Fans pick 51 books like Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

Before reaching middle school, I pretty much believed that my friends—who they were and how many I had—determined my value. But my circle could be fickle; girls were ostracized for minor infractions (you bought the same coat as me!) I lived with daily fear of being dropped.

So Cat’s Eye captivated me with its lack of sentimentality in depicting (some) girls’ friendships. Elaine, a middle-aged artist, returns alone to Toronto, the city where she grew up,  for a retrospective of her work. The trip gives Elaine space to reflect on her life in that city, and Cordelia, her childhood “friend”, is central to her memories.

Cordelia tormented and humiliated Elaine, even putting her life in danger, yet Elaine remained loyal to her for years. It felt very real to me that this toxic relationship would continue to preoccupy Elaine into her functional adulthood. Girlhood friendships are often fraught, and Atwood… show more.

Lorrie Moore is another one of my favorite writers and someone I’ve been lucky enough to write about on multiple occasions. Her first novel, Anagrams, is smart, fun, and resolutely—even defiantly—weird. Her second novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is all those things and more.

Berie, the narrator, is on a bad vacation in Paris, where her marriage is teetering on the brink of collapse. Instead of dealing with her obnoxious husband, she thinks back to the summer she turned fifteen and the profound friendship she forged with a girl she worked with at a Disney-knockoff theme park in upstate New York.

Like Home Land, this novel has its cultists, and I’m happy to count myself among them. Moore, like Lipsyte, is a stylist as unmistakable as she is unprecedented, someone whose sentences I would recognize anywhere. This slim coming-of-age novel bears all her hallmarks—comic timing, gimlet… show more.

I know I have those lost friendships I still wonder about—we worked together, lived together, traveled to beach towns together, drank tequila together! We went to very bad bars and made very bad decisions together! How’d we lose touch?—and thank God these brilliant writers do too.

Schappell and Offill gather a cocktail party’s worth of lost platonic loves, reminding me that I’m not alone and giving meaningful thought to the monumental importance of friendship and the pain of losing it.

I’m a little obsessed with the sheer ferocity with which Elisa Albert writes the world, and when I this short, sharp novel the phrase that stuck in my head was, “This is all teeth.” And boy, do I mean that in a good way.

Ari Walker is still trying to get her footing after the birth of her baby when Mina, a former cult musician, moves to town and the two bond hard. I still think about Albert’s description of Mina, her round cheeks and her messy hair and the jarring realization that this woman is not affecting carelessness with standard beauty norms, but truly does not give a good goddamn. It’s about those people who are both alien and intimate and who make you more yourself. 

Detective Paranormal: I love reading Indie books like Book 1 in the Psychic Detective Ellen Owens series because they offer such diverse styles. Mitchell takes care to develop her characters beyond their career roles, which I like.

Detective Owens struggles to accept her gifts, which can be a blessing and a curse for her. Visions aren’t readily accepted as evidence in police work; however she quickly learns they can offer leads. When Ellen spies a woman at a cemetery several times wearing the same clothes, she’s drawn into a 1978 cold case where an editor named Regina Mitchell disappears, leaving her young son behind. Although a psychic newbie, Ellen’s family isn’t, so she has her mother for support as she winds her way through this complex old and cold case. 

Loyalty. Love. Relationships. They are all essential elements in my favorite books, and nowhere are they more present than in this one.

Ann Kinnear, like my other favorite female psychics, is torn between doing what she feels she should and doing what she’d like to do—which is to hide behind closed doors. It’s the same dilemma I would have if I were gifted (or maybe it’s cursed) with an ability like Ann has.

As I had hoped, Ann chooses to make a difference, securing a spot as one of my favorite books.

Eloise Montgomery is my kind of protagonist. She survives a tragedy, suffers a great loss, and, waking up from a coma, finds herself with a new and frightening psychic ability. One that she puts to good use.

I like her grit and determination, along with her moments of doubt and despair. She’s human. A normal, everyday woman is thrust into a life she didn’t expect and is making the best of it—a situation I can identify with. Except for her psychic ability. That I don’t have, but how cool would that be?

I have the 1971 paperback printing of More Than Human, with the Robert Pepper cover art. The book has a special significance for me; although unrelated in plot, it has similarities to my book: it is science fiction, has an unusual structure, a complex timeline, deals with psychology, and features investigation and discovery. The fact that it was written in 1953, before the Internet, Earth satellites, personal computers, and cell phones, facilitates the reader’s attention to the rather complex story. Seven individuals, Lone, Janie, twins Bonnie and Beanie, Baby, Gerry, and Hip, are exemplars of inequality, with peculiar capabilities and shortcomings. The German word gestalt, meaning the forming of a pattern, describes how, together, they embody the next step in human evolution.

I loved this book for the new concepts it brought to me about psychic abilities, specifically telepaths that could block other’s psychic abilities.

After this, I was drawn to the book for the way it blurred the lines of reality, making me question alongside the main character if anything they were experiencing was real. I also thought the idea of the UBIK drug that kept people in a 'half-life' was fascinating and a different way to show addiction and its consequences.

Lastly, the ending was quite thrilling and kept me reading into the wee hours of the morning, even though I had work the next day! 

Far Journeys is a profound and unusual book. The story in which Robert Monroe, who was a radio executive, finds himself having spontaneous out-of-body experiences sometimes reads like science fiction. Yet it is his honest account. Dedicated to an exploration of human consciousness, he later founded a nonprofit called The Monroe Institute, which pioneered research into changing brainwaves using only binaural sounds. Monroe kept pushing the envelope with his explorations, learning to explore places beyond our world that most have only dreamed of; and it’s given me such great inspiration for my stories. It also blew my mind and helped me make sense when I had my own glimpses of the energetic realm that he describes here. This is technically his second book, but I feel it’s even better to start here.