100 books like Solar

I especially loved that this book has the ability to bring together elements as disparate as science, politics, and our common humanity. I repeatedly stopped reading to think about what was written: a depiction of our society and our place at the crossroads of possible futures that will depend on our attitudes to the plants and animals that make up the earth we share.

But the moral core at the center of this novel makes it more than just a good story. I kept thinking that it was easy to imagine Powers’s book as what many people believe is the “Great American Novel,” Moby-Dick, if we replace Melville’s whale with Powers’s trees and set it in the present instead of the 19th century. 

I’ve long been inspired by Butler’s writing, which features BIPOC characters front and center. As a multiracial person, I seldom saw people who looked and thought like me in the older fiction I read.

The notable thing about this book is that it’s technically science fiction, not alternate history, since the novel's beginning in 2024 (this year!). However, much of what Butler wrote has come to pass, raising one question: Has her vision of the future become an alternate version of the past? I love trying to wrap my head around that conundrum.

What makes a great novel? One that will be read forever? Top critics and commentators such as Harold Bloom and Nicholas Royle say the greatest fiction is written in a foreign language that somehow or other we understand. It is strange, unusual, uncanny, yet tells us profound truths about the human condition. The Rings of Saturn did even more for me; I thought it was miraculous. On the face of it, the narrator simply hikes through East Anglia. But he blends reportage, history, philosophy, mental ruminations, and much else in a melancholic commentary on life. Even translated from German, Sebald’s writing is mesmeric. Rings is a text that shapes your thinking in new ways. Sebald and his four peculiar ‘prose fictions’ would surely have won a Nobel prize had he not died in a car accident in 2001.

Before becoming a published writer, I was a lawyer litigating primarily large, multi-district environmental insurance coverage cases. I became familiar with the many ways by which we damage our precious natural resources, be it groundwater or soil or the air we breathe. Beginning with Rachel Carson, we have rich literature that speaks to the degradation of the planet, including the devastating changes wrought by global warming. The stories in this anthology speak to the physical and emotional topography of our current climate crisis, from a Sami woman who studies fish populations to a Wisconsin man contemplating the animals who make his trailer a portal to a world unsullied by humans. Fish & Water is a smart collection on a topic we ignore at our peril.

Shiva Naipaul is a truly major Caribbean writer. He captures the volatile essence of that extremely unstable society. One added bonus is his inter-racial perspective, to which his Indian origins contributes decisively. This work ‘views a colonial world sharply with postcolonial perspectives.’ Any reader of West Indies fiction should combine a sense of history with some grasp of contemporary conditions. Although the novel was written in the 1960s, it still has a sense of contemporary relevance. Obviously, readers must keep their eyes open for younger writers in this mode. Naipaul’s works have rightly been integrated into the Educational System.      

Mickelson’s Ghosts was the final book of famous novelist and equally famous writing teacher John Gardner, published a few months before his death in a motorcycle accident at the too-young age of 49. It tells the story of Peter Mickelson, a once-famous philosopher nearing the end of his career, and finding himself buying a run-down house he can't afford with his ex-wife and the I.R.S. breathing down his neck. Soon the rationalist philosopher finds himself living in a world of bad decisions, sex, hauntings and ghosts, and religious cults—a world where rationalism can’t save him from his own creeping madness and mortality. 

I was captivated by Julian Barnes’ treatment of memory and time in this novel, which tells the story of Tony Webster and his group of school friends, whose relationships fracture and strain as life and death leave their marks on their lives. In his retirement, Webster's own memories of his youth prove unreliable.

I felt it was a well-paced and exquisitely written short novel, which makes impressive use of subtle imagery (the sight of the Severn bore is a good example–a nod to how the world can sometimes surprise us). He uses these subtly constructed visual reference points to illustrate this greater message on the relationship between time and memory.

As a piece of writing, I found it quite simply extraordinary.

I will always find an excuse to read a classic literary tome about an unreliable narrator by the British seashore, partly because I know I’m in for a gut-punch of a landscape description. Even better when it’s garnished with a few—not too many, just enough—of those ultra-evocative lines that stop you in your tracks and make you go, “That’s exactly what that’s like!” But that’s not even the best part of this five-course meal of a book.

The story becomes increasingly surreal and disturbing. At each stage, Murdoch’s descriptions of the ocean landscape shift and change with the narrative, so the water increasingly looms in the background like a living character, apparently impersonal and even more deliciously horrible for it. 

McEwan has always numbered among my favorite fiction writers, not only because he knows how to spin a tale, but I enjoy his immaculate prose. I was amazed by the way McEwan creates an exciting and brilliant story all in a one-day narrative. Unusual happenings occur in a famous neurosurgeon’s free Saturday following an exhausting week of intricate surgery. His mundane routine explodes into an unusual, complex situation when a minor car accident leads to a scene of violence and confrontation with a gang of youths. I was so drawn in to this story that I found myself almost being there and sweating in a state of anxiety. 

I’m not a sports fan. My good friend, Ryan Harty (author of one of my favorite short story compilations: “Bring me your saddest Arizona”) recommended this book to me many years ago. I’m not a sports fan but he assured me it had very little if anything to do with sports. He was right about that! I gave it a shot and was immediately transported into the narrative. It’s still in my top 5 all-time favorite book list. Ford’s ability to communicate existential crises in deeper but simple ways is so, so good. Frank Bascombe, the protagonist is detached in a way that is both beautiful and unsettling.