100 books like The Everlasting Story of Nory

I first read this book in the mid-1990s as I was honing my skills as a therapist.

It hit me hard, as if the author, a psychiatrist, had been a fly on the wall of my childhood home. Miller holds no punches about what drives some people to become clinicians.

Part One of her book is titled “The Drama of the Gifted Child and How We Became Psychotherapists.” It helped me get clear about my choice of career. It was painful reading, but critical to my skills as a clinician and my own mental well-being. I’ve never forgotten it.

Whether you are a therapist, thinking about becoming one, or want to read a book that tears the cover off the myths of childhood, this is essential reading. 

If you have read a parenting book or taken a parenting course in the last sixty years, chances are you have been influenced by the wisdom of Haim Ginott, even if you didn’t realize it.

He and his students, including the authors of How to Talk So Children Will Listen, set the groundwork for what is known today as connection parenting, conscious parenting, gentle parenting, playful parenting, and authoritative (but not authoritarian) parenting.

When my mom passed away and I looked through her books, I saw she had a first edition of Between Parent and Child, first published when I was a young boy.

When I read it, I felt a strong flash of recognition about the way she raised me. Ginott gets children, and he gets parents.

Vivian Paley was the only classroom teacher to win a Macarthur “genius” grant.

Her particular genius was deeply understanding the inner life of young children, and creating innovative ways for them to reveal and explore that inner life.

She listened carefully to children, told stories to reach them at the heart, and encouraged them to share their stories and act them out.

It was hard to pick one book by Paley to highlight, since I also loved her respect for children’s dramatic play in Molly is Three and Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays, and I loved her recognition of the depth of children’s empathy in The Kindness of Children.

As an added bonus, Vivian Paley was a classmate at Newcomb College with my mother, and they both went into early childhood education.

Korczak was a pediatrician, an educator, a champion of children’s rights, the director of orphanages, and much more.

He said, “A child has a right to grief, even if it is for the loss of a pebble.” And he knew about grief.

He cared for orphans in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he accompanied the children to a concentration camp, even though he was offered the chance to escape.

He said, “They children will be scared without me there with them.” He marched with them to the train, carrying a green flag, which was the symbol of his beloved character King Matt, a child king who tried to unite all the children of the world in peace.

He did not survive, but we are very lucky to have his writings. He is my biggest hero, and my biggest inspiration.

I wish publishers translated more fantastical fiction from around the world. This collection by Mexican authors offers a buffet of the weird, fabulist, and otherworldly.

The translated prose is masterful. Many stories draw the distant, decaying realm lying between life and death, directly and viscerally, into the homes and lives of the characters.

Anthologies can often suffer from an unevenness between authors, but this collection is consistently surprising and offers something for any reader of fabulist fiction.

Believers in God see him as the creator of man and women in his own image. Firm believers tried throughout history to model themselves as they imagined God. But God, the author says, evolves through his relationship with man, and man becomes rival to God. So believers and non-believers discover that God, the protector of the poor and weak, becomes a warrior who nearly destroys all humans and animals he created by causing the flood. So rational people realize that God is a tribal chief who gets angry, kills, destroys, loves some and forgets many more. This book is a must-read for all believers and non-believers. I found this book unusual in telling amazing stories about God and his actions and reactions. 

This is the ONE book I recommend to younger women who want a mentor’s advice on what’s truly most important in life. The author writes from the perspective of a “seasoned sister” who was often asked to share how she was able to raise a large family, work, run a ministry, and write multiple books while at the same time maintaining a vital spiritual relationship with God. 

Lucinda Secrest McDowell gives practical, accessible advice about love, authenticity, prayer, dealing with suffering, sharing one’s story, and much more. I recommend listening to the audio version read in the author’s own voice. This book also works well for book clubs and Bible study groups. 

I was given this book thirty years ago by an Indian poet, who promised me I would love it. It is a feast of stories, told to the central character Devi throughout her life. Through her grandmother’s ancient stories, she learns about love, beauty, riches, and womanhood. Her father-in-law tells her stories that teach her about life, how to survive her lonely marriage, how to belong. Stories and dreams give her wealth and power, but they evaporate and still she is there, empty, alone, and desperate for the love that the old stories are about. 

Two other women’s stories weave through the narrative. Her mother Seta, and her husband’s old retainer, Mayamma share exotic tales of ancient India, Gods, mysteries, magic, and rituals. 

The Thousand Faces of Night is trancelike and beautiful.

One of my favorite fiction collections, it contains everything from selkies to homework assignments to imagined histories.

I’m drawn to stories that illuminate hidden literature, imagine landscapes, or unearth a secret history. Stories with footnotes, poems, and epistolaries. Tender is all these things, and in the best fabulist tradition, these elements are not the point. They heighten the stakes and experiences.

I love books where the unreal and uncanny don’t distract from reality but create a focus to make a fictional reality more real. In Tender, even stories that appear to be straight science fiction become something bigger and stranger.

Samatar is a masterful stylist, and her prose is outrageously good.

This is a really unique and different meeting book – it basically teaches about how to run meeting effectively by inserting them naturally into a fable. The fable is really quite engaging and something most of us can relate to. The learnings, although not extensive, align quite well with the science. Overall it is a fun and informative book.