Fans pick 97 books like The Secret Life

Virginia Woolf knew – she insisted – that a life spent maintaining a house, throwing dinner parties, and taking children on sailing expeditions was not necessarily, not categorically, a trivial life.

Even a modest, domestic life is still, for the person living it, an epic journey, however ordinary it might appear to the outside observer. Woolf refused to dismiss lives that most male writers ignore or even denigrate.

And you can get lost in her magnificent sentences; no one puts words together as beautifully as Virginia Woolf.

I was blown away by this book, which beautifully captures the fragmented, jarring experience of being “Extremely Online.” The reader sees the world through the protagonist’s eyes as she scrolls, argues with strangers, and experiences the constant pressure to generate hot takes—especially once an absurd tweet propels her to celebrity.

The book conveys the tension between online interactions (ephemeral, yes, but not necessarily lacking in genuine human emotion) and serious offline issues, like the family tragedy that finally pulls the main character away from the digital fray. I laughed out loud at the over-sharing and performative virtue signaling in the Reddit-like Portal. Haven’t we all encountered “that guy” online?

In contrast to John Berger’s Marxist aesthetic, Barthes’s approach to visual experience and photographic images draws upon the tradition of semiotics and, to a degree, postmodern theories of text and intertextuality. Barthes leads his reader into the codes and conventions of the image. How images signify is thus made a central topic that provokes self-reflection and reflexive challenges to conventional image analysis. Where Berger’s work is expository and analytic, Barthes's book is exploratory and novelistic (Barthes would have his reader approach the work as a kind of intertextual fiction). As the title of the work suggests, this is Barthes at his most personal and reflective. His fascination remains with the photographic image which is presented as one of the defining aesthetic objects of modernity. But the act of photography is now itself complex, mediated, and open to a range of concrete experiential impulses.

Here the viewer of the photograph is… show more.

I go to Ben Lerner’s writing for the shimmering atmospheres of his fictional universes. 10:04 is set in contemporary New York City and follows the narrator-writer through his urban routines. But between his health scares, relationship worries, and professional commitments, the novel thrums with a strange, uneasy beat as the narrator questions the fabric of modern life in a large city. He feels the sublime abundance of the commodities that surround him, whose very abundance is precarious. The book meditates on the fragility of the global supply chains that bring cans of ground coffee onto supermarket shelves and into our baskets. There is also a superstorm approaching, which threatens the city’s power. Lerner is wonderful on twenty-first-century, first-world malaise.

Iris and her best friend Sam are your average bored middle schoolers. One day, they discover a river that’s gone dry and a hidden city that’s re-emerged. I’ve always been fascinated by “ghost towns” that were submerged in lakes. This book has it all: mystery, fantasy, adventure, and a strong message about friendship.

The art is stunning, with a soft palette of blues and purples. The little hints hidden in the art really add to the book.

Alan the crocodile is famed for his big razor-sharp scary teeth. Oh-oh!

Everyday Alan goes sneaking into the jungle to scare all the animals. But Alan has a big secret! What he really loves is to relax and run a warm mud bath and take out his false scary teeth! When, one day Alan’s false teeth go missing, he is frantic. Can he still be scary without them?

A very amusing uplifting story with fabulous, bright illustrations.

Set in a Mesoamerican-inspired world, The Lost Dreamer is seeped in Latin culture and tradition.

Everything about this novel reaches deep into my soul and makes me feel more connected to my land and my ancestors. The magic system feels more organic and earth-bound, closer to shamanism than depictions of magic in more modern fantasy novels and I loved it.

The novel follows two courageous and strong Latin women with gifts - a Dream Walker and a Seer. Individually we see them learn to fight for themselves, and for the land and lives they love. The queerness in this novel is intrinsic to the world and story, characters able to be themselves without question or oppression. (At least, not oppression due to their sexuality - which I appreciated!)

This is a darker, more realistic take on former child stars.

I don’t normally enjoy non-linear timelines, but the way the story jumped back and forth, from the heyday of the TV show, where the characters played in a fictional teen pop band to present day, where they are trying to pretend they’ve moved on from the scandalous ending, was compelling.

The central mystery of what went wrong and why kept me hooked while the details of the behind-the-scenes conflicts and pressures fascinated me. As someone who grew up in LA, close to the orbit of these kind of wildly popular teen shows, I appreciated the stark look at what these productions do to their young stars and the sometimes creepy attention underage girls get.

I also appreciated that it didn’t get so dark I couldn’t finish it.

I love the way this author puts ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances. I read the book in gulps, and as I neared the end, I slowed down to savor the mind-blowing story as it was unfolding. I became fully absorbed in the lives of people I now knew well and liked. I rooted for the good people and knew the bad would finally meet their end. This was an utterly unpredictable story that kept me guessing and surprised me all the way through.

First things first, Simone Elkeles is my favorite YA author, and I couldn’t do a list of recs without mentioning one of her books, and my all-time favorite has always been Leaving Paradise. I also recommend LP because it’s close to my own book in that it features a reformed bad boy, Caleb, freshly on probation who’s trying to navigate his way into society and fix his “mistakes.” I so love the sorta forbidden dynamic between him and Maggie, because Caleb is actually on probation for hitting Maggie in a hit-and-run while drinking and driving. So not only is he trying to win over his former friends, parents, and town, he’s gotta make things right with Maggie, who is not giving him any play whatsoever—in the beginning! Love love Caleb’s voice in this novel.