Here are 100 books that Rhinoceros fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am passionate about the Vietnam War because my male relatives served and came back changed by the experience. I spent ten years as the editor of The Patton Saber, writing articles about the experience of World War II soldiers, but when I came across an idea for a novel about past life memories, I decided to focus on memories of the Vietnam War. What I love about this list is that it reflects many facets of the war, including soldiers, nurses, veterans, and the family members touched by those affected by war.
O’Brien’s depiction of American soldiers in Vietnam was vivid and moving. It gave me a deeper understanding of the soldier’s experience. His artful use of the metaphor of what they carried revealed not only the items on hand but also the psychological baggage each soldier dealt with.
The stories were haunting and made me a full witness to the complexity of war and the many ways it is experienced. It is artfully written, moving, complex, touching and unforgettable.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
I started reading voraciously at age 4, and read Camus by 6th grade, which is why it made sense that I was so into Pink Floyd, my favorite album of theirs being Animals, which is super depressing. I then studied writing extensively with some great writers, getting my MA and MFA, and teaching writing at colleges from 1991-2021. Along the way I became an editor, a writing coach, ran a writing workshop for 7 years, and started a publishing company. I know good writing when I see it versus crap, and I can tell for sure in about 300 words. I also fall hard for books, and do want to marry them.
This is the Tom Robbins book for me: the glorious bastard that made me want to be a writer.
It's a day lost in Tijuana, or Nice, or Beijing, or some other place you'd never thought you'd be, and you don't speak the language, but you've convinced yourself that you're fluent, and you can do it: you can get around anyway, and there's no cabs, and so you get into some guy's really old Volvo or, more ill-advised, van, and you give him the local equivalent of ten bucks to take you where you hope you want to be and not kill you, and he does it, but when he drops you off he yells at you, in his language, for being stupid enough to take a ride with a stranger.
And you do it again the next day, and you never learn your lesson.
Still Life with Woodpecker is sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.
For the last decade, I’ve spent the majority of each year traveling. I’ve been to 60 countries across 6 continents and every US state. My love of travel was inspired and encouraged by my parents from a very early age. I’ve also been inspired by a wide variety of other sources, like movies, TV, photography, and, of course, books. Often, I’ll plan an adventure around a cool location I saw or read about and then just go. I’ll just show up and see what happens. All it takes is that little initial nudge, like what I found in these books.
No book has had a bigger influence on me as a person or a writer than this one. I suppose a lot of hoopy froods could say the same. It’s an adventure on a galactic scale, and yet, at its core, it’s just about a guy who wants to go home and have a cup of tea.
It’s a brilliantly funny satire and full of jokes and moments I’ll never forget. All four books in the series are amazing, and I’ve re-read them countless times. The fifth and final book is a downer worth skipping.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
I started reading voraciously at age 4, and read Camus by 6th grade, which is why it made sense that I was so into Pink Floyd, my favorite album of theirs being Animals, which is super depressing. I then studied writing extensively with some great writers, getting my MA and MFA, and teaching writing at colleges from 1991-2021. Along the way I became an editor, a writing coach, ran a writing workshop for 7 years, and started a publishing company. I know good writing when I see it versus crap, and I can tell for sure in about 300 words. I also fall hard for books, and do want to marry them.
I've met Mr. Mosely a few times, and he's a helluva guy.
This is my favorite of the Easy Rawlins series. Mosley writes in my favorite genre, hardboiled, and he's perfect Chandler, but with two important distinctions: his books teach us about being in a Black man's shoes in a white man's world, and we can never learn that well enough, and Easy is a genuinely good person, and there are not nearly enough of him.
He is good to his bones, to his soul, and we all want him to succeed: we're with him from the first line, and we all get religion praying for him to make it all the way, not to solving the crime, but to solving the mystery of living life well, and on his own terms.
With each succeeding mystery featuring his reluctant detective (and natural-born existentialist) Easy Rawlins, Walter Mosley gains new fans and builds on what is now recognized as a permanent addition to American crime writing. His current book is A Little Yellow Dog--another instant classic of suspense, style, and shrewd social observation.
