100 books like The Bonfire of the Vanities

The one thing I don’t like about most economics books is that they are overly antiseptic and highly divorced from the machismo gambling culture that drives speculative behavior in the first place and leads to the kinds of conditions that eventually create financial catastrophes.

My writing on economics is highly colored by the fact that I worked on Wall Street as a financial journalist at the height of the high-rolling, cocaine-rich, Salomon Brothers 1980s. But pick any subsequent bubble – Enron, Scion, FTX, the tech founder clients of SVB – it ultimately follows the same betting and bluffing storyline.

If you want to understand commodity markets, start by understanding the people who drive them. For that, there’s no better writer than Michael Lewis and no better book than his semi-autobiographical original effort, Liar’s Poker. The reason I prefer Liar’s Poker the most is not only because it covers the period… show more.

Before the U.S. entered the war in Vietnam, Graham Greene forecast its disastrous consequences. His love triangle, set amid the escalating conflict, perfectly captures the naiveté of American interventionism overseas. I love the subtext of the tale, which is narrated by an embittered British journalist. Although it’s never spoken, we intuit that he is addicted to opium and living the life of a dissolute expatriate. Fowler watches in horror as a U.S. diplomat tries to steal both the woman and the country he has adopted. He claims impartiality and indifference until he cannot any longer.

I couldn't leave this important book off this list, especially since my own novel is a refashioning of that story from the woman's point of view!

Fitzgerald's most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, is seen by many as an avatar for the American Dream of the quest for riches and status. But Jay Gatsby is also Scott himself—the man striving to be part of the in-crowd, who conflates wealth with class, and who never, ever gave up on his ultimate goal of reclaiming the great love of his life, Daisy Buchanan.

Short—it clocks it at barely 50,000 words, The Great Gatsby captures the zeitgeist of its time, taking readers back to the heady, post-Great War party of the Jazz Age, where anything seemed possible.

Having worked as a police officer, process server, and private investigator, I find most books featuring characters with those occupations unrealistic and not entertaining. 

Michael Connelly spent time working for the L.A. Times as a crime reporter, so he knows reporters, cops, and lawyers.  He’s seen greater success with his Harry Bosch series, but The Lincoln Lawyer was the debut novel featuring defense attorney Mickey Haller, and it’s great. 

Not only does the plot keep you guessing, but the realistic grit of the Los Angeles courts gives this book an authenticity you rarely find.

Shortly after it was first published, I picked this book up in the bookstore at Heathrow on my way home from a business trip. I spent the entire flight glued to it and laughing out loud.

This was Bryson’s first travel book and one that changed my perception of what travel writing could be. It is perceptive, irreverent, and focuses on the small, often quirky, details that make travel so interesting. I am now a huge fan of all of Bryson’s books, but this was the one that got me hooked.

“Sentimental” is maybe the last word you’d use to describe Ellis’ fiction, but Less Than Zero is an elegant proof that form needn’t follow function.

For all the sparseness of its language and pitilessness of its characters, there is a profound empathy for its narrator Clay, a pensive college freshman who’s returned home to California for Christmas break. Clay expends no outward moral judgment on the depravity of those who populate his very Gothic Los Angeles, but we come to intuitively understand his reticence as less a disposition than a defense.

It is precisely in how he understates his pain that we feel just how total it is.

Chandler’s novel, first published in 1939, is a touchstone for anyone writing detective fiction.

Never mind that private detective Philip Marlowe never actually solves anything.

In addition to the famously unsolved murder that Chandler brushed off when told about it, there are plot holes you could drive a Buick Roadmaster through, and prose occasionally edged in purple. Never mind its shortcomings, The Big Sleep overall remains intoxicatingly hard-boiled, a much-imitated classic of the genre.

I have gone back to it many times since I first read it, seeing its flaws but loving its tough-as-nails sensibility. It played an important part in setting me on the road to writing not only the Priscilla Tempest novels but also the Sanibel Sunset Detective mysteries.

Like everyone else who writes this stuff, I owe Chandler a lot.

Silva’s novels about Gabriel Allon—a reluctant Israeli secret agent posing as an Italian art restorer—are my current favorite read and a serious contender for the best spy thrillers by a contemporary writer.

Each of the novels in the series works as a separate episode; in this case, Allon is lured into action to track down a Palestinian assassin.

But Allon is brought to life by recurring themes across the series, including the fact that his traumatized wife is permanently assigned to a psychiatric hospital by the car bomb that killed their son.

Silva’s meticulous writing and ingenious mixing of historical fact and fiction will appeal to literary readers. 

Would you like to know how it feels to be a celebrated star trader, while you’re actually hiding a secret and illegal loss of hundreds of millions of dollars? Rogue Trader is a stomach-turning account of how far someone might go to fit in and avoid being seen as a failure. This is a true story of how Leeson hid a small loss rather than admitting a mistake, and how that small loss grew into the secret 800 million dollar loss account which brought down one of the world’s oldest banks. 

In a world where the old school tie and family pedigree are paramount, maintaining the image of a successful star trader was his only way of fitting in, and with the substantial paper profits he posted, no one wanted to question him. Not until it was too late to save the bank. 

Also by Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925, is the slow-moving and heavy-handed but steadily engrossing and ultimately overwhelming account of a poor boy so bewitched by a beautiful rich girl that he commits literal murder and loses his own life in his struggle to have her.