100 books like Notes on Grief

Michelle Zauner’s writing is rich with detail, especially descriptions of Korean foods and visits to relatives in Korea that blossom with imagery, scents, and sounds. Against the backdrop of those vivid childhood scenes and the food shopping and eating scenes, the story remained vivid as her mother succumbs to cancer.

Two themes struck me throughout the book: Michelle’s father is Caucasian American, her mother is a Korean immigrant, and M. struggles to find her place in either culture. Her youthful rebellion against her mother’s over-protectiveness and very Korean-ness becomes painful to face as her mother is sick and dying.

I was deeply moved as Michelle came to accept her mother, forgive herself, and embrace the family and culture her mother had given her.

Joan Didion’s book is heralded for its bravery, clarity, and confessional witness about grief and loss. Indeed, it’s all these things, but for me, more importantly, this book paints a masterful depiction of the loss of innocence that comes when you lose something meaningful—like a loved one.

Particularly, it shows, with exhilarating force, the fragmented sense of time of such an experience, moving from Didion’s darkest moments of despair at the loss of her husband in the present to treasured memories of her life before his passing and musings about what comes now—in the future.

This book is not for the faint of heart, but it is for the savoring soul who, like Didion, possesses an inherent human desire for a sense of coherence and wholeness after life has torn it asunder.

This book shows how layered and difficult grief can be, in the most uncomfortable and sometimes taboo ways. While flipping from page to page, you feel like you’re having a talk with your big sister, hearing her uncover things that no one else would be honest enough with you about.

Through her character Wren, this author is honest about how impossible it feels to grieve while also trying to live, as the narrator uncovers parts of her deceased friend she didn’t even know about. 

With a codependent mother relationship that feeds into various forms of abuse (CW: eating disorders being one of them) and Hollywood as the backdrop for this coming-of-age story, this is an important, unforgettable memoir.

It’s a gift to be so darkly funny and honest as a nonfiction writer, particularly when your own deep vulnerability is in service of something larger. Written in short numbered passages that span McCurdy’s life from early childhood into adulthood, this true story is a perfect rollercoaster.

Both laugh-out-loud funny and deliriously sad, there’s never a moment you won’t feel held by this book and this writer.

Writing about a Nigerian family’s migration from Nigeria to the US, I appreciated Atta’s ability to masterly cover a wide range of issues without losing focus.

I was totally charmed by the remarkable way in which this novel managed to take me along on a journey that ultimately raises deep appreciation of each character’s point of view in the course of touching on issues such as interracial as well as intra-racial tensions and familial strains exacerbated in a new geographic and cultural environment.

English enslavers called Ancona Robin Robin John and Little Ephraim Robin John “princes” because they were literate English-speaking members of one of two ruling African slave-trading families in present-day southeastern Nigeria.

The lives of the Johns illuminate the surprisingly complex relationships among the participants in the transatlantic slave trade, when African suppliers of enslaved Africans often had as much economic and political power as their European customers.

The English allies of the rival family captured the two men during a trade war between the families in 1767.

They were taken to the Caribbean and North America, with several escapes and recaptures, before being brought to England, where they successfully sued for their freedom. They returned to the family business in Africa.  

This book is the best love story I’ve read, full stop. There’s nothing like the first time you fall in love, and Ifemelu and Obinze’s relationship reminded me of that feeling—its paralyzing awkwardness and overwhelming joy.

Before I read this book, I’d never thought about what it must be like for immigrants from Africa to encounter (and enter) the long and tortured story of race in America for the first time, and the novel gave me a lot to think about on that score. I also love a novel that takes me somewhere I’ve never been, and the scenes of contemporary Lagos, where Ifemelu and Obinze are reunited, come alive in Adichie’s precise and brilliant description. 

I knew nothing about this book’s author but was immediately hooked by the engaging voice of the young protagonist. I would have followed her anywhere. She led me out of Nigeria, on the run from warlords who burned her village, to a refugee detention center in the UK. Then on the loose, an undocumented young Nigerian woman searching for the one man in London who could vouch for her. What she does find is the man’s widow. And I found a story I couldn’t stop reading. Only later did I learn that the author is a man. And that he’d written the book to shine a light on the cruelty done to Nigerians in the name of oil rights, and the mistreatment of refugees in UK detention centers. Well done, Chris.

I am in love with Lesley’s writing, and everyone should be. Period. I will recommend this book a thousand times. The first time I read it, I was left feeling hopeful–hopeful that stories are soft, intentional, deliberate, magical things that can shift people and places enough to make a difference or change minds. With each story in this collection, Lesley peels away the layers (sometimes softly, sometimes jarring) of lives, relationships, and women.

I think this book is very important because Soyinka shows that the right of the people to protest cannot be restricted by walls or chains. That the oppressor is totally helpless against the will of the people, as also shown in Taduno’s Song by the protagonist Taduno and Kongi, a character modelled on Soyinka. Imprisoned without trial by the authorities at the start of the Nigerian civil war, Wole Soyinka’s prison notes provide records of the twenty 27 months he spent in solitary confinement, the very basis of the words that would cement his place as a prisoner of conscience and give rise to a body of work that would illuminate the world.