100 books like Laurus

Murakami is a magical realist genius, and this book is him at his mystifying, dream-like best. Expect otherworldly portals, sexually voracious ghosts, woodlands afflicted by mysterious fainting episodes, and, of course, an entire cast of talking cats.

What amazes me about Murakami’s writing is his ability to transfuse the mundane with the truly magical and to avoid all whimsy–even when writing about something as inherently whimsical as talking cats.

Magical doors that appear out of nowhere, a fantastical book that may not be fiction, some truly sketchy villains, a quest, and an intrepid heroine.

The author had me at fantastical book, but what I love about this novel is the world and character building, that feeling of opening the cover and being somewhere that has nothing to do with ordinary life.

And yet, there is mystery. And romance. A lost father. A daring daughter. You’ll want to race through it, but slow down at the same time, just to savor the ride.

This novel is impossible. Names, plots, generations, and vivid words all created hurdles for me to finish it. I honestly wanted to give up, but I always came back to the book.

The hurdles cast a spell that demanded me to continue. I wanted to know what happened to Macondo, the fictional town in the book. The magic elements and scents of the words left me spellbound for years. The reading experience elevated me to a colorful world, and I almost did not want to return to my reality.

This is the first in a series about kids who’ve had their Wonderland experience—gone to another world where they fit in, only to be thrust back to Earth.

I devoured this book with all the needy fervor of a girl who spent her childhood looking for hidden doors in tree trunks and waiting for her to be summoned to her calling. This doesn’t call from any specific tales. Rather, it combines elements from fairy tales across cultures and authors to create a world that stole my breath.

It also incorporates another story element I’m a sucker for—the school for “special” or “gifted” children. Only I hope I’d never have to attend this school because it would mean I’d found my place and then lost it again.

It’s not possible that Tolstoy died and lived to tell about it, but that's what this book feels like.

As Ivan Ilych’s illness progresses, the reader sees how shallow his relationships are, and how fruitless is his striving to “get ahead.” As I read this book, I felt the vast chasm between the living and the dying, how alone Ivan is in his suffering. Ivan Ilych is no hero: he is an everyman. He squarely faces the pointlessness of his life, and ultimately throws off the things of no importance.

Through his experience I anticipated my own death, and felt how important it must be to live my life remembering that all the stupid stuff doesn’t matter. What does matter is my relationships with God and with other humans. Everyone who expects to die someday should read this book.

When I was in college, I told my writing teacher I wanted to write about my father’s death, which had happened when I was very little. My teacher, a famous writer, lost his father when he was very little too, but he told me he never wrote about it directly. I looked for examples in literature of someone writing autobiographically about a loss in early childhood and I only ever found one: Tolstoy’s debut novel, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was 2, his father when he was 8, and he writes about it with unparalleled power across his oeuvre, but never so directly and autobiographically as in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. He made it OK for me to write my own autobiographical novel about childhood loss.

I mean, hello! The opening sentence “All happy families are alike…” is probably my favorite opening sentence of all time. This book is what I place in the “epic story telling” category for its breadth and scope of time. In many ways it is the story of two separate families and it hits on several themes I have come to crave and demand from art. Tolstoy looks at class, cultural and societal norms, and the emotional toll of familial expectations. It is a book so dense with interesting, flawed characters and it is one of the rare works I come back again to read every few years.  

I speak Russian and spent several years working in the former USSR on cultural exchange exhibitions. I majored in Russian Language and Literature at Brown and have a Master’s in those subjects, also from Brown, and I love Turgenev even more than I love his great contemporaries, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

In this short novel, Turgenev speaks to political differences across generations, something pertinent to the American political scene now and to the tension between activism and domestic life. 

As a novelist, I’m also blown away by his ability to put so much into a very short piece of fiction. It’s helpful, but not essential, to have a bit of knowledge about pre-Revolutionary Russia, but like his masterful Sportsman’s Sketches, he is a genius at bringing characters, both real and imagined, to life.

Leo Tolstoy is considered a master storyteller with an unmatched grip on presenting the inner emotional struggles of mankind.

This novel presents the stress caused in the lives of people and society when French General and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte attacked Russia. The book had a deep impact on future generations. I read the book in my early 30s and found it fascinating. 

I have a deep interest in the evolution and reaction of societies to crises, both natural and man-made. The discussion on leadership, whether it is by birth or upbringing, was fascinating for me. 

After worshiping Leo Tolstoy and his writing for long decades, the much later discovery of Sophia’s diaries came to me as a huge revelation: I learnt that no writer or artist is an island, but always part of a human ecosystem that nurtures and feeds their art. In the case of Tolstoy, it was his family and most particularly his wife. In her personal writings we meet the woman behind the great writer, married to him for 48 years, and who bore him 13 children. She was pivotal to his work, encouraging and supporting his literary career. Through her pages, we find out about her love for Tolstoy and their tormented marriage, in which she often felt neglected and provoked. We see the hidden, dark side of the great man of letters, a vastly gifted but troubled individual, and we also learn about Sophia’s undying vital energy that allowed her… show more.