100 books like The Me List

By Julee Balko,

Here are 100 books that The Me List fans have personally recommended if you like The Me List. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Hello Beautiful

Jacquline Kang Author Of The Club

From my list on the pleasures and perils of family ties.

Why am I passionate about this?

When my children were 1, 3, and 5, my husband and I adopted two teenage boys. Suddenly, I was a mom to five, trying to keep my head above water. I turned to other women for advice, friendship, and compassion. While bonding over our chaotic lives, I found stories. My friends offered new perspectives on my world. I learned that every woman is living life on her own terms, and no two tales are the same. This is the magic of listening to another woman. I'm passionate about telling these stories so we can all see the world from a unique perspective and look at our situations with new understanding.

Jacquline's book list on the pleasures and perils of family ties

Jacquline Kang Why did Jacquline love this book?

I loved the similarities between this book and the book Little Women. The layers of the relationships between the four sisters attributed to an unexpected family drama. There were times I wanted to crawl inside the pages and give the girls a good “talkin’ to” as some of the choices they made were indeed cringe-worthy.

But this is the mark of a truly talented writer, evoking such emotion in the reader that you think about the book well after finishing the final pages. 

By Ann Napolitano,

Why should I read it?

16 authors picked Hello Beautiful as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Edward comes a poignant and engrossing family story that asks: Can love make a broken person whole?

“Hello Beautiful is exactly that: beautiful, perceptive, wistful. It’s a story of family and friendship, of how the people we are bound to can also set us free. I loved it.”—Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman…


Book cover of City Girl

Jacquline Kang Author Of The Club

From my list on the pleasures and perils of family ties.

Why am I passionate about this?

When my children were 1, 3, and 5, my husband and I adopted two teenage boys. Suddenly, I was a mom to five, trying to keep my head above water. I turned to other women for advice, friendship, and compassion. While bonding over our chaotic lives, I found stories. My friends offered new perspectives on my world. I learned that every woman is living life on her own terms, and no two tales are the same. This is the magic of listening to another woman. I'm passionate about telling these stories so we can all see the world from a unique perspective and look at our situations with new understanding.

Jacquline's book list on the pleasures and perils of family ties

Jacquline Kang Why did Jacquline love this book?

I love this book because it features three vastly different women in three very different family environments. Devin, a soon to be single mom, Caroline, a wife of an abusive husband and Maggie, a wife and mother in a family where she holds no value.

Even though these women and their situations couldn’t be more different, they find solace in one another, proving that sometimes family is what you make. I read this book while in my high school years, and it captured my attention and turned me into a devoted women’s fiction reader. 

By Patricia Scanlan,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked City Girl as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

They're back and stronger than ever! Pre-order CITY GIRLS FOREVER, the new Patricia Scanlan novel, out Spring 2025.

*** THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING AUTHOR ***

Whatever life holds, friends come first...

Devlin: Blonde, beautiful, rich and spoilt. The world is hers for the taking until she encounters the suave, seductive and very married Colin Cantrell-King. A rat, who lies, cheats and uses women until he tires of them. Her life is turned upside down and then the unthinkable happens. Caroline: Fat, frumpy, needy and terminally shy, she's terrified of being left on the shelf. The she meets Richard cold, reserved…


Book cover of Recipe for a Charmed Life

Jacquline Kang Author Of The Club

From my list on the pleasures and perils of family ties.

Why am I passionate about this?

When my children were 1, 3, and 5, my husband and I adopted two teenage boys. Suddenly, I was a mom to five, trying to keep my head above water. I turned to other women for advice, friendship, and compassion. While bonding over our chaotic lives, I found stories. My friends offered new perspectives on my world. I learned that every woman is living life on her own terms, and no two tales are the same. This is the magic of listening to another woman. I'm passionate about telling these stories so we can all see the world from a unique perspective and look at our situations with new understanding.

Jacquline's book list on the pleasures and perils of family ties

Jacquline Kang Why did Jacquline love this book?

I love this book for a few reasons. 1.) I love a book where the location becomes a character in and of itself. This book takes place in the San Yuan Islands of Washington State, a location that is near and dear to my heart as I grew up in the area. I spent most of my childhood roaming the shores and popping into the little boutique shops dotting the islands.

