100 books like The Reincarnation of Peter Proud

This book was perhaps the strangest book I have ever read. It’s long and beautifully written with descriptive scenes that turn the cinema of the mind on full blast in sound and color, sometimes even evoking touch and smell. It’s bizarre and, honestly, made no sense to me at times with its churning of characters and unfathomable plot jumps, but it taught me that fiction doesn’t always have to make sense to make a lasting impact. Sometimes, it’s about how it feels, not how it reads.

This book is a fast read, but to tell the truth, I’ve never read it once without rereading it at least three times back to back. It’s moody and rhythmic, eerie enough to make the hairs on my neck stand up, and it rings of a desperate hope I know to be doomed.

Yet, it’s so beautiful and atmospheric that I want to be in the grand house anyway, with all the charming but creepy characters stitching away so the story can go on forever.

This is another favorite short read I’ve read at least a hundred times. If Hughes had made The Deadfall any longer, it would have spoiled the vivid, hypnotic, poetic way he sucks me into the life of a boy camping with his brother.

He has me feeling the warmth of the fire on my face before casting me into the dreary countryside where my feet are cold and the wind nips my nose. The intense atmosphere of nature keeps me going back to this one. The absolute beauty of what happens when the ghost of a fox calls out to a sleeping boy suspends me in disbelief. I never want to let go. 

This book is nonfiction. At times, it took me so far out of my comfort zone that I had to put it down.

But when I set aside my own belief system and read the interviews with the mindset of believing what the people were saying, a pattern emerged that made me question everything I thought to be true… in a good way. 

In the nineteenth century, no class culture was more prominent than the one by German Social Democracy. The German Social Democratic Party topped one million individual members before the outbreak of the First World War and about one-third of the electorate in Imperial Germany vote for its programme of revolution and democratization. This book is about the mental world of the party’s rank and file, their fears, wishes and desires, their dreams, and their beliefs. It talks powerfully about leadership cults, the tensions between nationalism and internationalism, working-class reading habits, and the ideals of republicanism. It is a powerful recreation of a constructed class identity with huge repercussions on politics in Germany.

Like Sassoon, Owen entered the war as a “dreamy” youth interested in literature and art. Unlike Sassoon, though — whom Owen idolized — Owen did not survive the war. He was killed in action on November 4, 1918, a week before the war ended.

Owen wrote all of the poems for which he is remembered between August 1917 and September 1918. His experience of the war turned him from “ a very minor poet to something altogether larger,” writes C. Day Lewis. “…It was a forced growth, a revolution in his mind which, blasting its way through all the poetic bric-a-brac, enabled him to see his subject clear — ‘War, and the pity of War.’ The subject made the poet: The poet made the poems, which radically changed our attitude toward war.”

The hallmarks of Owen’s poetry are his compassion for the frontline soldier and the precision and clarity with… show more.

Immediately after the war, a bereaved woman returns alone to her family’s summer home in the Swiss Alps. It is a beautiful place, but she’s terrified of the memories it stirs, and haunted by the ghosts of those she’s lost. When a couple of lost English widows happen upon her house, she seizes eagerly on their company and the distraction they provide. She invites them to stay, and quickly forms an intense and rather desperate attachment to them. This novel gives a fine evocation of a time when so many felt displaced, when it was as if the tectonic plates of civilised existence had shifted the safe ground from beneath their feet. We see the journey of (eventually) a quartet of bereaved and war-shattered people towards a sort of healing, wholeness, and peace – as well as a new tolerance towards the differences of others.

This is the first novel I read about grieving families who commissioned photographers to search for the place where their loved one died, in order that a photo could be taken for them to have as a keepsake.

I love learning something new when I read a book and I discovered so much about the after-effects of losing someone without having knowledge of their last moments and a place to pay one’s respects. 

This is about Edie, a widow wanting answers about her husband who she believes might still be alive, despite being classed as ‘missing, presumed dead’ in 1917. She commissions her late husband’s brother to search for him and photograph his final resting place, if indeed there is one.

A wonderful, haunting story of enduring love and loss.

More than a century has passed since the First World War, but this book shows us that its humanitarian legacies are well worth remembering.

I appreciate this book for many reasons, but most of all, for the truly global perspective its authors take. They make it clear that the Great War was truly a world war. More than this, it should be remembered as a global humanitarian crisis. The authors examine many diverse efforts to assist both soldiers and civilians while also considering the messy politics involved in these relief efforts.

I find this book valuable for revealing the complex relationships between aid workers and relief recipients, a dynamic as central today as it was 100 years ago.

Set in London in the early 1920s, Huxley’s Antic Hay follows a cast of young bohemian and artistic characters, all affected in various ways by the Great War, as they search for SOMETHING to give meaning to their lives. London has changed, the world has changed, and they are lost. Cripplingly shy Theodore Gumbril, the main character, (inventor of Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes, trousers which contain an inflatable cushion in the seat) searches for love, and meaning, in the shattered society following the end of the war. His search for love – including the donning of a false, confidence-boosting beard, makes for an absurd kind of comedy. Antic Hay is a savage satire, a switchback of emotions, swooping between humour and despair – though the slight plot does sometimes get rather side-lined by intellectual discussions and I admit to skipping the odd page. However, it gives an excellent flavour of the… show more.