100 books like The Confessions

I think Atticus Finch represents the best qualities in a father and a man. If he is idealized, as many have said, it is an ideal all fathers can aspire to.

I first read this in high school, and I’m not sure I was mature enough to appreciate it. Later, it was a selection in the book discussion group I was in, where we focused less on the characters and more on the themes. When I read it a third time on my own, as an adult and father, I came to appreciate how Atticus Finch models the behavior he wants to see in the world, and that, I think, is the most effective form of fathering.

This well-written book taught me a great deal about WW2. I especially appreciated learning more about Mary Churchill, Winston’s youngest daughter, who was seventeen at the start of the war. The author obtained access to her diaries, and he quotes from them often, so I got a feel for the life of a young woman in society during wartime. Mary had a conscience and good insights and became a main character in this historical book.

It’s not a novel, but at times it reads like one.  

This book has become a classic. It’s a brilliant book.

Doris Kearns Goodwin gives specific examples of how Abraham Lincoln was a master in creating coalitions and mobilizing support in the face of continuous resistance. His cabinet was made up of senior and ambitious individuals, many of whom were strong leaders in their own right.

Lincoln had to figure out how to get them on his side and create viable coalitions in order to move his key agenda—win the war and ensure the passage of the 13th Amendment. In many ways, he was not simply a visionary but a master of balancing persuasion and authority—which is a desirable leadership skill.

What more can be said of the classic tale of good versus evil, which was penned less than a hundred years ago, but speaks of a timeless conflict as old as humanity itself? Yet what is most inspiring to me is that in this world of brave knights, powerful wizards, and deadly dragons, the true heroes are the hobbits. People viewed as insignificant by others, but whose courage saved the lives of all.

Like for Aristotle, this is no easy read, but Augustine must be credited with planting in the clearest and most dramatic way the central doubt: cannot we want and do something merely for the sake of the evil or wrong we would commit?

His story of the pear theft is bound to leave an impression on anyone, regardless of one’s religious background. Later Christian philosophers will try to get around Augustine’s doubts, with more or less success.

James McDougall’s History of Algeria gives an excellent overview of Algerian history, focusing on the lived experiences of the Algerian people over the last 500 years.

He does this with an easily readable style, offering acute insights and drawing on the personal experiences of those who lived through world-changing movements. He covers the War of Independence and the revolutionary transformations which ensued in Algeria, and across the continent, by that long and heroic struggle.

Biography is perhaps my favorite genre because, at their best, biographies show us how people are both made by history and make history themselves.

This book is amongst the best political biographies I’ve ever read as it gives a passionate but also fair and critical account of one of the best-known revolutionaries of the 20th century, Frantz Fanon. 

It is a book both about ideas and the humans behind them and is serious on both counts. Whether it’s deep in explaining Fanon’s turn away from orthodox Marxism or his continued attachment to Caribbean poetry, or when simply painting a picture of an afternoon in Tunis when Fanon interacted with his many friends and colleagues, it is a lively read that was hard for me to put down. 

In this book, Werenfels explains how elite dynamics and tactics work in the Algerian political system and how they have led to the lack of significant political change since the country returned to the democratic process in 1995. Werenfels analyses the coping mechanisms of the highly opaque authoritarian elite in a shifting local and global environment building on evidence from extensive research. This book planted the seed of an idea for what the topic of my own book would be and how I wanted to structure it. 

This is not only a beautifully written book, it is an important one. Why? Because it poses challenging questions about the promise of post-independence freedom for Algerian women through a collection of short stories written between 1959 and 1978. First published in French in 1980, the writing style is at once innovative, lyrical, and unsettling as Assia Djebar explores the condition of Algerian women across the pre-colonial, colonial and immediate post-colonial periods. The inspiration for the book is Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 painting of women in an Algerian harem because, as Djebar explains in the post-face, this picture leads her straight to the conundrum of 1970s Algeria: “What would Delacroix see if he entered into contemporary Algerian apartments?” And for her the depressing conclusion is that he would still find women locked up and shut away just as in the 1830s. One of the most significant voices to emerge from Algeria,… show more.

This is a powerful memoir. First published in French in 2016, one year after Mokhtar Mokhtefi’s death, it is an eyewitness account of twentieth-century Algeria, tracing his political journey from a poor village south of Algiers, through to the French secondary education, one of the few Muslims to do so, and his eventual engagement in the FLN in 1957. Graphically portraying the anger and disaffection that drives Algerians to rebel against French rule, the book is equally unsparing about the divisions and authoritarianism which riddle the National Liberation Front and shape post-independence Algeria. Beautifully translated by his widow, the writer and anti-imperialist activist Elaine Mokhtefi.