The vivid descriptions of the landscape brought me back to those days. 2.) I loved the way this story focuses on a mother/daughter relationship that isn’t the typical “happy family” dynamic. A sprinkle of romance and a touch of culinary had me turning the pages until the very end. 

By Rachel Linden,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Recipe for a Charmed Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“Heartfelt, heartwarming, joyful, and uplifting. You can't go wrong with a Rachel Linden book.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

After a day of unrivaled disappointments, a promising young chef finds every bite of food suddenly tastes bitter. To save her career, she travels to the Pacific Northwest to reconnect with her estranged mom, and discovers a family legacy she never suspected in this delicious novel from the bestselling author of The Magic of Lemon Drop Pie.

American chef Georgia May Jackson has one goal—to run her own restaurant in Paris. After a grueling decade working in Parisian kitchens,…


Book cover of Blush

Jacquline Kang Author Of The Club

From my list on the pleasures and perils of family ties.

Why am I passionate about this?

When my children were 1, 3, and 5, my husband and I adopted two teenage boys. Suddenly, I was a mom to five, trying to keep my head above water. I turned to other women for advice, friendship, and compassion. While bonding over our chaotic lives, I found stories. My friends offered new perspectives on my world. I learned that every woman is living life on her own terms, and no two tales are the same. This is the magic of listening to another woman. I'm passionate about telling these stories so we can all see the world from a unique perspective and look at our situations with new understanding.

Jacquline's book list on the pleasures and perils of family ties

Jacquline Kang Why did Jacquline love this book?

Here is another book where the setting acts as a main character in the novel. I gobbled up the references to wine, cheese, and the Napa Valley as though I was sitting on the sun-soaked porch with the characters. But the backdrop of the Napa Valley, as stunning as it is, pales in comparison to the lessons three generations of women learn from each other as the story unfolds.

This story made me want to understand women's roles as heads of families and how those roles are changing from generation to generation.

By Jamie Brenner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Blush as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From acclaimed author Jamie Brenner comes a stunning new novel about three generations of women who discover that the scandalous books of their past may just be the key to saving their family's future.

For decades, the Hollander Estates winery has been the premier destination for lavish parties and romantic day trips on the North Fork of Long Island. But behind the lush vineyards and majestic estate house, the Hollander family fortunes have suffered and the threat of a sale brings old wounds to the surface. For matriarch Vivian, she fears that this summer season could be their last—and that…


Book cover of The Quick and the Dead

Emma Smith-Stevens Author Of The Australian

From my list on “funny-sad” contemporary novels.

Why am I passionate about this?

Much laughter is born out of sadness. Humor can be a way to cope or even reinvent our realities in ways that bring relief—and release. There's a misconception that “serious literature” should be humorless; crack a smile and you’re a fraud. However, the worlds and characters that emerge from this way of thinking do not ring true to me. Who among us hasn’t joked to help deal with sorrow? Or to satirize the outrageous? Or simply because life--however brutal—is also sometimes funny? The more a writer allows laughter to intermingle with tears, the more I believe in the story, and the more I enjoy it. That is why I wrote a “funny-sad” novel, The Australian.

Emma's book list on “funny-sad” contemporary novels

Emma Smith-Stevens Why did Emma love this book?

Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, children without mothers, traverse air-conditioned buildings and desert landscapes, strewn with symbols and signs of mortality—from the preservation of those teetering on the brink of death at a nursing home to a wildlife museum full of taxidermies; and these teenagers are orbited by agitated, confused adults who seem wholly unaware of the strangeness—and messages—defining their lives. Joy Williams is a master at dark humor in literary fiction, and The Quick and the Dead is one of her finest achievements.

By Joy Williams,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Quick and the Dead as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert.

Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults.

A father lusts after…


Book cover of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South

Timothy N. Thurber Author Of Republicans and Race: The GOP's Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 1945-1974

From my list on Republicans and Democrats in the 1960s.

Why am I passionate about this?

