80 books like The Amazing Spider-Man

As a young man I had a prolonged bout of mental illness. What saved me was my struggle to become a writer. This was my secret identity. I had to find other writers to inspire me, whose books offered hope, and could help me channel the restless energy that I felt within that had not yet found a purpose. I found such a writer in Henry Miller.

Miller is out of fashion now, even though George Orwell called him "the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past". Like DH Lawrence, he tangled with the censors repeatedly – to his credit.

He was as uncompromising about his art as Lawrence. Unlike him, he had no hang-ups about moralism and guilt. Far from it. Reading him was like sipping nectar. It was a tonic for the mind. His exuberant language was… show more.

Looking around me as a young man I found a grey world that had been stripped of all its glory and fabulousness by the exploitation and utilitarianism of human beings. 

Alexandra David-Neel was an amazing explorer. She was the first European woman to meet the Dalai Lama and in 1924 became the first to enter the forbidden Tibetan capital, Lhasa. She had already spent a decade travelling through China, living in a cave on the Tibetan border, where she learned about Buddhism from hermits, mystics, and bandits. 

She describes in this book how these people learnt such seemingly impossible skills such as telepathy, defying gravity, running for days without food or drink or sleep, and surviving with hardly any clothes in the subzero Himalayan blizzards. 

This magical world vanished when the Chinese invaded in 1947. 

To think that this miraculous way of life existed in the same century as me… show more.

Annie, Brenda, and Elise have been wronged. Not only have their husbands taken them for granted, but they have gone so far as to deceive, betray, and hurt them. Now these friends, sisters in humiliation, want justice.

I understand. I felt similarly when I was soldiering through my divorce. What reasonable thing could I do to get back at him without hurting anyone else, especially my kids. I never found a specific answer, but therapy and this book helped.

I enjoyed the way the girls were there for one another and wished I had friends in my boat who would get me like that and support me like that. Betrayal is rough, especially when you’ve given love with your whole heart. This book is a cathartic ride through the weeds.

Flavor Pick: Neapolitan

I simply love this book and read it at least once a year. It’s in the YA genre, and I am more like an MAA (middle-aged adult) but the main character, Auggie Pullman, and his friends and family are so enticing that I’m drawn in every time.

Auggie has an incredibly rare facial deformity and when we first meet him, he’s off to school for the first time. The book is written with a light touch and from many different voices, something the author pulls off with aplomb. It’s notoriously difficult to get away with multiple narrators, but this really works.

I root for Auggie every time, and the sheer humanity of the book, along with great humour and characterisation means that I come back to it again and again.

This book was like a big piece of literary chocolate cake. It was a blast from start to finish, set in the 1940s theater world of New York.

Ninety-five-year-old Vivian recounts her time in the theater, looking back on all the pleasure and pain of youth. The theater itself is another character within the novel, and like Broadway itself, the book is littered with eccentrics and phenomenal characters. An absolute jewel.

Molly Grant is a divorce attorney at a large Manhattan firm representing wealthy and demanding clients. While the book is entertaining in its descriptions of ridiculous office politics and insufferable clients, what made me fall in love with it was the main character. Molly is sharp and funny, and in the beginning of the book, she seems like the typical associate playing the game to get ahead, putting in the hours and stroking egos while also keeping her head down. But when the ex-wife of a rich, ruthless media mogul seeks help because her husband is alienating her children against her, Molly has to choose between her own career advancement or listening to her conscience to use her lawyer powers for good. This is an engrossing, entertaining, feel-good read. 

I have returned to many of these stories over and over again through the years—for Cheever’s prose, for his sense of what makes men tick. On one level, I can’t quite relate to white suburban husbands in upstate New York in the 1950s and 60s. And yet, somehow, they seem profoundly familiar. 

Like Cheever, Shaw was a fellow New Yorker contributor but his work is grittier than Cheever’s and was best summed up in The New York Times: “[Shaw] has a primitive skill possessed by very few sophisticated men.” Winner of two O. Henry awards, I would say he is the “meat and potatoes” short story master - but it’s Prime USDA.

Manhattan art dealer Sera James watched her world crumble at the altar two years ago, and her heart is still fragile. Her desire for distraction reignites a passion for a mysterious portrait she first saw as a young girl—a painting of a young violinist with piercing blue eyes. Along with wealthy heir William Hanover, Sera unravels the story behind the painting’s subject, an Austrian violinist Adele Von Bron who smuggles Jews out of Vienna and finds herself in Auschwitz.

Evocative, haunting, soul searching, this debut by Cambron is time-slip historical fiction at its best: heartbreaking truth of the horrors of Auschwitz, romance with a musical refrain, art and faith. Just the kind of story I try to write. A delight.

The book is an engaging memoir about what it was like in the 1950s for a single woman just out of college to balance life and relationships while starting a career in magazine publishing in the Big Apple and follows her career and family relationships through to the 1970s.

Though things like finding an apartment in a trendy neighborhood back then were significantly easier than they are in modern day, the hilarious accounts about the challenges of adapting to small living conditions still ring true.

It’s an entertaining glimpse into the golden age of the print magazine industry, but it’s also a brutally honest account of women’s mental health issues, and what it’s like to seemingly have it all but still feel the constraints imposed by choosing to live in NYC. Any aspiring writer should read this book.