100 books like Orangutan

The gold standard of recovery books. I found this gem literally in the gutter when I was homeless. Changed my life by showing me if I could get my shit together, I, too, could write a book about my experience, and, in the process, maybe help someone else who was suffering as well.

The brilliance of Hustle is the way it juxtaposes the everyday addict's life. Sure, there's the big crime and action, bad guys, car chases. Again, that part fiction. But Hustle lives and breathes in between. In the minutia. Of the doldrums of, as Lou Reed once so eloquently sang, waiting for the man. It's the quiet moments and small conversations between Big Rich and Donny, where we see their humanity. As warped and twisted as the world may be around them, they never lose that appeal: being victims of the human condition. And like I said, living this life with Tom (the drug part), I can honestly say it was those little conversations that give you something to laugh about and a little hope to hold onto. 

I’m starting to feel bad it’s all dudes (and white dudes) on my list, but I think that, despite the fact that these days I only read women-written domestic psychological thrillers (they’re just better at it), when I first got straight I sought out others just like me. I didn’t think recovery was possible. Josh’s book is as harrowing and poignant and gorgeously written as they come. I mean, I think Oprah picked it for a book of the month. What more can you ask for?

Some Things That Meant the World to Me is gritty with plenty of down and dirty. But at the center of Josh’s (and his stand-in Rhonda's) story is a poet's heart (as well as a love letter to my city too, San Francisco).

This one hurts. Because when I was asked to write this list, Ryan’s book immediately came to mind. Part fiction, part memoir, all hell, Wasted Talent might be the most aptly titled book ever. See, Ryan, who was an amazing writer, talent, and friend, died last week. I don’t know what of. I’m not gonna speculate. But he was in his thirties and wasn’t hit by a car. Over the last few years, Ryan and I weren’t in touch as much, though I did put money on his books when he returned to prison. Ryan’s life and work are a testament to one irrefutable fact. I didn’t go the AA route. But, boy did they get the final destination right. Addiction ends one of three ways: jails, institutions, death. Wasted Talent is Ryan’s only novel. That he didn’t grace the world with more defends his titular choices.

Disfigured and jobless after a fire, Timothy Wilde takes a job with the newly formed NYPD. He is assigned to the Sixth Ward, right on the border of the Five Points, a ward notorious for the desperately poor who live there and the rampant crime. One night he finds a young girl running through the street in a nightgown soaked with blood. She tells an unbelievable story of bodies buried in a nearby woods. Wilde investigates and soon finds himself a target of the city’s wealthy, several of whom are guilty of the most heinous of crimes but feel entitled to escape any accountability. Written in the slang of the times, it reads with the immediacy and plausibility of a memoir. I loved this book because it treats such serious issues: income inequality and the lack of accountability for the rich and powerful—even when engaged in child prostitution and murder.

In Central Park, there used to be a statue of J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology.” Mercifully, it was removed in 2018, but the memory of his and other white doctor’s butchery on the bodies of several enslaved women isn’t so easily erased.

This book uncovers how Sims performed experimental (and anesthetized) cesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on powerless Black women and scores of poor Irish women. In turn, those medical “breakthroughs,” which were medical experimentations, were used to benefit middle–and upper-class white women’s reproductive lives. While properly eviscerating Sims, Owens also highlights the medical skills of the same enslaved women disregarded by doctors.

I was infuriated at the mental hopscotch needed to render these women both skilled practitioners and nameless bodies to be cut up at will. You won’t feel good when you finish reading this essential book, but you will remember Lucy, Anarcha,… show more.

This forgotten masterpiece of a memoir by a prosecutor who took on corruption on the docks of New York came out in 1956, two years after that Marlon Brando classic, On the Waterfront.

William Keating, a hard-nosed, relentless, and incorruptible crime-fighter, gives an inside look at the reign of terror imposed on honest, hard-working longshoremen by the gangsters who ran their union.

Keating was by no means anti-labor – at the start of Chapter 2, he mentions that his father was an official in the United Mine Workers, and that his great-grandfather was a prominent Molly Maguire in the hard-coal fields of Pennsylvania. That earned points with me – I come from a long line of Irish American coal miners in that area. 

A wonderful book in two senses – it’s wonderfully written, and it evokes wonder. This is an idiosyncratic urban fantasy set in an imaginary metropolis called New York City (cut off from the world by an impenetrable cloud wall that lifts only occasionally, to let the trains through). In this city, amazing characters (amazingly good and amazingly evil) clash as they strive for the things that matter to them most. And the prose is as bright and vivid as a Van Gogh painting. Winter’s Tale contains one of my favorite lines in all literature, where one character is described as “breathtakingly short.”

I adored this book. I think every teacher should be given this book just to feel that although you might shut the door to the outside and be alone in the classroom with your students, you are not alone in what you face. This book convinced me that I needed to write my own teaching memoir. 

McCourt (author of Angela’s Ashes) and his sense of humor and creativity at times get him into trouble but eventually endear him not only to the students but also to the school administration. I might not have agreed with everything he described, but I was overwhelmingly delighted with his approach and his great rapport with his students. 

I fell in love with this series and its intrepid heroine Molly Murphy on page one. A young, penniless woman who has to rely on her own wits to make her way to America at the end of the 19th century, and a sea voyage that ends well enough until she becomes a murder suspect as soon as she arrives in Ellis Island - this impeccably researched historical mystery has all the ingredients I could want. It’s a satisfying mystery and a scathing social commentary, the tone of voice is clever and funny, and I didn’t just want to follow Molly on every step of her journey, I wanted to be her.