Here are 100 books that The Instructions fans have personally recommended if you like
The Instructions.
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I have been fascinated with mental health since long before I was officially diagnosed with Bipolar I. Even as an elementary schooler, I recognized that I was different from my peers: I thought more deeply and often more darkly, I experienced higher highs and lower lows, often beyond my control, and I very rarely discussed my home life. Writing became a logical and perhaps life-saving outlet as soon as I learned to put words into letters (mostly the wrong letters, but thank God for spell-check).
This coming-of-age novel has everything: love, grunge music, angst, and a slow revelation of past trauma. I don't think I speak for everyone with mental health issues, but I know that having a traumatic childhood is a common, shared factor amongst people with serious diagnoses. I read this one before I understood why I identified so strongly with it.
Charlie lives on the fringes, barely dipping a toe into the social melee that is high school life, yet, with courage and determination, he carves out a place for himself. While his new friendships allow him to find himself, they also allow him the safety to confront the wounds of his past, wounds too large for even his teenage self to come to grips with.
Even though my last manic episode was over sixteen years ago, I am only recently doing the real work of processing and understanding the traumatic experiences…
A modern cult classic, a major motion picture and a timeless bestseller, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a deeply affecting coming-of-age story.
Charlie is not the biggest geek in high school, but he's by no means popular.
Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie is attempting to navigate through the uncharted territory of high school. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and music - when all one requires to feel infinite is that…
I have always been a lover of love stories, yet it can be difficult to find “love stories” that aren’t put into other boxes or aren’t genre romances. My debut is also a family drama that spans sixty years of the twentieth century, but it’s a love story at its core. It’s sometimes classified as a romance because it’s a love story set on a beach. Still, it doesn’t quite fit into typical romance frameworks, which have characters meet and pulled apart before finally ending up back together. My book, instead, explores the reality of loving someone over decades and building a life together.
I read the book originally in college as part of a Jewish Literature course, and I was struck by the love story inside. The title drew me in immediately, and it was one of those beautifully heartbreaking stories with lines that will stick with you for a lifetime.
“Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” I will never be over this one.
Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But it wasn't always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book...Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).
I fell in love with magical realism and stories that have a sense of whimsy after hearing my grandparents tell stories of their lives. They always embellished a bit, making a simple detail of a bread line or a penny found on the ground feel massive. Then I read Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. I didn’t understand at the time that the light touches of magic or moments that felt magical, even if not truly enchantment, were uplifting in stories both light and dark. I quickly fell under the spell and have placed elements of magic or whimsy in my own writing ever since.
On the surface, this book is about a person haunted by a single incident from their past but beneath the surface, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is a gorgeous meditation on the moments in life that affect us, big and small.
The novel has a heavy subject but the stunning turns-of-phrase and imaginative world our narrator shares can make even the mundane and lived-in reality feel like the fantastical summed up in my favorite line, "Missing someone, they say, is self-centered. I self-center you more than ever."
Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina. When his grandfather, a master storyteller, dies of the fastest heart attack in the world while watching Carl Lewis's record, Aleksandar promises to carry on the tradition. However when the shadow of war spreads to Visegrad, the world as he knows it stops. Suddenly it is not important how heavy a…
I fell in love with magical realism and stories that have a sense of whimsy after hearing my grandparents tell stories of their lives. They always embellished a bit, making a simple detail of a bread line or a penny found on the ground feel massive. Then I read Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. I didn’t understand at the time that the light touches of magic or moments that felt magical, even if not truly enchantment, were uplifting in stories both light and dark. I quickly fell under the spell and have placed elements of magic or whimsy in my own writing ever since.
Three Assassins almost feels like the movie Bullet Train with Brad Pitt.
It’s a series of seemingly unrelated events that connect a network of assassins together and pit them against one another, knowingly or unknowingly. The novel itself is less about the action and pace and unfurls like a twisted puzzle, making every piece lean into a seemingly surreal universe.
We see all the characters, good and bad, their flaws, good and bad, and the ones we can stand up for, good and bad. “All the knowledge and science that human beings have, it only helps humans.” But even when we’re cheering, I didn’t necessarily know what to believe until I reached the end. Even then, I walked away holding doubts and a smile.
