Books like The Glass Room: 100 fan favorites

No work of fiction has had such a profound effect on historians of Occupied France as this staggeringly beautiful book. I had never read fiction like this before, a novel written contemporaneously yet showing such a depth of knowledge of the world around by a novelist who saw beauty beyond the chaos that had engulfed her world.

The young French novelist of Ukrainian-Jewish origin had planned five books yet only completed two before being killed in Auschwitz in 1942. This book contains the first two complete novels which are very different stories, but equally dramatic and written in prose that flows poetically. I loved the first novel, about the exodus from Paris in May 1940, just as much as the second, a love story that was used for the film of this heart-wrenching book. 

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre follows the format of a romance novel: a governess falls in love with her employer, they overcome impediments, and they live happily ever after. Add a madwoman in the attic, Thornfield Hall in flames, and Mr. Rochester’s voice calling to Jane across the winds, and you have an unforgettable romance novel.

I admire Jane immensely. Her journey from being a suffering student at Lowood School to an independent woman is as relevant as ever. Through every experience, she asserts her autonomy but never wavers in her moral compass.

In Brontë’s world, love involves every fiber of one’s being, not just emotions or desire. Mr. Rochester is a complex, conflicted man who proves himself worthy of Jane’s love. For me, they have set the standard of the romantic heroine and hero. 

This novel took my breath away. The power of this novel is in the descriptive details and the fresh perspective on WWII. I adore a book that brings a global story down to the intricate details of the humans involved, their relationships, and, in particular, how people seemingly on opposite sides of violence are only love-seeking humans when all is said and done. The resilience of the characters, especially the young woman named Marie-Laure, who is blind, is truly inspiring. It's a reminder of the strength we all possess, even in the most challenging circumstances.

As with my other favorite novels, the unlikely protagonist and shero is a young woman named Marie-Laure, who is blind. I was taken by the way this novel explores her ability to navigate her known world and then a world that is devastated physically and emotionally. Marie-Laure, along with all of the characters in this… show more.

What I appreciate about Hunter's novel is that it takes a new approach to the subject of the Holocaust. With the outbreak of WWII, the Kurcs, a Polish-Jewish family, find themselves driven into another diaspora, with their family members cast to the four corners of the globe. Hunter touches on the plight of Poland during the early years of the war when the country was torn asunder by Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east. The plot follows the various family members as they struggle to survive the Holocaust in Poland, in Stalin's Gulag, and as one member tries to flee to South America. A big, sprawling, family epic filled with tragedy and humanity, brutality and heroism.

City of Thieves occupies the top shelf in my library. Why? Is it because now I’m watching the people of Ukraine battle a merciless enemy or because David Benioff has packed a tale that swings between unlikely comrades, a tender courtship, and the Nazis’ siege of Leningrad in WWII? Maybe both answers. But I read this book years ago. The deep humanity of the story is also a thriller that made me laugh and shudder through its short length of 258 pages. It doesn’t hurt that Benioff is a gifted screenwriter, too.

After I visited Sicily at 22 (the same age as Mariella in the book) and stayed with relatives in Siracusa, I fell in love with Sicily (and all of Italy) and wanted to know everything I could about it, its history, its customs, architecture, food, and especially to understand the collective psyche of its people. 

My grandmother was born in Sicily and never spoke English even after moving to the United States, and my uncles and father spent a good part of their childhoods in Catania, where the Sicily part of Becoming Mariella takes place. I had never before felt the deep longing of a cultural belonging, and this book, written in 1958, is one of the finest works of twentieth-century fiction (according to Daunt Books), and opened my eyes to the pride and richness of the Sicilian people and its aristocracy, their stubbornness and an understanding of how,… show more.

Clumsy peasant schoolboy, Meaulnes, and his friend – the narrator of this haunting story – get lost, and happen upon a great house, deep in the woods, where a phantasmagorical fancy dress party is underway. Everything at ‘the lost domain’ is topsy-turvy. Children are in charge. The passage of time is suspended. Social inequality has been erased.   The time the boys spend there is dream-like, disconcerting, life-spoiling because nothing can ever be so strange and marvelous again.  

Later, after much searching, Meaulnes make his way back, but the domain is like youth itself. If you return, it will be to find everything drabber than you remembered,  and the people you adored merely human. 

This book is even greater than its reputation.  Generally thought of as one of the last works of romanticism, a celebration of illusion, it is actually clear-eyed, tough-minded, bracingly truthful about the inevitably of disillusion. Alain-Fournier was… show more.

Not just one house, this time, but houses - a whole village in fact.  Adam Thorpe’s dazzlingly inventive novel is the story of a rural community over three and half centuries, narrated by a chorus of different voices.  Human dramas proliferate: love affairs, murders, executions, violent uprisings. But as people come and go, things stay put, outlasting them. An adulterous eighteenth-century lady is confined to her shuttered bed-chamber, forbidden to go down the creaky old stairs. Fifty years later a garrulous carpenter, reminiscing in the pub, describes the cutting of the wooden scroll that finished the banister of the new staircase he and his mates have built in the Hall, once that lady’s home. Two generations later a consumptive young lawyer, taking down the testimony of dozens of Luddite machine-breakers, visits the Hall, notices the stairs, judges them dark and old-fashioned. Time passes again and a 20th-century television cameraman leans… show more.

I first met Peter here in Chapel Hill, and we became fast friends. A Holocaust survivor from Prague, Peter often spoke to my classes about his experiences. What made his talks so powerful was his ability to remember what it was like to be an eight-year-old boy living in a city under Nazi occupation, and to tell a story that is humbling, moving, and real. Never have I seen a speaker connect better with young people. Peter first became inspired to begin telling his story to students and others after confronting a Holocaust denier, and his many presentations laid the foundation for this book. Part history, part memoir, A Boy’s Journey is also a story about family and the need for tolerance and empathy in our world today. 

Alas, now out of print, this book is part biography, part architectural history, and part social history. The mason-architect Robert Smythson comes to life, as do the houses he designed and the eccentric patrons who employed him. The book's (mainly black-and-white) illustrations inevitably look a bit dated now. But the text is, to my mind, hard to beat: utterly engrossing, particularly when dealing with Hardwick Hall, a house Girouard knows intimately, having lived there as a small child. I remember stumbling across this book many years ago, as a student, while looking for something else at the library. I ended up spending the better part of the day reading Robert Smythson from cover to cover: it was a revelation that a work of scholarship could be so beautifully written.