Love Mrs. Dalloway? Readers share 100 books like Mrs. Dalloway...

This is my candidate for the Great American Novel. Read it for its storyline and its fascinating chapters on whales. Along the way, you’ll encounter discussions about race, religion, friendship, and the virtuous life.

Some of my students ask, “Why does Melville digress so much?” My response: persist in reading this work. What at first seems extraneous becomes vital. You’ll discover a masterpiece.

This was the first book I read about Basilicata, and it is essential for anyone interested in Southern Italian roots. Written in staggeringly poetic language, it offers a sad but beautiful introduction to the culture and history of the region, which is hardly ever written about and barely even visited, even by Italians.

During WWII, Levi was sent as a prisoner to Basilicata as punishment, to work as a doctor among the peasants there. The book taught me about the feudal farm system still in place there well into the 20th century, about its inhospitable landscape, and its isolated, poverty-stricken population – my ancestors.

It set the bar high for me to write my own memoir and continues to inspire me. The title refers to the fact that the train line only went as far as Eboli – that Christianity and civilization stopped short of Basilicata.

This is the story of a highly educated writer living with the poorest of the poor in the U.S. Agee was sent to live with Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression. His assignment was to write about them for a magazine, but he ended up making it into a magnificent memoir (Jimmy Carter’s favorite memoir) that is often paired with Walker Evans’ photos. They lived and worked as a team.

Agee is a well-educated, well-off writer, but manages to describe the lives of the poorest of the poor with great respect, artistic originality, and sincerity, and to give us a full, if painful, understanding of the lives of people who could not afford shoes and were worked to the bone by the landowners.

It’s a deeply spiritual work, artistically original in structure and language, a long, slow, magnificent read that has touched me deeply each time I’ve read it.

This is another two-for-one book! It is a historical fiction about the life of Alexander the Great, told by his male lover, Bagoas. But it was written in 1972, only five years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK. Bagoas is a nuanced character; he is frank about the nature of his love for Alexander the Great, and there are even a few sex scenes! As I read it, I couldn’t help reflecting on how groundbreaking this must have seemed in the context of the 1970s. 

Mary Renault is a very interesting figure in her own right. She was undoubtedly queer and lived with her partner for over 50 years. There are relatively few women in her novels, and many of them are unflatteringly depicted. Renault eschewed the label of ‘lesbian,’ was uncomfortable with the early gay pride movement, and is said to have told people that she wished… show more.

Everybody loves this book because it, of course, has become an international classic of literature and one of the best works F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, which takes the reader on a time-traveling secretive world of the upper-class set in New England life in the 1920s.

In F. Scott's work, we are casually and comfortably introduced to an America where new money met old money, and the tender tightrope one had to walk in order to vie for position, marriage, and peer acceptance in a world founded on wealth and prestige.    

The book is, to my knowledge, the only one that fully covers the evolution of marriage in the West, including historical details and interesting biological and anthropological data; it changes the way we are indoctrinated to think by showing that sex, love, and marriage were for most of the time completely separate things, while we now try as much to force the three items to be always together.

The most surprising part for people who have not been familiar with the history of these topics is how recent and geographically localized it is the expectation that love, sex, and marriage should be together.

As a huge fan of Ian McEwan’s early novels with their dark drama, especially The Innocent, I initially gave up on this book after the first 70 pages—but then, thankfully, resumed a while later. 

What seemed a genteel novel about manners transforms into something much more sinister and dramatic. I loved the tense atmosphere of it, with much of the story condensed into one hot pre-war summer’s day and then the later serious repercussions from what, at the time, seem fairly harmless childish actions.

What makes a great novel? One that will be read forever? Top critics and commentators such as Harold Bloom and Nicholas Royle say the greatest fiction is written in a foreign language that somehow or other we understand. It is strange, unusual, uncanny, yet tells us profound truths about the human condition. The Rings of Saturn did even more for me; I thought it was miraculous. On the face of it, the narrator simply hikes through East Anglia. But he blends reportage, history, philosophy, mental ruminations, and much else in a melancholic commentary on life. Even translated from German, Sebald’s writing is mesmeric. Rings is a text that shapes your thinking in new ways. Sebald and his four peculiar ‘prose fictions’ would surely have won a Nobel prize had he not died in a car accident in 2001.

Who can resist a diary? It’s hard not to fall in love with the title character, who’s on a perpetual quest for self-improvement. As Bridget, a lovable thirty-something singleton, finds herself in dozens of entertaining and embarrassing situations, she navigates them with her trademark pluck.

Very loosely based on Pride and Prejudice and complete with its own Mr. Darcy, I adored this novel and yearned for Bridget to realize she’s a catch exactly as she is. I read this at a time in my life when I, too, was a work in progress, and finding Bridget felt like connecting with a funny friend.

This is my all-time favorite of the Twilight series. The fantasy in this book was mystical, and I did not put the book down. I wanted to know more about Edward and how he eventually expressed his love for Isabella.

The descriptions in the book really allowed your imagination to flow. The love expressed between two people was to die for.