100 books like Lolita

It centers on and celebrates becoming—molting from one skin to another. For Ishmael this is a transition from a tired and limiting worldview to something fresh and alive.

The “bosom buddies” at the heart of the novel, Ishmael and Queequeg, seem comprised of opposites, but Ishmael’s etherealizing is grounded by Queequeg’s pragmatic ingenuity in ways that quiet and expand the young pagan-Presbyterian’s buzzing, anxious mind. Theirs is a friendship of succor, probably sex, and survival—all of it shadowed by the delusional obsessions of their mad captain.

Every young man’s dream of living on a Greek island in the 60s before the tourist invasion ruined the idyll forever.

The antiquity, the sun, the resin-flavoured wine, the turquoise sea, and the sweetness of the islanders’ welcome is the background to a tale of mystery and magic, sexual promise and deadly intrigue.

This book changed my life. I went to the islands as soon as I could after reading The Magus, and sixty years later wish myself still there.

This is one classic that everyone should read because it’s a pleasure to do so. I read this as a 13-year-old, and it quickly became the yardstick against which I measured every other love story. Yes, it’s a love story, and that is the heart of this book, but it’s not a sappy romantic tale. 

This book explores class structures, mental disorders, and a glimpse into another time. Intense yet leashed emotions form the backbone of the story. As a teen and even now, the brooding, dark quality of this tale really appeals to me.

This novel follows Ayoola, a beautiful murderer, and her put-upon sister, Korede, who helps clean up her crime scenes. Korede is loyal to a fault, willing to help cover up her sister’s crimes, but what makes the relationship feel authentic and lived-in is the way petty resentment boils around minor slights and the perpetual issue of the sisters’ disparate beauty. 7

The book is a slender, efficient, and funny look at the psychology of sisterhood that happens to take the form of a thriller.

You can’t mention du Maurier’s Rebecca without mentioning Manderlay. The estate is essential to the entire spooky tale. I loved the way the house on a cliff feels sentient and antagonistic without the story ever venturing into the paranormal or supernatural. The reader is in the narrator’s head the entire time, and we’re left wondering what she’s imagining and what’s real. It’s such a well-crafted, haunting story. 

I also enjoyed the exploration of realistic morally gray characters: Maxim, Rebecca, Mrs. Danvers, and Jack. Everyone was at odds with the second Mrs. DeWinter, and their motivations were all complex and wonderfully twisted. 

In his tragicomic novel The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s thickheaded narrator John Dowell trolls, over and over again, through the detritus of his life, searching vainly for the origins of his predicament—namely, that he has been duped by his wife and her lover, his supposedly best friend and the “good soldier” of the novel’s title. When Dowell finally succumbs to the utter hopelessness of his situation, he turns away from his audience in a brash attempt to bargain with a misbegotten universe, and his dreams of an impossible reconciliation with the world become our own: “Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?” In his greatest moment of anguish and uncertainty, Dowell grasps for the poetry of language to sate his weary soul.

Having read this book when I was 22, it helped shape my fear of the danger of complacent societies. Simply but powerfully written, its first-person narrative creates a sense of claustrophobia, a glimpse into the isolating and dehumanizing life of a handmaid. 

Through Offred, the traumas she experiences, and the people she interacts with the whole world of Gilead springs to scary life. While reading the book, it struck me that nothing was totally made up. Every incident in the book was derived from history. These things had already happened, and they could happen again. It showed me that victory is not always heroic and impressive. Sometimes, victory can be just surviving oppression.

When it comes to finding inspiration in our memories, Marcel Proust is literature’s gold standard. The French novelist devoted the balance of his life to the art of refracting his memories through the lens of his writerly self. Proust understood implicitly that our memories are triggered by sensory experiences—sights, sounds, smells, and touch, to be sure—but most especially through the pleasures of the text. In Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of his epic À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust interrogates the ways in which memory is catalyzed by the senses, while comprehending, at the same time, the manner in which the reality of our memories becomes shaped by the ruinous work of nostalgia, of a sentimentality that exists beyond our ken.

I first read The Sheltering Sky on a train to New York. I was so caught up in the book, I hated to get off at Penn Station.

It feels as if the novel sprang directly from the author’s subconscious,  and it has an eerie way of burrowing into the reader’s thoughts and dreams. An American couple (modeled on Bowles and his wife Jane) embark on a journey deep into the North African desert. To say they have a complicated marriage is an understatement.

The murky sexuality of the characters, the astonishing descriptions of the landscape and the sky, and the truly shocking events make this a journey no reader can ever forget, even if you’d like to.  

This Victorian classic sent shivers down my back when the ghost of Jacob Marley rattles his spectral chains to send a dire warning to Ebenezer Scrooge about the perils of his miserly life.

I was gripped from the first word as his tragic life is revealed by the narrator in the most effective and emotive way. I remember feeling anger as Scrooge mistreats his underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, dismisses his kind and generous nephew, Fred, and believes Christmas to be a “Bah!” and a “Humbug!” However, as Scrooge was shown the error of his ways by three phantoms, my anger transformed into sadness and pity.

How could someone be given so many chances at redemption and spurn them all? Happily, Scrooge learned his life lesson before it was too late.