100 books like The Mill on the Floss

This book scared the hell out of me when I was a teenager because its vivid descriptions stayed in my dreams yet it never stopped me from reading and loving the entire book.

It taught me a lot about following your intuition and/or gut feelings. Although it has been a long time since I read it, the main thing I remember is that your intuition is your protector, and listening to that inner voice helps a lot along the way.

Salvage the Bones was the first Jesmyn Ward book I read, and I fell for 14-year-old Esch, who loves Greek myths and a boy named Manny. Set in the days before Hurricane Katrina, Esch and her beloved brothers live young lives full of – well, full lives, that’s the point. 

Ward told the Paris Review about living through Hurricane Katrina, “I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive. I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.”

Ward is an electrifying writer, and Salvage the Bones is an American classic. 

In this book, George Eliot’s novel of provincial life in 1830s England, nearly everyone marries the wrong person. Even the future happiness of its heroine, Dorothea, when she finally unites with her true love, Will, is questionable. And yet it stands for me, not only as one of the finest novels ever written but one of literature’s greatest romances.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that it is a novel “for grown-up people.” I believe it is essential reading because it reflects real life where couples are mismatched, love goes unrequited, and ambitions are thwarted. It illuminates the small ways our better selves become compromised—and the larger gestures by which we are redeemed. As Eliot’s characters zigzag their way to each other, it is love that brings this redemption. How very romantic!

This is Eliot’s last novel about an ostensible British aristocrat’s journey to uncovering his real identity. Often referred to as Eliot’s “Jewish novel,” it reflects her unerring ability to empathize with the Other. It is very long but also un-put-downable, with two interwoven plots that complement each other masterfully. It’s at once a conventional 19th-century novel and an entirely original and surprising take on the genre. As a Jew with a love of nineteenth-century British novels, this one spoke to me most powerfully.

For a long time, I assumed that I would find these three novellas about churchmen and parishioners in the English countryside of the late 18th and early 19th centuries sleepy and dull. They’re anything but. Eliot depicts the presence of alcoholism, spousal abuse, loneliness, and life-damaging gossip in her fictional communities. But her signature empathy and wit, already on display in this early work, make it invigorating, not a downer.

Felix Holt is fascinating to read right now, when our electoral system seems to be blowing up in our faces. It takes place at the time of the Reform Bill of 1832, which increased the number of men (not women, of course) eligible to vote by fifty percent. The result: pandering to the masses—shallow sloganeering, hypocrisy, bribery and other misuses of funds, political sins that still feel all too familiar. There’s even a terrifying election riot. Since this is a Victorian novel, there are also subplots about thwarted love, hidden paternity, and an inheritance.

Just like life, this supple narrative about a village in Warwickshire, England is full of beauty, gruesomeness, and sudden death. Without manifest plot points as such, the narrative seems to float past the range of eccentric townspeople after a destructive flood and later an epidemic of poisonings. Comically, none of the characters seem to take that death seriously. Comyns’ tender gift for describing humans in intimate communion with nature will make you long for flowers, forests, and abounding nature-amid-towns which we no longer experience in today’s world. This writer is neither optimistic nor pessimistic about humanity--but observationally brilliant. In their wild, hilarious ranges of behaviors, her characters too are lovely specimens living at the marshy banks of an omnipresent river.

This book reminds me of my favorite Georgette Heyer romances in its depiction of the Georgian period. When I read historical fiction of any kind, I want to feel I’m in that time, not reading about modern people in costume.

The story of a blind young woman confined to a country estate because her brother feels she is unable to deal with society was compelling. I liked the characters, and the story carried me along so successfully that I regretted finishing it (after keeping me up after I should have been in bed). 

I’m a critical reader, and I couldn’t find a thing in the book to annoy me.

While the cover only lists John Stuart as the author, he acknowledged in his autobiography that the book was “directly and literally our joint production” with his wife Harriet. And certainly, the book has a different tone than ‘his’ other works; less academic, and more lively. Anyway, what they wanted to show was that the “only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.” This is so relevant today when autocrats from Beijing, through Moscow, to Budapest are muzzling voices with different degrees of severity. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. And the evidence shows that dictators and despots are fallible. Democracy works. Dictatorship does not.… show more.

I became well acquainted with Economics after my undergraduate studies, and found this book to be an excellent resource.

It begins with the ancient Greeks and culminates in the modern era. It elaborates upon crucial issues such as money, markets, prices, and production. What sets it apart from others is its focus on the evolution of economic ideas, rather than the economists themselves.

Backhouse's writing style is clear and accessible, and makes even complex concepts understandable. One thing I appreciate is that Backhouse demonstrates that no economic theory emerges "out of nowhere" as is often implied, rather it builds on its predecessors.

This book offers insights that have stayed with me long after reading, and I still refer to it for its depth of knowledge.