SUZUKI IS JUST AN ORDINARY MATHS TEACHER...UNTIL HIS WIFE IS MURDERED.
Seeking justice, he leaves his old life behind to infiltrate the criminal gang responsible. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of the most unusual professional assassins, each with their own agenda:
THE WHALE convinces his victims to take their own lives using just his words.
THE CICADA is a talkative and deadly knife expert.
THE PUSHER dispatches his targets in deadly traffic 'accidents'.
Suzuki must take on the three assassins to avenge his wife - but can he keep his innocence…
As a biology professor, I communicate frankly with adults about climate change, trusting them to comprehend the accelerating crisis. As a mom of Millennials, I channeled worries about their coping with wildfires, droughts, and extinctions into editing an anthology of young adults’ climate essays. Grandchildren posed a new worry: how should climate realities be introduced to the newest generation? My attempt at that task is a biography of Thoreau, focusing on his 1850s nature observations that ecologists now use to assess 21st-century climate shifts. Luckily, other children’s book writers also offer stories, memoirs, and other approaches to inform without alarming young readers; the best inspire determination to craft a better future.
This is the kind of book that changes lives! The spare text and black-and-white sketches convey an inescapable message about climate action: the hope we need comes from us.
As personified by another young heroine, effective action will take resolve (“Rise up!”), imagination ("Think up”), sleepless nights (“Rest up”), and support when we can find it (“Meet up.”) Some solutions may be unexpected, like seed swaps and Little Free Libraries, but they’re not impossible. Plenty of them look like fun.
I don’t know another book that depicts more succinctly how to build the future we want and children deserve: “Show up!”
Awarded as a 2021 Malka Penn Award Honor Book, here is a timely picture book about a young girl's mission to inspire others to help the planet. The meaningful message of climate change activism is perfect for Earth Day and every day!
Celebrate young climate change activists in this charming story about an empowered girl who shows up, listens up, and ultimately, speaks up to inspire her community to take action against climate change. After attending a climate march, a young activist is motivated to make an effort and do her part to help the planet... by organizing volunteers to…
I’ve always been interested in creators who convey intensely personal stories through dynamic visuals, whether it be animation, illustrations, or comics. And even better: tales of people who lived in the past! Although trained in screenwriting and creative writing, I started making art twenty years ago–and that gave me a newfound respect for those folks who combine great stories and memorable drawings. Nowadays, I can’t read enough graphic novels!
This is easily one of the most shocking and upsetting books I've read in a long time, considering I knew next to nothing about this massacre. I grew up in Columbus (a bit south of Kent, OH) and was born a year after these events, but now I'm informed, angry, and grateful–thanks to Mr. Backderf. The book is exhaustively researched, well-constructed, and beautifully drawn.
From bestselling author Derf Backderf comes the untold story of the Kent State shootings-timed for the 50th anniversary
On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, 4 students were killed and 9 shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children-a shocking event burned into our national memory. A few days prior, 10-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same Guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike. Using the…
I grew up in China during the years of the one-child policy. In 1989 I joined millions of people in the pro-democracy protests. Our hope and joy were crushed by the Tiananmen Square Massacre. A year later, I left China and came to the States. I wanted to write a story about the students’ fight but create a more meaningful arc. It took me twenty years of soul searching to find my story. At the heart of my novel Living Treasures is a metaphor for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. My heroine continues the fight by doing grassroots work and helping rural women, who are victimized by the one-child policy.
Philip J. Cunningham joined his Chinese friends from May 3 to June 4 in 1989, as a supporter, journalist, and witness in the Tiananmen Square protests. Tiananmen Moon chronicles the protests, hunger strike, students’ leadership, their internal friction, and Cunningham’s meeting with Chai Ling before the massacre. From an American bystander’s perspective, Cunningham voices his concerns about the peer pressure among students, and a few self-claimed radical leaders using the same rhetoric and tactic as the regime to seize power and escalate conflicts. To this day, the Tiananmen Square protests are obliterated by the propaganda machine in mainland China. Tiananmen Moon is a remarkable testament capturing the plaintive and lyrical beauty of a dream that continues to haunt China today.