It's 1964. Easy Rawlins has given up the street life that has brought him so much trouble and grief. He's taken on a job as supervising custodian of Sojourner Truth Junior High School in Watts. For two years he's been getting up early and going off to work. He wears…
I admire the way children tell stories—how their imagination veers here and there, how fantasy and reality intertwine, and how magic can happen at any moment. I wrote stories like this when I was a kid and, fortunately, saved many of them. When writing The Kids of Cattywampus Street (my twentieth book), I went through these stories and recreated this narrator’s voice as the 8-year-old me with absurdity and confidence. I wanted to show a range of characters in a diverse world where kids believe in themselves, have the power to use their imagination, can get into and out of trouble on their own accord, are resilient, adaptable, strong, and just plain funny.
This is a collection of four related stories that follow a little girl named Josette, her Mama and Papa, and the maid, Jacqueline. Papa tells Josette some absurd stories within the story and everyone has a bizarre and seemingly random imagination. For example, Papa calls cheese a music box, a music box a rug, a rug a lamp, and so on. Mama can open walls. Josette eats the moon, and Jacqueline is one of many Jacquelines. The author, Ionesco was a French-Romanian playwright and considered one of the fathers of “Theatre of the Absurd” in the 1950s and 60s and these stories are surreal. Originally published in the early ’70s, this new edition contains Delassert’s equally surreal, colorful, and expressive illustrations.
Back in print for the first time since the 1970s, these illustrated stories by one of the twentieth century’s great playwrights make ideal bedtime reading for young children. The “silly” stories, as Ionesco called them, are accompanied by nearly 100 full-color illustrations, painstakingly restored by the artist for this brand new edition.
I see no distinction between the personal and the political. All art is, therefore, a political act, and literature especially, since the author gets inside the reader's head. In 1984, the use of a pen is punishable, never mind having an unorthodox opinion; novels are written by machines—commodities like jam or bootlaces, to pacify the proles. (A.I. novels outcompeting human ones?) Yes, novels entertain, and that's OK, but the best way to change your outlook is to let you understand the human condition a little better. That is why I want more from a political thriller than just the same old lies, corruption, sex, and power at the heart of government.
This book made me think, reflect, and laugh (if a little unnervingly!). It is a quirky tale that warns us of threats to civil liberties from AI and corporate tech giants in a Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy meets 1984 way.
Some of the writing is lyrical and literary, sometimes perplexing and banal. I was not entirely convinced by the science behind the science-fiction elements, but that is perhaps allowed because of the Theatre of the Absurd approach the author takes.
'Fun and erudite' Sunday Times 'Snort-inducingly funny' Daily Mail 'One of the cleverest books you'll read this year' Telegraph
Every system, however immaculate, has a few little glitches.
The latest in domestic tech should have predicted that businessman George Mann was about to murder his family. But instead it crashes and leads to the wrong man being caught and punished.
Are there gremlins in digital giant Beetle's ubiquitous wearable tech, talking fridges and Dickensian droids? Have they been hacked, or is something even more sinister going on?
With the clock ticking philandering Beetle CEO Guy Matthias, conflicted national security agent…
I’ve had a life-long interest in genocide dating back to my teenage years, when I read Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Murderers Among Us. Wiesenthal introduced me to the idea that governments sometimes murdered innocent people and could elude justice for their crimes. The question of human evil interacted with my theological interest in the problem of evil generally. Both genocide scholars and theologians were posing similar questions: how could people or God permit the occurrence of wanton evil when it was in their power to avoid it? And what should we do about genocide after it has happened? These questions launched my research into genocide and continue to fuel my study of this topic.
