100 books like The Boys

I find this book to be an unsettling but impactful read, both thought-provoking and complex. We Need to Talk about Kevin follows the mother of a troubled teenager responsible for a school shooting.

It’s about nature versus nurture, the relationship between mother and child, and deeply seated guilt. It draws inspiration from real events, including the 1999 shooting at Columbine, which wasn’t the U.S.’s first mass shooting at a school, but it would become one of the most infamous.

Shriver’s novel raises unsettling questions about a mother’s guilt and self-justification and a community’s heartache and blame. I consider it to be a captivating and moving book.

To say I love this book is to say I love torture, which may not be accurate. It’s better to say it burrowed into my brain and stayed there for far too long. I don’t get scared easily. But this novel caught me differently.

This one freaked me out on a level I’d never experienced before. Why? Because it’s the kind of story that could happen to anyone, especially to dingbats like me. And make no mistake: Nick, the “hero” of this story, is a complete dingbat. I mean, he’s smart. But he makes so many believably bad decisions in the face of a ruinous situation to preserve his own interests that we’re reminded how no one is immune to situations that conspire at every level to defeat us.

This book just gets under your skin and stays there. It did mine.

This novel has so many reasons to recommend it. It incorporates radical experimentation and horrifying surgeries being done in a bizarre hospital. To make it even more mysterious, there is a hurricane threatening the island which complicates the investigation of US Marshall Teddy Daniels searching for a patient who has disappeared.

I loved the creepy island hospital and the use of weather as a character.

This book is not for the faint of heart, there are trigger warnings a mile long and it is one of the most gruesome books I have ever read and yet like a car crash, I couldn’t peel my eyes away from the book.

I listened to it on audiobook and the narration of the story added to the thrill and terror of it all. 

The thing that first drew me to medieval Sicily was its history of Muslim habitation.

I am deeply interested in questions of how Muslims, Christians, and Jews interacted with each other during a period of history in which religious identity was one of the most prominent public facts about a person and their community.

Alex Metcalfe is one of the leading scholars studying the Arabic texts that give us insight into the cultures of Muslims in Sicily and southern Italy and their legacies after the Norman conquest of an island that had been in Muslim hands for nearly two centuries. He has written several other works, but this is the one most accessible to a general audience, and the one that covers both Sicily and the southern parts of the mainland that were also strongly impacted by Muslim presence and culture.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve walked through layers and layers of trials – including chronic illness in myself and all four of my children, special needs in one of our kids, a degenerative ankle that has led to six ankle surgeries, depression, and several seasons of financial struggle. During times when I haven’t had much capacity to read in large chunks, I have found Beside Still Waters to be a comfort and encouragement. Charles Spurgeon writes with profound insight and eloquence, but in a down-to-earth way.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough! This insightful book had its genesis in a trip the author took with her daughters through Italy where she saw parallels between viticulture and the meaningful, fruitful lives we can live here on earth. 

Bestselling author Beth Moore is perhaps the best-known Bible teacher in the United States, bar none, and a hugely gifted writer. She is also known for her deep spiritual wisdom and joyful spirit despite undergoing some very traumatic experiences in her own life, including childhood sexual abuse. Moore uses Jesus’ teaching in John 15 to introduce readers to biblical principles that help us flourish.

This is an absolutely beautiful book, inside and out! I recommend both the print and audio versions, but it’s a special gift to listen to Beth Moore read her own words.

In her decades of work on Italy’s Fascist era, Marla Stone has shown an especially keen eye for the development of the regime’s policies and ideologies, whether in the sphere of art and culture, or that of political violence and imperialist aggression. Here Stone offers a succinct and penetrating overview of the origins, rise, consolidation, and eventual crash of Fascism in Italy, followed by a translation of some three dozen primary documents—about a third of which were otherwise unavailable in English—to illustrate her narrative. Particularly chilling are the propaganda texts from 1938 on, when Mussolini’s grandiose claims to the legacy of ancient Rome took a back seat to full-blown racial politics, “as Italians were declared ‘Aryans’ and biological anti-Semitism became part of official ideology.”

I am apt to come back to the kitchen from the garden or the farmers’ market with a large bag of irresistible vegetables that I have no idea what I’m going to do with. More often than not I turn to Viana La Place’s book for a simple and satisfying recipe that uses Italian ingredients with a touch of California thrown in.

It’s not often I’m moved to tears by an academic book, but this book did it for me by putting me in the shoes of a Florentine patrician trying to comfort his friend the night before his execution. The main historical source of the book is an extraordinary ‘how-to’ manual: the one used by the ‘comforting confraternities’ of 16th-century Bologna, men who volunteered to spiritually prepare condemned criminals for their final moments on earth and, in so doing, hopefully increase their chances of salvation. The book explains the various methods and tools that the comforter could use, including prayers, songs, and pictures, and reveals the complex rituals of execution that began long before the prisoner’s arrival at the scaffold. A moving account of the realities of historical capital punishment.