100 books like Silence

What I appreciate most about David Mitchell’s novel is how he grounds the history in scenes full of well-developed characters. So, for example, we don’t begin the novel with a long note about the historical period or the lineage of the ruling class, but rather with the urgency of childbirth gone wrong in the house of a concubine in Nagasaki in 1799.

It’s from this rootedness in the sense-based that we move into a wider exploration of both geopolitics and the magical, which I absolutely fell in love with—this sense that there is an element of the supernatural at play in this otherwise very realistic historical world.

What can I say about Toni Morrison’s novel about the legacy of slavery that hasn’t been said by a hundred book reviewers? Just that Beloved is her masterpiece and reading it made me want to write fiction.

I love the non-linear plot, how it seamlessly moves between the past and present, between the outer and inner lives of its central characters, and its clear-eyed rendering of the horrific reality of slavery in the pre-civil war South. A book that not only transported me to another time but transformed me.

This is a novel that I suspected I was falling into as much as reading—that is, I felt utterly and, at times, uncomfortably immersed in Murakami’s story universe.

I love the blending of contemporary realism in the novel (our protagonist’s day-to-day life) with the historical and the way the Japanese military’s atrocities in Manchuria in the 30s haunt the recognizably contemporary world so that even a man sitting at the bottom of a well contemplating existence and history feels like an acceptable and dreamlike weirdness.

I’m completely taken with such a strange and affecting representation of lesser-known histories and the ghosts such events leave us with.

Do I need a reason to love this book? There are too many characters, too many subplots, too many deaths, and the ruins of beloved characters. And yet, the entire picture it presents is beautiful. That is how life is– unpredictable and chaotic.

I learned a lot about war, the mentality of people who go to fight, and the mentality of the people left behind. Above all, it was such a good feeling to finish the big book–probably one of the biggest books I had read and loved! 

Dickens was a great intuitive psychologist, and The Tale of Two Cities shows some brilliant insights into human behavior during and after revolutions. The wonderful dreams of French society being built on justice and fairness came crashing down after the revolution. This is because people driven by opportunism and pathological hatred took over society. These ‘revolutionaries’ had an intense desire for vengeance and violent retribution–as well as gaining power for themselves. 

This is a feature of revolutions that we see again and again after the collapse of the old regime: unprincipled opportunists jumping to power. The direction of change becomes more radical. Inevitably, a lot of innocent people became victims during this post-revolution period, as did many innocent French people during what became known as the period of ‘Terror,’ when the guillotine rapidly killed thousands and thousands.

Dickens shows that in this terrifying post-revolution period, some individuals make great sacrifices… show more.

This book explores the customs and development of the Polynesian Islands prior to interference from European powers.

I see the rawest forms of our instincts and psychology in the indigenous peoples of the world. This book is a call for all readers to suspend the tendency to judge other cultures and time periods and just be observers. 

Kang’s sentences are short and tidy and clearly well-translated into English from Korean, and I was immediately drawn into the novel through the almost staccato rhythms of the prose. A small warning: this story comes with ghosts.

The plot is a fictionalization of a horrific event in Korean history in which soldiers opened fire on thousands of students protesting the 1980 military coup, killing somewhere between 600 and 2,300 civilians. The story was actively suppressed by the Korean government—hence the uncertainty over numbers.

Using this as a backdrop, Kang personalizes the violence and political upheaval of Korea in the 1980s, giving us memorable characters and the anguished and marginalized voices of the dead. It’s a novel I can’t quite shake, even years after first reading it.

I feel almost obligated to begin by noting that I found Thien’s prose absolutely gorgeous. This is both a brave novel—in its representation of the massacre of student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989—and beautifully contextualized by further timelines spanning 1960s China and 1990s Canada.

I felt at once that Thien was showing me not only a snapshot of the infamous military response to student protests in Beijing but helping me understand what this brutal event might mean to those directly affected by it. The emotional and psychological power of the storylines and their exploration of grief and joy left me in awe of the novel and its author’s talent.

Raheb is a pastor/scholar who lives in Bethlehem and has become one of the most important Palestinian voices describing the Arab Christian experience within the Israeli occupation.

It is rare to read an actual Palestinian voice in this conflict—and rarer still to hear one coming from the church. Raheb is widely respected in academic work but also in the regional church. He has started a remarkable university (Dar al-Kalima University College) and a myriad of projects to alleviate the problem of Bethlehem’s life under military occupation.

Are you a fan of travel literature? If so, then you will be as amazed as I was to find this remarkable account. In the 1990s, the author, a noted travel writer, undertook a task that would be impossible to duplicate today for obvious reasons. Based upon the contents of a rare manuscript, he decided to trace the footsteps of two eastern orthodox monks who, in the Sixth Century, traveled through much of the Byzantine World, moving from one ancient monastery to another while describing their adventures. Tracing their route, the author relates in a witty, yet always respectful and well-written narrative the many obstacles he and his predecessors 1,300 years earlier faced. “The more things (and people) change the more they stay the same,” if for different reasons, and nothing can point that euphemism out better than this entertaining and informative book of a lost world and a time… show more.