100 books like The Garden of Evening Mists

This is another history that drew me in with a tightly focused story — an 1879 expedition to reach the North Pole — then overwhelmed me with a slowly dawning realization: The expedition was sheer insanity based on assumptions that are whacky beyond belief but were state-of-the-art thinking less than a century and a half ago. George Washington De Long and his crew aboard the Jeanette left San Francisco expecting to spend a single winter trapped in the polar ice before popping into a temperate Arctic Sea and steaming their way straight to the apex of Planet Earth. Instead, the crew endured more than two years of almost unimaginable hardship. That any of them survived to tell the tale testifies to the indomitability of the human spirit.

Sands traces the life of Baron Otto von Wächter, an Austrian SS official, who created and oversaw the Kraków ghetto and was indicted for the murder of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles.

Accompanying Sands on his interviews and research is Wächter’s son, Horst, who knows his father only through what he has heard from his mother and read in her diaries and letters. Horst is horrified by Nazi atrocities but believes his father was a “good man.”

With the pace of a gripping spy thriller, Sands brings Horst deeper and deeper into the lives of his parents, including Otto’s years on the Ratline—the route through which Nazis, often aided by the Vatican, fled Europe after the end of World War II. 

Since my own novel is set partly in post-war England, I was drawn to Ondaatje’s Warlight, which begins in 1945 London as the city is recovering from brutal bombing. Another hook for me was the youthful characters; my book is also populated with war-confused children. Ondaatje’s narrator, 14-year-old Nathaniel, recalls his youth with the benefit of adult wisdom. He and his sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents to the care of some eccentric and slightly dangerous characters. Their teen years are marked by many mysterious events and experiences, only beginning to clarify in retrospect. Do we ever know what’s really happening?

By its very nature, poetry is about compression. At its best — again, at least to me — a great poem opens up over and over as you read and reread it. It’s a constant journey of discovery. And Northern Ireland’s Philip Larkin, the best English-speaking poet of the 20th century that most Americans have never read, is a master of the compressive arts. I’m recommending his entire Collected Poems here, but if you read only one Larkin poem, make it “Church Going.” In 474 carefully chosen words describing his visit to a mostly abandoned country cathedral, Larkin delivers the equivalent of a 10,000-word treatise on the state of religion in the Western World today.

I was previously unfamiliar with Elizabeth Hand but this novella had me hooked.

The story concerns a folk-rock band who, decades earlier, stayed at the historic Wylding Hall to write and record an album. But Wylding Hall is full of secrets and mystery, and things happened there that affected them for the rest of their lives.

One of their numbers disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. The house itself behaves in ways that…let's say houses shouldn't behave. All these years later, each of the surviving band members tells their side of the story – their own recollections of what happened during that fateful time and this is the really clever part of the story.

Full of spooky atmosphere and an eclectic cast of characters, I loved this story.

Set in Japan in the period just before World War II, this is the story of Sachiko and her three sisters.

Yukiko is in need of a husband, but she is stiff in her old-fashioned habits. Taeko, by contrast, is a rebel who sleeps with men and becomes pregnant. Sachiko, modeled by Tanizaki on his pretty and spirited wife, loves all of her sisters and feels responsible for them.

I found the picture of the sisters’ daily life, which was by turns cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern, fascinating in its detail. One thing follows another, open-ended, surprising, and completely authentic in feel. I cannot recommend this book enough!

A memoir in letters about a solitary writer in mid-century New York corresponding with the proprietor and staff of a used book shop in London, from whom she orders inexpensive but attractive copies of mostly classics over a period of decades. Even more, it’s a memoir of relationships that develop as a consequence (all through letters; the principals never meet in person). There are so many reasons I love it. For one thing, Helene Hanff collects, rather than accrues. She’s not in it for the First Editions (which doesn’t mean she can’t appreciate decent paper or proper weight or used book smell); she’s in love with the words, and the way they seem to make her feel more like a fellow human being than her interactions with actual people do. There is the natural infusion, over a period of years, of not just incidental details of lives being lived but… show more.

Emma, the bored and restless translator into English of the works of a reclusive, once-celebrated Brazilian author, learns that the author has disappeared. On impulse, and uninvited, Emma ducks out of her Pittsburgh life and a relationship she has tired of, jets off to Brazil, and insinuates herself into the ongoing investigation into what has happened. Less a detective story than a constantly unfolding act of decoding—like Helene Hanff, Emma seems to have an easier time coaxing layered meaning out of words than interpreting gestures or interactions with actual people—Ways to Disappear is packed with doubts about humanity but soul-deep love of books, Brazil, and the process of translation. (Novey herself has translated the brilliant and enigmatic Clarice Lispector.) This being 21st Century American lit, the relationships that form feel less stable, healthy, and sustainable. And yet, in indulging her fascination with the mysteries of other places… show more.

Really, almost anything in the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin series would fit here. A lazy, blustering, brilliant recluse, Nero Wolfe is perpetually badgered, kicking and grumbling, back toward humanity either by his passions—American cuisine, beer, books, orchids—or by Archie, his leg-man/lacky/surrogate son. I picked this specific novel because it involves a murder amid a gathering of world-class chefs; the cooking banter alone is worth the price of admission (which will be cheap; how and why have these books somehow fallen off our collective cultural radar??). None of Nero’s adventures among his fellow human beings make him want to venture out of the fortress he has made for himself inside his Manhattan brownstone. But they’ll make you want to hole up in his company. The man himself thinks he just wants to be left alone with his interests and comforts. But what he creates and relies on to sustain him feels pretty… show more.

Perhaps it's because I’ve lived in Fukui and have been to Echizen where the famous bamboo dolls are made that I found this novel so compelling. The novel’s uniqueness comes partly from its focus on a character who makes traditional bamboo dolls produced close to where I now live in Kanazawa, an hour north of Echizen, and part from the style of storytelling, which might be described as sparse but richly imagistic, and evocative of an all-but-lost past. The novel can easily be viewed as a modern folk tale, and moments unfold in the rural setting of 1920s Fukui that border on the mysterious-if-not-quite-supernatural. The relationship between the doll-maker and his wife is indeed strange, yet much can be extrapolated beyond that strangeness through all that’s left unsaid and un-acted on.