10 books like Lolita

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a book that only became understandable after multiple readings. When I was younger, I was bored struggling through this book; I didn’t enjoy the whaling history or whale biology and none of it added up to a novel. Still, I wanted to know why so many people believed it was the finest novel ever written. And now, having read the book at least a dozen times, I see that Melville’s wild construction justifies the epic confrontation between whale and man. I see the relationship of the Old Testament God to the White Whale that Ahab cannot best. I can honestly say that I love this book I once hated.

Like most people, I love a good scary story. Ironically, I consider this non-horror novel to be the scariest book ever written. That alone is an extraordinary accomplishment.

The Magus centers on a young teacher who moves to an isolated Greek island where he becomes so manipulated by a Svengali-type character that he loses his sense of self and even of reality.

For me, it did something else. Something personal. It got to me. It totally wigged me out. It triggered my own instinctive fears and apprehension about losing control to malicious mental trickery. Now that is scary.

Jane Eyre is a book I read and teach at least once a year. Its early section about childhood is, for me, the archetype of all impossible childhoods. Jane is orphaned, misunderstood, oppressed by the awful relatives who take her in, and abused by officials of Lowood School, the institution they palm her off on. Deprivation and hunger are the daily facts of her life. Humiliation, physical “punishment,” and the threat of hell are used to control her fellow wards. She is not so easily controlled. She watches while some of her fellow children, including her beloved friend Helen Burns, die because of infections caused by unhygienic conditions and malnutrition.

Despite it all, she retains an authenticity, a sense of herself that she refuses to violate to curry favor or reduce the harshness of her treatment. She remains a truth-teller, a natural detector of the pompous and hypocritical. She questions… show more.

The title and all the glowing reviews made me pick this book up, but the sisters Korene and Ayoola kept me reading. This book actually made me wonder exactly how far I’d go for one of my sisters. It also made me think about how much many women give up to be the caretakers (as Korene the nurse is), especially of the men in our lives. Korene not only figuratively has to clean up after her little sister, she has to literally don plastic gloves and grab the bleach. Is it horrible to think a little Ayoola-style “self-defense” would make the world a better place? Yes. Yes, it is. But I’m so glad this book took me there, right to the darkest edge of that thought…fictionally.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” famously begins du Maurier’s novel of a country estate that guards its secrets from the young, unnamed narrator who comes there as the innocent bride of mysterious Maxim de Winter. Out of her depth, she’s terrified by the imposing mansion, the specter of de Winter’s deceased first wife, and the creepy housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who urges her to commit suicide by jumping from a window. Gothic in tone, the unnamed heroine survives revelation after revelation, but the house itself—Manderley—is finally burned to the ground, leaving nothing but ruins. 

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.

Let me be clear: I’m talking about the book—not the TV series!

This is a dystopian classic that everyone should read. In fact, all of Atwood’s books should be read. As for The Handmaid’s Tale, I read it in a literature class in university, and it has stuck with me ever since (much like other classics—hello The Great Gatsby).

The Republic of Giliead, where the story takes place, was created when the US government was overthrown, and strips women of their rights. It’s a premise that has roots in real events—the 1979 Iranian Revolution, most notably, and so the rich worldbuilding (and powerful imagery) doesn’t feel contrived—or all that dystopian.

And while it will definitely transport you away from your day-to-day life while you read it, it’s the way the haunting Republic will stay with you afterwards that makes this book a gem. 

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.

It is a notion that Paul Bowles realizes intuitively in his deeply philosophical novel The Sheltering Sky. For Bowles, it is our memories, not simply our flesh, that render life so precious, so fleeting. “How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood,” Bowles writes, “some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Out of all of the books I have read, I have read A Christmas Carol more times than any other. An instant phenomenon when it was first published in 1843, it has never been out of print. It is the embodiment of not just a Christmas ghost story, but of a story that encapsulates the very essence of the spirit of Christmas in the popular imagination in a way that no other story ever has. Although I had always loved watching the 1951 classic film Scrooge with the wonderful Alastar Sim in the title role, I didn’t read the book until I was in my teens, when I came across a lovely copy of a 1950 edition in a charity shop. Since then, I have read, and shed a tear over, A Christmas Carol every Christmas – I won't embarrass myself by revealing exactly how many times that is, but… show more.