100 books like Moth Smoke

The East India Company was an unusual organization, to say the least, beginning as a conventional international trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and becoming an aggressive colonial power.

Its complicated nature is one of the reasons why the British empire is so poorly understood: people struggle to comprehend how a company could have been imperial. Dalrymple does a great job of explaining it in this incredibly accessible book.

One of my all-time favourite books on Indian history.

Beryl Markham was a bush pilot in Africa during the early years of aviation. She is a marvelous writer and an adventurous soul. Ernest Hemingway wrote of her: “Did you read Beryl Markham’s book? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could put pen to paper except to write in her flyer’s log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I am completely ashamed of myself as a writer.... She can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers.”

Hemingway is right. This is the best written travel book I’ve read. I grew up in what is now called South Sudan, not far from Kenya where Markham grew up. Her writing brings back the land and people, the weather and hardships, the beauty of that land and its lonely skies.

During my student days in the early 1970s, I travelled throughout North India by train and country bus, often staying in the countryside in former colonial rest houses from days of British rule in India. I tried to imagine what it was like for the British East India Company officials before 1857, and then for the British colonial officials who replaced the company officers after the Indian Sepoy Mutiny. The Siege of Krishnapur vividly recreates the 1857 mutiny from the perspective of British company officials and their families trapped by the local soldiers they had employed. 

Farrell used a diary and letters from those besieged in the real city of Lucknow to illustrate the horrors of hunger, impending rape, torture, and eventual death that many of the British faced. The scenes are graphic, and the portrayals of the relationships among those trapped have stayed with me for years. The novel… show more.

Kenya was an exotic territory for British colonial interests in the late 19th century. For reasons almost impossible to understand today, the British decided to build a railroad from Mombasa, the seaport on the Indian Ocean, through the Kenyan savannah, to Kampala, a city of some riches in the far interior of what is now Uganda. The story of the building of the railroad at the end of the 19th century is hair-raising, thanks to Miller’s classic history, as imported Indian workers had to endure predatory lions, harsh climates, and raging rivers to forge across the frontier. That the railroad to nowhere was completed is a tribute to those Indian workers and their intrepid British overseers.

Today, one can take the train from Mombasa to Nairobi, some three hundred miles distant, either in the daylight, hoping to spy some wildlife, or in a sleeping berth at night. I… show more.

First up in Fante’s famous quartet of Bandini novels—The Road to Los Angeles is a literary—Tour De Force. The central narrator—Arturo Bandini—is stuck out in Boulder Colorado, where it is freezing cold, and nothing ever happens. Not surprisingly a young Arturo is keen to escape to warmer climes, and pursue a writing career in Hollywood. Immediately I could relate to the books central idea, as I was keen to do exactly the same at exactly the same age, albeit on the other side of the world. This novel introduces Fante's alter ego Arturo Bandini who reappears in Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Ask the Dust (1939), and Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982). It’s an important first novel by an important American author.

I think Sebastian Barry is one of the greatest contemporary novelists whose prose unfailingly sings, pirouettes, and enriches. I would recommend all his novels, which take various members of the Dunne or McNulty families over time and place. This particular novel is set in the First World War and follows Willie Dunne as he leaves Dublin to fight for the British, only to find himself caught on the wrong side at the Easter uprising and having to face his own countrymen. It is a brilliant depiction of a young Irish tommy out of his depth in a brutal war, fighting on the side of a country for whom he has mixed loyalties, of the ambivalence and tension of the Irish war of independence, and those caught in its cross hairs.

I disagreed with almost every action by every character in this book. I’d find myself saying to them: “Don’t do that!” But they did do that. And it kept me reading nonstop.

It’s a strange feeling, to watch characters spin out of control, yet be unable to look away. It's also the mark of terrific storytelling, and writing that I greatly admire.

This beautifully written story centers around an immigrant family, but TCKs will find they have a lot in common with Gogol, an Indian American with a Russian name, who tries to define his cultural identity in opposition to his parents'. This book beautifully expressed something important for me, and discussing the movie with my brother and my parents provided a rich opportunity to process our own experiences.

Weird, right? The author of the story is unknown. Some may say it’s just a narrative of the main character’s story, but no one really knows the truth behind the mythical monster. Slender Man was a decent book, a very quick read too for four-hundred pages. While the story was slow, it pitched in its genre of suspense, mystery, and terror. We live in the real world, but we’re also living in a world of wonders. I’d recommend this story to anyone who loves mysteries and evil entities, even gamers who run around the worlds of Fallout and Skyrim.

“Sentimental” is maybe the last word you’d use to describe Ellis’ fiction, but Less Than Zero is an elegant proof that form needn’t follow function.

For all the sparseness of its language and pitilessness of its characters, there is a profound empathy for its narrator Clay, a pensive college freshman who’s returned home to California for Christmas break. Clay expends no outward moral judgment on the depravity of those who populate his very Gothic Los Angeles, but we come to intuitively understand his reticence as less a disposition than a defense.

It is precisely in how he understates his pain that we feel just how total it is.