The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this book is now available.
This compelling book provides a vivid firsthand account of the student demonstrations and massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Uniquely placed as a Western observer drawn into active participation through Chinese friends in the uprising, Philip J Cunningham offers a remarkable day-by-day account of Beijing students desperately trying to secure the most coveted political real estate in China in the face of ever more daunting government countermoves. Tiananmen Moon takes the reader into the thick of the 1989 protests while also following the parallel response of an unprepared but resourceful…
I’m a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an op-ed writer for numerous publications. I’m also a former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. I’ve spent my adult life studying the ways that human beings imagine education, across space and time. Schools make citizens, but citizens also make schools. And we’re all different, so we disagree—inevitably and often profoundly—about the meaning and purpose of “school” itself. In a diverse nation, what should kids learn? And who should decide that? There are no single “right” answers, of course. I’m eager to hear yours.
Here’s the only full-scale biography of the most important student activist in American history. Mario Savio registered Black voters during the Freedom Rides in Mississippi and then led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, when the university tried to prevent civil-rights demonstrators from protesting on campus. Savio’s story is yet another reminder about the radical roots of free speech, which is too often dismissed at contemporary universities as a conservative or even reactionary impulse. It wasn’t, and it isn’t.
Here is the first biography of Mario Savio, the brilliant leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, the largest and most disruptive student rebellion in American history. Savio risked his life to register black voters in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964 and did more than anyone to bring daring forms of non-violent protest from the civil rights movement to the struggle for free speech and academic freedom on American campuses. Drawing upon previously unavailable Savio papers, as well as oral histories from friends and fellow movement leaders, Freedom's Orator illuminates Mario's egalitarian leadership style, his remarkable eloquence, and the…
I’m a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an op-ed writer for numerous publications. I’m also a former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. I’ve spent my adult life studying the ways that human beings imagine education, across space and time. Schools make citizens, but citizens also make schools. And we’re all different, so we disagree—inevitably and often profoundly—about the meaning and purpose of “school” itself. In a diverse nation, what should kids learn? And who should decide that? There are no single “right” answers, of course. I’m eager to hear yours.
We’re also indebted to young minority students for pioneering free-speech rights in our schools. Most of us still associate the struggle for student rights with antiwar activists like Mary Beth Tinker, whose armband protest against the Vietnam War led to the epochal Tinker v. Des MoinesSupreme Court decision declaring that teachers and students don’t shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate. But before and after Tinker, Black and Chicano students challenged racist curricula, disciplinary policies, and more. Student rights arecivil rights, and vice versa. We can’t—and shouldn’t—separate them.
A powerful history of student protests and student rights during the desegregation era
In the late 1960s, protests led by students roiled high schools across the country. As school desegregation finally took place on a wide scale, students of color were particularly vocal in contesting the racial discrimination they saw in school policies and practices. And yet, these young people had no legal right to express dissent at school. It was not until 1969 that the Supreme Court would recognize the First Amendment rights of students in the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines case.
A series of students' rights lawsuits…
I lived and worked in South Korea for four years, where I first became fascinated with the country’s history, from shamans on Jeju island to the twentieth-century politics of Seoul. I’m the author of two novels and dozens of short stories and essays published in venues around the world, many of which feature some element of Korean history. I’m originally from Canada and now teach creative writing at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Kang’s sentences are short and tidy and clearly well-translated into English from Korean, and I was immediately drawn into the novel through the almost staccato rhythms of the prose. A small warning: this story comes with ghosts.
The plot is a fictionalization of a horrific event in Korean history in which soldiers opened fire on thousands of students protesting the 1980 military coup, killing somewhere between 600 and 2,300 civilians. The story was actively suppressed by the Korean government—hence the uncertainty over numbers.
Using this as a backdrop, Kang personalizes the violence and political upheaval of Korea in the 1980s, giving us memorable characters and the anguished and marginalized voices of the dead. It’s a novel I can’t quite shake, even years after first reading it.
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma.
Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.
