100 books like No One Is Talking About This

This book resonated with me on so many levels. I first read it in 2015 while working at a tech company, and the novel gave me the language to express the unease I felt about Big Tech’s relentless push for “transparency” and “sharing,” often at the expense of privacy. In many ways, the book is an argument about trade-offs—the perks of working for a Google-like company versus the torture of being overly connected.

Eggers also offers one of the most accurate portrayals of life as a Silicon Valley tech worker. The overwhelming barrage of pings and constant demands for feedback felt all too familiar. Ultimately, it is both a compelling dystopian thriller and a thought-provoking critique of the tech-driven world we inhabit, raising critical questions about privacy and the cost of innovation.

Dean Koontz doesn’t need an introduction, nor does he need a shout-out, but this book stuck out to me in my younger days. While it may not fall into the same classifications as my previous recommendations, it may have been the first book I read about an average, not entirely special, person with a unique ability he doesn’t understand.

I read this book 20 years ago and still think about it often. The concept of seeing death and knowing when someone is about to die is just an intriguing—and terrifying—prospect. How do you deal with that? Especially knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it? And then, what do you do when you start seeing Death everywhere? Do you fight it or run for the hills?

While this book doesn’t depict today’s internet culture directly, it’s easy to imagine a dystopian future where most people spend their lives in a virtual reality world like the Oasis. As the main character navigates the challenges of this massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), he encounters dilemmas that resonate with today’s internet users: Can you truly trust someone you’ve only met online? How do you compete when others have far more resources?

Though the book is geared toward a young adult audience, its themes hit home for readers of all ages. I’m glad we have stories showing that tech isn’t always a neutral force in society and that retreating into an online space doesn’t solve the larger systemic problems in the world.

Long Way Down does an incredible job of telling such a contained story, telling everything within the span of a single elevator ride.

Reynolds uses the elevator trip to make the protagonist encounter ghosts of multiple dead people in his community, all connected to his murdered brother, and question if vengeance is the right answer to his grief. This is a well-deserved classic, and a must-read for all novel-in-verse fans!

I loved the novel’s unforgettable narrator, Perry L. Crandall, who has an IQ of 76.

A masterpiece of narrative voice, Lottery is easily the most engulfing book I’ve read in ten years. (I had a beloved sister with developmental disabilities and expected to be reduced to mush by page 5, but instead I was filled with joy.) The story follows Perry and his loathsome, money-grubbing sibs after Perry wins a boatload of dough in the state lottery.

This book is not what you think it will be, in about a million ways, and the ending is a heart-filling surprise. It made me want to be a better person. Everyone I’ve recommended this to adored it. (P.S. I’m not related to the author but I wish I were.)

Virginia Woolf knew – she insisted – that a life spent maintaining a house, throwing dinner parties, and taking children on sailing expeditions was not necessarily, not categorically, a trivial life.

Even a modest, domestic life is still, for the person living it, an epic journey, however ordinary it might appear to the outside observer. Woolf refused to dismiss lives that most male writers ignore or even denigrate.

And you can get lost in her magnificent sentences; no one puts words together as beautifully as Virginia Woolf.

In contrast to John Berger’s Marxist aesthetic, Barthes’s approach to visual experience and photographic images draws upon the tradition of semiotics and, to a degree, postmodern theories of text and intertextuality. Barthes leads his reader into the codes and conventions of the image. How images signify is thus made a central topic that provokes self-reflection and reflexive challenges to conventional image analysis. Where Berger’s work is expository and analytic, Barthes's book is exploratory and novelistic (Barthes would have his reader approach the work as a kind of intertextual fiction). As the title of the work suggests, this is Barthes at his most personal and reflective. His fascination remains with the photographic image which is presented as one of the defining aesthetic objects of modernity. But the act of photography is now itself complex, mediated, and open to a range of concrete experiential impulses.

Here the viewer of the photograph is… show more.

Andrew O’Hagan is a contemporary master of the literary essay, and in this book we have three long non-fiction pieces linked by his investigations into the online world. O’Hagan was the ghostwriter for Julian Assange’s doomed autobiography, and here he tells the story of this adventure – it’s a publisher’s nightmare but a dream for the psychoanalyst, as the line between Assange’s invented self and the reality of his life begins to collapse. The other two essays also explore mercurial identities online, with a portrait of the rumored, shadowy inventor of Bitcoin, and the brief life of a Frankensteinian amalgam of O’Hagan’s own making – a cyber-persona who has an address, a credit card, and who can buy drugs on the Dark Web. O’Hagan even manages to meet his creation’s mother.  

I go to Ben Lerner’s writing for the shimmering atmospheres of his fictional universes. 10:04 is set in contemporary New York City and follows the narrator-writer through his urban routines. But between his health scares, relationship worries, and professional commitments, the novel thrums with a strange, uneasy beat as the narrator questions the fabric of modern life in a large city. He feels the sublime abundance of the commodities that surround him, whose very abundance is precarious. The book meditates on the fragility of the global supply chains that bring cans of ground coffee onto supermarket shelves and into our baskets. There is also a superstorm approaching, which threatens the city’s power. Lerner is wonderful on twenty-first-century, first-world malaise.

This book is like a reminder of the wisdom that already lies latent within us (by “us” I’m identifying as a cis-gender woman, but that does not exclude anyone else, just helps to clarify). Rather than a gentle nudge, Dancing in the Flames’ approach to uncovering the buried dark goddess in modern culture is more of a slap in the face. A wake-up call that, I personally, have been intuiting for years. Woodman and Dickson weave together true historical accounts and cultural representations of why the dark goddess is essential for human and societal growth. Eerily similar to my highly sci-fi/fantastical book, I stumbled upon Dancing in the Flames while conducting research for my dark-fem-rising story. I hang on every word they write as it 100% rings true for me.