In 2019 I published a review of Mary Fulbrook’s Reckoningsin the journal History. The review may have been the most laudatory I’ve written. Fulbrook’s study of the Holocaust and its noxious aftereffects lingers with me today. I’ve come to think of Reckonings as the War and Peace of Holocaust histories. Like Tolstoy’s epic, it paints on a sprawling canvas, exhausting the writer’s palette to portray the Holocaust as a searing multi-generational phenomenon. Reckoningsdoes not approach the Shoah as most writers of the Holocaust do, namely, as a monumental but time-limited event. Fulbrook conceives of the Holocaust as a cancer that blights the victims and their families into the second and third generations. The radioactive fallout of the Shoah continues to the present day, poisoning people’s lives so deeply that no human response is adequate to deal with it. She upholds the tragedy of the Holocaust by refusing…
A single word - Auschwitz - is often used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust. Yet a focus on a single concentration camp - however horrific what happened there, however massively catastrophic its scale - leaves an incomplete story, a truncated history. It cannot fully communicate the myriad ways in which individuals became tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, and obscures the diversity of experiences among a wide range of victims as they struggled and died, or managed, against all odds, to survive. In the process, we also miss…
I was born in East Germany and experienced the disappearance of that country and the huge changes that followed as a child. My history teachers reflected this fracture in the narratives they constructed, switching between those they had grown up with and the new version they had been told to teach after 1990. It struck me how little resemblance the neat division of German history into chapters and timelines bears to people’s actual lives which often span one or even several of Germany’s radical fault lines. My fascination with my country’s fractured memory has never left me since.
It is impossible to understand Germany or indeed continental Europe without understanding the horrific conflict that raged on its soil during the first half of the 17th century. One of the most devastating conflicts ever fought in Europe, it tore communities and families apart along dynastic, religious, and political lines. Famine and disease added to the horrors of war, depopulating regions in Germany by up to two-thirds of pre-war levels. The conflict left a deep scar in German collective memory, the consequences of which can still be seen in religious, linguistic, and cultural divisions today. It was a collective experience of trauma with loud echoes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Wilson’s excellent work remains the best overview in English.
Winner of the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2011
The horrific series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War (1618-48) tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to whole areas of Central Europe to such a degree that many towns and regions never recovered. All the major European powers apart from Russia were heavily involved and, while each country started out with rational war aims, the fighting rapidly spiralled out of control, with great battles giving way to marauding bands of starving soldiers spreading plague and murder. The…
I’ve devoted my career to writing love stories. I’ve analyzed and dissected most of the great ones, always with the intention of writing something to join their ranks. Along the way, I noticed something interesting: the books that make people cry often stick with them, long after they’ve finished reading them. Perhaps this is because we all need to release feelings that are not socially acceptable? Whatever the reason, if you’re like me and love a good cry, then you’ll most certainly enjoy the books on my list.
Until I wrote my book I was exclusively a screenwriter. And throughout my career, I’ve been hired to adapt a variety of different novels, mostly love stories and romantic comedies. But nothing I’ve ever worked on has haunted me quite like Alyson Richman’s tale of first love – a love ripped apart by the brutality of the Nazis and their “Final Solution.” And yet, even as the horrors unfold, Richman always manages to find pinpoints of light in the darkness. Her prose is both elegant and poetic – and the tale she weaves will undoubtedly call forth the waterworks.
A rapturous novel of star-crossed love in a time of war-from the international bestselling author of The Secret of Clouds.
During the last moments of calm in prewar Prague, Lenka, a young art student, and Josef, who is studying medicine, fall in love. With the promise of a better future, they marry-only to have their dreams shattered by the imminent Nazi invasion. Like so many others, they are torn apart by the currents of war.
Now a successful obstetrician in America, Josef has never forgotten the wife he believes died in the war. But in the Nazi ghetto of Terezin,…
I am a member of a generation that wasn’t supposed to be born. My parents were Hungarian Holocaust survivors and I was born amidst the fragments of European Jewry that remained. As a psychotherapist, I have specialized in helping people navigate the multigenerational reverberations of the Holocaust. Having a witness to your own experience, in therapy and through books, provides comfort, understanding, and hope.
What motivated “ordinary people” to risk their lives and their families’ lives to save Jews? I was especially interested to know because my father and his labor battalion of 140 Hungarian Jews were saved by their Commanding Officer. As a therapist, I wondered what personal and family characteristics made a difference. As a mother, I wanted to raise children who care about others and take action in the face of injustice.
Based on interviews with 700 rescuers and survivors, central was the rescuers’ sense of personal obligation to others which began with close family relationships and seeing their parents model caring behavior and ethical values. I remember hearing a rescuer sum it up, “I had to do it to be able to live with myself.”
Why, during the Holocaust, did some ordinary people risk their lives and the lives of their families to help others--even total strangers--while others stood passively by? Samuel Oliner, a Holocaust survivor who has interviewed more than 700 European rescuers and nonrescuers, provides some surprising answers in this compelling work.
