100 books like Something Wilder

I recommend this book to everyone. I seriously cannot praise it enough. I know absolutely nothing about sailing, but this book completely transported me—I felt like I was right on board the Alberg with Anna, sailing the Caribbean.

Trish Doller’s descriptions took my breath away. You can really feel how she poured her passion for sailing into this book and she handles the main character’s grief beautifully. On a more personal level, I also adored the German American rep. 

I’m a sucker for a good friends-to-lovers romance, especially if gives off When Harry Met Sally vibes. Poppy and Alex have been friends since college. Despite being polar opposites, they share a passion for travel. So, every year, they take a vacation together, known as “The Summer Trip”—always in a different location, and always as “just friends.” At the start of the book, they haven’t spoken for two years, so Poppy makes a last-ditch effort to reconcile with Alex via a jaunt to Palm Springs. The trip does not go as expected, which makes for some truly hilarious scenes! I loved the way the narrative alternated between past and present, weaving together the history of this couple, with delightful flashbacks of their previous trips, including New Orleans, San Francisco, Tuscany, and Croatia.

I’ve never been to the Galápagos Islands, but after reading Shipped, I wish I could afford to go! In this enemies-to-lovers romance, Henley and Graeme are office rivals who work for the same adventure travel company but have never met in person. When the opportunity for a promotion arises, their boss sends them both on a company cruise to the Galápagos archipelago, where they’ll have to come up with the best marketing pitch for the area. This book has so much going for it: hilarious travel hijinks, sizzling sexual tension, and detailed descriptions that bring the islands to life. By the end of the book, I was convinced I needed to add this destination to my travel bucket list!

In 2021, my son spent a semester abroad in Seoul. While he was there, I picked up this book to get a better feel for his experiences in South Korea. At the start of Heart and Seoul, Hara, a 25-year-old Korean-American woman, has just lost her adoptive father. His death prompts her to travel to Seoul to learn more about her birth parents, whom she’s never met. Though the story includes a swoony love interest, what I enjoyed the most about Hara’s journey was the way she adapts to life in South Korea. The setting is so richly described that I got an amazing sense of Seoul as a vibrant city, filled with beautiful monuments, delicious street food, and quirky cafes. While the book is marketed as a romance, the love story isn’t fully resolved until the sequel, Seoulmates, which is equally enjoyable.   

This is the book that made me want to write a historical romance. The protagonist, Miss Jane Fairfield, is outlandishly rich. But she can’t get married and leave her younger sister, who has epilepsy, to the well-meaning but cruel treatments recommended by their uncle, who is also their guardian. Since her money makes her an appealing target for many an impoverished rake, Jane has to work extra to become unappealing while still seeming like she’s trying to attract a man. She wears obnoxiously bright clothing, insults people with the kindest tone, and—in one desperate attempt to make a man be mean to her—takes the food right off his plate. This is a book about people trying to put you in your place and keep you small. And let me give you a hint: it’s a romance, so there’s definitely a Happily Ever After, and that includes small-minded people getting their… show more.

In 1950s Sewanee, Chang and Katherine slowly fall in love and find that the Souths of Korea and Tennessee are not that different after all, both subject to lingering issues of class, family, race, and civil war. I love the poetic language in this novel, as well as its ambitious story and the complexity invested in every relation.

Semi-spoiler alert: this book has the best ending line ever so don’t flip to the end or you’ll rob yourself of something very precious. I adore a nice ending twist and although not so much an O’Henry plot twist (love his stories) as an “aha” shift in perspective, it has stuck with me more than any other element of the story.

The book’s blurb very aptly describes The Sea of Tranquility as “... a rich, intense, and brilliantly imagined story about a lonely boy, an emotionally fragile girl, and the miracle of second chances.” I’m a sucker for second chance stories, especially following an injustice. The beauty of this story lies not in the how the protagonist, Nastya, recovers her power by confronting and righting the injustice but in how she subtly and simultaneously learns to look forward instead of backward.

I used this book in class for three semesters. The students were fans; I stopped using it only because I re-designed my classes regularly. It’s a deep dive into hundreds of social science and neuroscience research projects about how we relate to each other, how we want to engage with each other, and why. It first appeared to be an unusual pick for a class on creatively entrepreneurial growth but students agreed it made sense when reminded that most creative work is done in collaborative teams so understanding each other is of great creative benefit. Brooks uses fictional characters, a man and a woman, and tells their life stories, illuminating them with insights rooted in research; we see the deep human truths behind behaviors and are entertained along the way. 

West Virginia’s Jayne Anne Phillips made a noisy arrival on the literary scene with her triumphant collection of short stories, Black Tickets. One of the first of the “dirty realists,” Phillips paints the backroads and forgotten lives of rural West Virginia during a time when that state, and many like it, were on no one’s radar. As one of her characters says, “This ain’t the South…this is the goddam past.” Phillips captures the loneliness and the disconnected lives of young women and men in a way few books have done.  

John Berger was a fantastic cultural observer and art critic, this book is erotic both in its observation of culture and context but also of human fallibility, and psychic and psychological transportation of love itself. It had a big influence on me as an art student and for the brief years when I was a sculptor. What I love about it is its empathy for both the female and male inner erotic life, although it is set in England and Europe at the end of the 19th century, Berger’s razor-sharp, succinct blending of the internal and external world is both moving and sensual.