100 books like Machine Dreams

When I first read Cormac McCarthy, I was awestruck by the brutal beauty of the way he used language. His way with words is almost enough to make you look past the truly horrendous things he describes in this book . . . all while telling what appears to be a simple “tale of the Old West.”

I have never read a singularly more elegantly written book, yet I’ve never read anything as mind-numbingly horrific. This book is so intense and complex that it is considered the only Cormac McCarthy book that can never be made into a movie. (He also wrote All The Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country For Old Men.)

The Rape of the Rose is an unforgettable novel that details the horrors of the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Britain. Hughes, also a poet of note, portrays the enslavement of children in those “dark Satanic mills” with disturbing precision, offering his youngest characters shreds of dignity, which life has deprived them of so roundly. He also shows men and women maimed and worked to death by owners intent on extracting every last ounce of their labor. A major figure in the novel is a father who flees a mill and joins the Luddite Revolution. I read this book thirty-five years ago and remember it vividly. It presents the underbelly of the Industrial Revolution—and the ample reasons for the rebellions it triggered. 

This is the most recent novel to make my list. As much as I relished Rooney’s earlier work, her latest is heftier, for it grapples with the genuine planetary and personal crises faced by her generation. Her characters don’t shy away from speaking openly about love, sex, and relationships—or the perverse economic system that is rapidly bringing humanity to its knees with consumer-driven smiles painted on its faces. Neither do her characters hold back from earnest discussions of Marxism. The latter note is getting wide play culturally, particularly with millennials, but mainstream media has rarely picked up on the reverberations underfoot. Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? is not so reticent—and more rewarding for its brazen honesty about the personal and the political.

I admire the storyline and the defining incident of this novel, which is why I’ve included it here, even though it’s an overly long and baggy book...

The novel tells the tale of a teenager whose world is torn apart when he and his mother visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a terrorist bomb goes off, killing his mother and many others. When a dying old man persuades our young hero to take off with a priceless seventeenth-century painting, The Goldfinch, he obliges and off we go...

West Virginia’s Jayne Anne Phillips made a noisy arrival on the literary scene with her triumphant collection of short stories, Black Tickets. One of the first of the “dirty realists,” Phillips paints the backroads and forgotten lives of rural West Virginia during a time when that state, and many like it, were on no one’s radar. As one of her characters says, “This ain’t the South…this is the goddam past.” Phillips captures the loneliness and the disconnected lives of young women and men in a way few books have done.  

Sarah by Laura Albert aka JT LeRoy captivated my attention right from the start. The story crackles with originality even years after its release. The writing is so vivid that it engulfs the reader in the story. The characters are three dimensional, and the tale being told in the first person and present tense makes you empathize more with the main character. Having gone through a difficult upbringing, the story of Cherry Vanilla and their quest to find love and acceptance spoke to me. This is a title I would highly recommend, not only for the merit of the writing but also because its message continues to resonate to this day. Also check out the audiobook of Sarah, read splendidly by Winsome Brown.

There is so much I loved about this book and this entire series. The series Bootleg Springs, about the Bodine family, was co-written by Claire Kingsley and Lucy Score. Whiskey Chaser has a sassy heroine named Scarlet, who I absolutely adore. She doesn’t take crap from anyone. When she meets a big city visitor at her lakeside retreat her quick wit and take no prisoners attitude proves she can do anything a man can do…and more. Whiskey Chaser is the first book in the series that mixes romance, humor, and a great mystery.

I loved reading this novel first and foremost for its exquisite craftswomanship; van Eerden just writes beautiful sentences. Her descriptions are palpable, delivering the reader to a hollow and its people—all characters who remain intricately bound to their homeplaces no matter how far away they travel. Like my own novel, this story revolves around women and also includes an LGBTQ character. And themes of grieving and motherhood, love and loss, and compromise, are naturally woven into the fabric of the story. 

This classic award-winning book is a must-read for anyone interested in traumatic events. Sociologist Kai Erikson was the first to equate a major disaster with individual and community upheaval, based on the 1976 Buffalo Creek dam flood. He details how this event traumatized individuals and caused a breakdown of community relationships and a rise in crime, unethical behavior, and major out-migration. Many of the emotional and social effects of disasters had not been discussed or treated when this book was written. Much has been learned since. However, Erikson stresses that many of the psychological and sociological problems continue to exist when calamities occur today and must be resolved. 

The basis for the movie October Sky, this isn’t an account of the space program so much as it is a study of the types of people drawn to it, in particular a young man in 1950s West Virginia striving for something more than a life in the coal mines. The culture shock of Sputnik sets him and his friends off into increasingly dangerous—and often hilarious—experiments in amateur rocketry.

Set against an awkward adolescence in a small coal town, it’s a vivid illustration of the obstacles that must be overcome to break free of the cycles life can impose. The screen adaptation takes some liberties, most notably with Hickam’s father. The book portrays him as being cautiously supportive, if understandably skeptical, of his teenage son’s unlikely obsession.