I developed a strong interest in current events, especially politics, in high school. What the government does, or does not do, struck me as a vital piece of the puzzle in trying to explain why things are the way they are. That soon led, however, to seeing how the past continues to influence the present. No decade is more important than the 1960s for understanding our current political climate.

Timothy's book list on Republicans and Democrats in the 1960s

Timothy N. Thurber Why did Timothy love this book?

Lassiter presents a nuanced examination of how social and political conflicts in Richmond, Atlanta, and Charlotte during enabled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to resurrect the GOP from its 1964 electoral disaster through reliance, not on a “southern strategy,” as many pundits have long claimed, but rather on a suburban strategy that involved the complex interplay of race, class, and other factors. 

The messages that enabled the GOP to gain traction in the suburban South, Lassiter emphasizes, worked across the nation. The South was not as different as many observers have long claimed. Lassiter also chronicles how these conflicts reshaped the Democratic Party in the South, as by the early 1970s more moderate figures such Jimmy Carter had supplanted the staunch segregationists of decades past.

By Matthew D. Lassiter,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Silent Majority as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Suburban sprawl transformed the political culture of the American South as much as the civil rights movement did during the second half of the twentieth century. The Silent Majority provides the first regionwide account of the suburbanization of the South from the perspective of corporate leaders, political activists, and especially of the ordinary families who lived in booming Sunbelt metropolises such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and Richmond. Matthew Lassiter examines crucial battles over racial integration, court-ordered busing, and housing segregation to explain how the South moved from the era of Jim Crow fully into the mainstream of national currents. During the…


Book cover of Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States

Howard Yaruss Author Of Understandable Economics: Because Understanding Our Economy Is Easier Than You Think and More Important Than You Know

From my list on inspiring people to improve the world.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in Brooklyn in a family that often faced financial difficulties and started working in my early teens in my father’s grocery store. These experiences made me painfully aware of the great disparities in education, security, material well-being, and opportunity in our society.  I saw how these inequalities caused some people to become cynical, resigned, or indifferent—while others became determined to overcome them. I became fascinated by them.  I felt that if I wanted to live in a more just and productive society, I first had to understand how it worked. My recommended books inspired me further and helped me to gain that understanding.

Howard's book list on inspiring people to improve the world

Howard Yaruss Why did Howard love this book?

This book brings together economics, education, and urban development by showing how our public policies advantaged wealthy suburbanites over less wealthy urban dwellers after World War II. Many people think there is a natural migration to the suburbs after couples have children. Jackson does a masterful job of showing why that is not the natural order of things. It is the result of specific policy choices such as how we fund infrastructure, what tax incentives we provide, who has access to credit, and how we draw political boundaries. His insights offer a blueprint for a more equitable society.

By Kenneth T. Jackson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Crabgrass Frontier as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize, this book is the first detailed history of suburban life in America from its origin to the drive-in culture of today.


Book cover of Living on Hope Street

Amra Pajalić Author Of Sabiha's Dilemma

From my list on YA fiction that represent marginalised communities.

Why am I passionate about this?

I spent my adolescence reading young adult novels that featured characters who were nothing like me, and yearned to read about characters who shared my struggle in mediating my community’s cultural expectations as a first-generation Australia. This is the inspiration for writing own voices stories as these are the books I wished I’d been able to read. I draw on my Bosnian-Muslim cultural heritage to write own voices stories for young people, who like me, are searching to mediate their identity and take pride in their diverse culture. Own voices books are an opportunity to learn and celebrate culture and diversity, and to show young people that they are not alone in the world.

Amra's book list on YA fiction that represent marginalised communities

Amra Pajalić Why did Amra love this book?

A stunning novel that represents the true beating heart of Australia I grew up with cultures that represent all the different waves of migration in Australia.

Divaroren has created such distinct voices for each of her characters which is a feat as each perspective is written in first person, from seven-year-old Sam who is terrorised by his father, to 70-year-old Mr. Bailey who is a Vietnam vet and struggling with the changing face of Australia.

I fell in love with the characters and loved that there was so much reality and heart, but most importantly hope in this beautiful novel that celebrates multiculturalism and belonging. 

By Demet Divaroren,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Living on Hope Street as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 14, 15, 16, and 17.

What is this book about?

