99 books like The Death of Santini

Five marriageable girls, a nervy mother, a sarcastic father, a sensible best friend, and a plethora of good-looking young men in uniform and breeches. What’s not to like?

This novel has everything. The story of two people who fall in love with each other in spite of themselves is still as fresh as paint today, and the supporting cast is fantastic. Austen’s writing is pin-sharp, revolutionary, and addictive.

I’ve read the novel hundreds of times, but I never tire of its wit, romance, and perfect plotting. Whether you love a good romance, enjoy digging around in the dusty corners of Regency fiction, or just like seeing a baddie getting their comeuppance, it is universally acknowledged that this is the book for you.

As a leader in autobiographical fiction, Wolfe writes of a large family dominated by an alcoholic, authoritarian father who is highly dramatic in words and behavior.

His wife’s determination to survive by running a boarding house and investing in real estate leaves little time for parental attention to the needs of their children.

While most grow to repeat the dysfunctional family habits that hinder healthy development, the youngest child, with the help of his teachers, struggles enough to finally take steps away from the pain, and out of the cycle, as I did with my own life.

As the daughter of an alcoholic, I took enough college psychology classes to know I was part of an unchosen cycle, at risk to continue the family chaos.

Despite my resistance, my personal, unanticipated, troubled behavior did emerge, baffling me, and this book was exactly what I needed to sort things out, especially when I became a parent and feared contaminating my children.

Reading about negative, senseless, and too-familiar family habits of concealment, disparagement, anger, pain, and especially the role-playing coping mechanisms that commonly develop in a dysfunctional family, gave me hope.

Family hero, scapegoat, quiet one, mascot, all of these I recognized clearly. By learning, understanding, and erasing the blame, I could redefine normal and finally “crawl out of the trap.”

The key to understanding our lives is to enlarge our perspectives, and human behavior hasn’t changed much in 2000 years.

Plato gives several suggestions for maintaining stability in organized society, including guarding against the influence of Sophists, who manipulate language to manipulate their listeners, reminding me of our salesmen today.

Especially valuable is his allegory of the cave, where educators present images to an audience chained in place since early childhood. The glare of the sun awaits anyone who manages to leave the cave, and coming back in won’t be easy, but those who leave and find genuine truth need to come back and serve those still in the cave. Make the world a better place.

The towering achievement of eighteenth-century fiction, but long, very long—and not because of the plot so much as the form. “There is no Story,” wrote Hester Thrale, an early admirer of Clarissa (1747-8): “A man gets a Girl from her Parents—violates her Free Will, & She dies of a broken heart.” Around this brutal, elemental tale of toxic courtship and finally rape, however, the novel uses competing, divergent points of view to problematize access to the action, its causes and effects, its rights and wrongs, its large implications for sexual politics and social class. With its multiple narrators, Clarissa probes complex psychologies in startling new ways and throws the burden of interpretation and judgment on its readers. It’s not just a compelling story but a vast, endlessly troubling altercation about that story, with each narrator, one way or another, “throwing dust in the eyes of his judges.”

Wells’ novel takes readers to the heart of the pain that an adult daughter experiences at the hands of a troubled mother.

It explores how the pain and trauma of being a woman in a culture that doesn’t value women equally are passed down through generations and how each generation picks it up and carries it, in similar but different ways.

This “wound” shows up in the relationships of mothers who grew up in the 1950s and 60s and their daughters who grew up in the 1970s and 80s. The mothers want so much for their daughters to have more freedom than they themselves did, but instead find themselves experiencing fear, bitterness, and unexpected jealousy.

Mildred starts out trying to fulfill all the traditional roles society expects of women as a wife and mother.  But she discovers, through travails, that she is too smart, too talented, and too natively ambitious to settle for those limitations. As Mildred gains success in the “man’s world,” she becomes the provider for everyone around her. She learns the bitterest lessons imaginable as her men and her daughter, first use her, then betray her. Against her will, Mildred Pierce becomes a fearless female in a cold cruel world. She triumphs in the end as a woman of courage, relying not on the unreliable love of others, but on her own independent spirit.

During a group summer vacation on a beachy East Coast hideaway, the age-old dynamics of young vs. old—and the have-a-lots vs. the have-less—are in full play. The result sounds like any number of 20th-century American literary dramas, until it becomes clear that the disasters that loom are far larger than any single-family or community. Millet’s playful, snarky novel is a portrayal of what may come as the young realize how thoroughly older generations have sold out their future. The adults may be lost, but the kids are alright.

At sixteen years old, Darin Strauss had just received his first driver’s license and was on his first unsupervised drive, when a classmate, on a bicycle, swerved in front of his car.  She was killed instantly.  There was never a question of actual culpability: bystanders described the girl on the bike as literally driving in front of his vehicle, as though intentionally (a theory corroborated by suicidal thoughts recorded in her last diary entry the night before the accident). But this did not alleviate the trauma of killing someone, and the anguish and guilt that Darin Strauss carried forward for many, many years into his adult life, and probably always will. “Half a Life” refers to how he lived thereafter; halfway in his own existence, and the other half in constant preoccupation with the girl whose life was no more. This book will fill you with such empathy and compassion… show more.

A lower-middle-class girl grows up in provincial England, and we follow her from early childhood through middle age. That’s it. She has a few relationships, a few kids, and some friendships. She fights with her mother, she works, and she thinks about her life, but only in passing because she’s busy living.

The kind of book that’s not supposed to work, except it does. It was technically marketed as a novel but exists on the disputed border between connected short story collections and novels. Each section can be read by itself and is a world unto itself. This book is full of moments that express how strange it is to have consciousness, how we are caught, suddenly, in the midst of ourselves, unable to believe we are here.