10 books like The House of Mirth

A New York Times bestseller, this incredible true story tells about the top-secret World War II town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the young women brought there unknowingly to help build the atomic bomb. While in college in Eastern Kentucky, I was well-acquainted with a man who had worked at Oak Ridge, so I was especially interested in Kiernan’s story. I became aware of this book while writing my novel.

Chronicling the early days of the Dutch presence in Manhattan, New York, the book is full of rich stories from the earliest days of the colony; encounters with wildlife, Indians, and other Europeans. I have read this book three times, captivated by the multi-ethnic beginnings of New York, a characteristic that defines the city even today. Tidbits like how facets of the Dutch language have been incorporated into English, such as the words “boss,” “cole slaw,” and “cookie.” The orange colour in the New York Mets uniform is an homage to Dutch heritage. What if the Dutch had been able to repel the British invaders? Would we all be speaking Dutch? Don’t wooden shoes cause blisters? But take off those shoes, put your feet up and read, an excellent read.

Toni Morrison’s magnificent Beloved is another novel that is deeper and more interesting each time I read it. It is, I think, a perfect novel, filled with heart and character and emotional truth. No American, certainly, can truly understand our history without reading this story of an escaped slave who murders her own child rather than allow her to be brought back to slavery, and then is haunted by the daughter’s ghost. What a beautiful and redemptive book, perhaps the most important novel written in my lifetime.

McEwan is a modern master, one of the few we have. And like most true masters, he’s often flawed. Not every sentence is perfect, his plots sometimes have potholes, and he’s been accused, at times, of borrowing without attribution. But I’ve been reading him for forty years and I think Atonement has a fair claim to be his masterpiece. The novel takes place in three time periods – 1935, the Second World War, and 1999 – and traces the implications of child’s misapprehension in witnessing a sexual encounter. The novel was published in 2001 and I suspect that some ideologically-minded contemporary readers might protest its inclusion on a best of list. But for those who still have a taste for nuance and ambiguity, It’s a devastating story about families, class, and literature. 

Sometimes improving the world can begin at your own doorstep. This book was written in the 1960s as city planners were razing huge swaths of urban centers and replacing them with banal, alienating towers that mostly destroyed the human scale of the lost neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs, by extensively walking urban neighborhoods, discerned what makes them vibrant. She coined the term “eyes on the street” and emphasized how street life and vibrant mixed uses enlivens a city. She forever changed the field of urban planning even though she had no formal urban planning credentials.

Sinclair’s exposé on the meat packing industry, published in 1905, reads more like a manifesto than a work of fiction, and may have blown the lid off the exploitation of workers in America, giving birth to the trade union movement. In the fictional plant, survival of the fittest applies; you work faster and faster until you drop; then someone replaces you. One understands the fascination with socialism that arose from these conditions, until capitalism returned with a vengeance in the 1980’s, and the financial collapse of 2008 set workers rights back to those years of The Jungle. Humanity moves in 100-year cycles, and this book is essential reading for our time. We hope the pandemic (another repetition from a hundred years ago) will restore some balance to current labor exploitation.

Invisible Man, another Harlem novel, is deeply concerned with comeuppance. The titular character is a bit of a cipher at the beginning of the story, but as he is increasingly railroaded, deceived, and exploited he grows certain that he must shake all the forces bearing down on him. That realization that gaining freedom will piss off his many adversaries, and his struggle to secure his autonomy as the novel comes to a head, always strikes me as vengeful. 

Because even its subtitle is subversive. Written as a valentine to Woolf’s lesbian lover, the book is anything but a biography. It is a gender-bending, time-traveling work of fiction that stretches from Elizabethan England to modern times—with the central character never aging, but changing sex. The book explores the fluidity of gender while poking fun at the pageantry and conventions of aristocratic English life, as well as taking to task the English tradition of male primogeniture. Fans of the book must also watch director Sally Potter’s brilliant film adaptation, Orlando, that stars a young, transcendent Tilda Swinton. 

This was the first chapter book I remember reading when I was a little girl, and I still love the story. Set during the early 20th century, Francie, her younger brother, and their mom struggle to survive. The children hoard trash to sell to the junk man for the pennies he pays them on Saturday. Their mother works as a janitress in exchange for rent and a few dollars. Their father works as a singing waiter, but drinks away his earnings. 

I followed Francie from age eleven to age seventeen. I felt like I knew her and was cheering for her to find a better place in her world. This novel highlighted what it was like to grow up impoverished in a city where everyone seems to notice and judge. 

We love this book for its breadth and its moral and environmental urgency. Muir writes eloquently [in an admittedly heightened and romantic prose] about the beauties of Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Sequoia National Parks, the only ones in existence at the time. Muir is of interest to Roosevelt because of his understanding of how important it is for wilderness to be preserved for all time not by state governments—as was the case in his time—but by the federal government. This of course was one of TR’s central personal beliefs and was to be, especially after his two-night camping trip in Yosemite with Muir in 1903, a central and guiding policy of his Presidency. For an elegant essay, readers might want to spend time with Muir’s chapter, “The Wild Gardens of Yosemite Park.”