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. It captures the fear and confusion as well as the beauty and ineffable nature of a mind perceiving the world differently than most of ours do.

Did you love Calvin and Hobbes when you were a child? How about as an adult? If so, you will love Martine Leavitt’s Calvin. Calvin, in this novel, is a schizophrenic teen who is convinced that Hobbes is real. He thinks if he can walk across frozen Lake Erie – with the girl he loves, Suzie – and convince Bill Watterson to write one more Calvin cartoon, he will be healed. 

This book is a brilliant exploration of mental health and relationships, rooted in characters you already know and love.  

Nellie Bly was one of the great muckraking reporters in American history. She pretends to be insane and is admitted to the “mad house.” Along the way, she exposes the horrible treatment of those suffering from mental illness, but of her treatment in a boarding home, where spoiled beef was served.

Many at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Roosevelt Island suffered no mental illness; they simply didn’t know how to speak English, she wrote. “I left the insane ward with pleasure and regret—pleasure that I was once more able to enjoy the free breath of heaven; regret that I could not have brought with me some of the unfortunate women who lived and suffered with me, and who, I am convinced, are just as sane as I was and am now myself.”

Her reporting led to a grand jury investigation and reforms inside the asylum.

This is the 75th anniversary edition of a book first published in 1946, a best-seller at the time, and the impetus for changes in the treatment of psychiatric patients. The narrator, novelist Victoria Cunningham, finds herself incarcerated in a corrupt and badly-run hospital with little memory of how she got there; I was disturbed by the way she had to navigate through an obscure, nonsensical bureaucracy that seems more insane than any of the hospital’s patients. Virginia is supported by her loving and loyal husband, but at times she loses track of her memories and forgets who he is. The book is frightening—especially given that it’s based on the author’s own experiences at Bellevue Hospital in New York—but also intimate and moving.