'Living on Hope Street is a big-hearted, compassionate work. Divaroren is a ferociously good storyteller and every character breathes life, every character convinces. This book is an absolute joy to read.' CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS" We all love someone. We all fear something. Sometimes they live right next door - or even closer. Kane will do everything he can to save his mother and his little brother Sam from the violence of his father, even if it means becoming a monster himself. Mrs Aslan will protect the boys no matter what - even though her own family is in pieces. Ada wants…


Book cover of The Practice of Deceit

Stephanie Kepke Author Of Feel No Evil

From my list on flawed, yet sympathetic characters.

Why am I passionate about this?

In second grade my teacher told me I should be a writer—I haven’t wavered in my path since. I was a voracious reader as a child and regularly snatched books off my mom’s night table. My love for flawed characters grew with each book I devoured. I felt a connection with these characters, which fueled my dream to become a writer. When I was twenty-one years old and studying writing, I wrote in my journal, “I want to write books that make people cry.” I love to explore the gray areas in life, and I’m honored that readers have told me my books do make them cry (and laugh). 

Stephanie's book list on flawed, yet sympathetic characters

Stephanie Kepke Why did Stephanie love this book?

I love smart thrillers like The Practice of Deceit—thrillers that keep me turning the pages even if my alarm is going off early the next morning; thrillers that don’t rely on violence to propel the story forward but rather on interesting, richly drawn, complex characters who are not portrayed in black and white.

Charming bachelor Eric Lavender, a psychotherapist, falls for Colleen O’Brien Golden, a lawyer, but when a conflict of interest with Colleen’s client implodes Eric’s idyllic suburban life as a husband and father to an adorable stepdaughter and a newborn, he learns the dark truth about Colleen’s past. Eric’s flaw is, to me, the one that makes a character most sympathetic—being blinded by love and desire. I love that this book is in the male point of view, and it’s done so well that when Colleen tries to destroy Eric, it is a gut punch.

By Elizabeth Benedict,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Practice of Deceit as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This smart psychological thriller about a therapist who marries the wrong woman is “a lot of wicked fun” (Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered).
 
When Eric Lavender meets the attorney Colleen O’Brien Golden, his position as one of Manhattan’s chic psychotherapists and most eligible bachelors suddenly loses its appeal. The sexy, stylish Colleen lures him to live with her and her young daughter in the exclusive suburb of Scarsdale. To his amazement, Eric is besotted and soon settles into the unexpected bliss of marriage and domesticity with their new baby and his loving stepdaughter. He even becomes a local hero…


Book cover of Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise And Fall Of Suburbia

Alex Marshall Author Of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken

From my list on why cities and suburbs function the way they do.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been drawn to community, meaning how people get together, live, love, and support each other. That love drew me into caring about cities, in all their various forms, because cities are places for people to gather and build lives together. This can be in an Italian hilltown from the 1000 AD, a 15th-century neighborhood in Barcelona, an elegant street on the Upper East Side of New York City, or a subdivision near a highway interchange in Phoenix. Once I started caring about cities, I started asking why these places are the way they are, and this produced my book.

Alex's book list on why cities and suburbs function the way they do

Alex Marshall Why did Alex love this book?

New sections of cities, new neighborhoods, and big infrastructure projects are aspirational for societies. They aren’t just about problem-solving. In this great book, historian Robert Fishman shows how London and Paris developed differently because they had different ideals and different aspirations.

As it began to grow due to industrialization in the late 18th century, London prioritized the development of townhouses, its urban ideal. This caused it to become a sprawling, low-rise city. Paris developed in the mid-19th century as a city of glamorous, stylish apartment buildings because this was Paris’s ideal.

Parisians valued the street and cultural life that apartment life generated. The title of this book is off-putting for me because it sounds so academic. But Fishman, a trained historian, writes well and gives you big ideas and details in a readable package. 

By Robert Fishman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Bourgeois Utopias as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A noted urban historian traces the story of the suburb from its origins in nineteenth-century London to its twentieth-century demise in decentralized cities like Los Angeles.


Book cover of Hello Beautiful
Book cover of City Girl
Book cover of Recipe for a Charmed Life

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