Here are 100 books that The Tree of Man fans have personally recommended if you like
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As Iago says in Shakespeare’s Othello, “I am nothing if not critical,” and regardless of what he meant, it applies to me - my intelligence works best at scrutinizing things for their significance. I studied science, worked in the financial sector, read fiction, watched cinema, and developed a sense of the interconnectedness of things. If the connections existed, I thought, there could be no one way of approaching anything; all intellectual paths were valid and the only criterion of value was that it must be intelligent. My book tries to stick to this since a writer may hold any opinions, but he or she must show intelligence.
JL Borges is, in my view, the greatest literary mind of the 20th Century.
This is a book of stories, philosophical essays and parables, but even when he is writing fiction, his favoured form is that of the mock critical essay about a non-existent book or writer.
What I especially love about him is his wit, subtle and easily missed since it often takes the shape of philosophical rumination when he is actually debunking something held very highly. My natural mode of expression is irony, and Borges’s irony is inimitable.
The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level, an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New Directions publication of Labyrinths.
This new edition of Labyrinths, the classic representative selection of Borges' writing edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (in translations…
Right from an early age, I have always been interested in the fallibility of the human condition, being particularly conscious of my own faults. People who are too good to be true are of little interest, except that I want to know their faults or their secrets. I have found myself drawn to complex characters, those who have good and bad characteristics, and some of the novels and movies that I have enjoyed most feature such characters. In my career as a lawyer, I have met all kinds of people who have made bad decisions or suffered misfortune, and it has always been a pleasure trying to help them.
This was one of the few books I read during my teens that seemed to describe accurately the angst of growing up in a world where no one teaches you how to be an adult, and you learn simply to cope and, possibly and with luck, thrive after a series of bad personal experiences.
The protagonist in it is born with a club foot (which most equate to Maugham's stutter or, more likely, his closeted homosexuality), which makes him always an outsider yet also a keen observer of others. I have always thought this to be one of the best and most influential books I have ever read.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
"It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham," wrote Gore Vidal. "He was always so entirely there."
Originally published in 1915, Of Human Bondage is a potent expression of the power of sexual obsession and of modern man's yearning for freedom. This classic bildungsroman tells the story of Philip Carey, a sensitive boy born with a clubfoot who is orphaned and raised by a religious aunt and uncle. Philip yearns…
I enjoyed writing The Karma Kaper. Just as there's tragedy and comedy in every aspect of our lives there's humor in crime. It's fun bringing that humor to my audience. I also believe in justice for all. Sadly, as American courts are currently more concerned with criminals' rights than victims' rights there are no guarantees victims will receive the justice they deserve. No one can predict if a jury of 12 will find a defendant who has committed a crime guilty. Then, there's the highest court of appeal - fiction! Between the covers of a novel, a crafty writer can ensure just verdicts and devise macabre punishments for the bad guys! It doesn't get any better!
Samuel Pickwick Esq., G.C.M.P.C., is just one of Charles Dicken's delightful retinue of characters.
He was a portly little man shaped like a bowling pin with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge who was nominated to lead three bumbling Pickwickians (members of Pickwick's eponymous Pickwick Club in London) on a tour of the English countryside to learn about life outside of London then report back to a full meeting of the Club post haste.
Through their ineptitude, Pickwick and his retinue manage to tumble into a series of unimaginable yet hilarious intrigues.
No matter their travails, Dickens through his alter-ego Samuel Pickwick always sides with what is just and fair. If you believe in Providence you'll find all of Dickens' novels a joy to read.
In The Pickwick Papers we are introduced not just to one of the greatest writers in the English language, but to some of fiction's most endearing and memorable characters, starting with the 'illustrious, immortal and colossal-minded' Samuel Pickwick himself. It is a rollicking tour de force through an England on the brink of the Victorian era. Reform of government, justice and commercial life are imminent, as are rail travel, social convulsion and the death of deference, but Pickwick sails through on a tide of delirious adventure, fortifying us for the future - whatever it might throw at us.
Loads of people want to be writers and the dream can come true! It did for me. So, I want to tell people about the books that have helped to turn me into a novelist. Initially, I wrote journalistic pieces about bizarre leisure activities for various British newspapers and magazines: I lay on a bed of nails, walked on red hot coals, met people who collect bricks as a hobby...and even lost my underpants while performing on the flying trapeze! (No kidding!) But my ultimate goal was always to become a novelist. Then, one day, I discovered the subject I just had to turn into a novel. And the result was...Death and Mr. Pickwick.
This novel was a massive influence on me. Rutherfurd takes the city of London as his subject, and follows the life of the city through the centuries, taking in Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans etc…right through to modern times. I don't have quite such a huge canvas in my book, but I do follow a series of historical events in a manner which is somewhat reminiscent of Rutherfurd. Rutherfurd takes you on a wonderful journey.
“A TOUR DE FORCE . . . London tracks the history of the English capital from the days of the Celts until the present time. . . . Breathtaking.”—The Orlando Sentinel
A master of epic historical fiction, Edward Rutherford gives us a sweeping novel of London, a glorious pageant spanning two thousand years. He brings this vibrant city's long and noble history alive through his saga of ever-shifting fortunes, fates, and intrigues of a half-dozen families, from the age of Julius Caesar to the twentieth century. Generation after generation, these families embody the passion, struggle, wealth, and verve of the…
There are so many ways to make friends—and to be friends. As a painfully shy person for most of my life, I’ve learned that words aren’t always necessary, and that shared interests and non-verbal (or differently-verbal) communication can take you a long way. It’s probably why so many of my books focus on unconventional friendships, like that between a boy and a funny-talking fruit bat (in Megabat), a boy and his emotional support duck (in Quack), or even a bee and a flea (in Bee and Flea and the Compost Caper). Not surprisingly, I also love reading books that celebrate unlikely friends. These are just a few of my favorites.
Adventure awaits when an inkblot from one of Ethan’s dad’s sketches comes to life and leaps off the page. Sydney Smith’s inky illustrations add to the fun of this fast-paced and funny story about friendship and family. And because Inkling loves to read/eat up ink, and he takes on the mood of whatever text he’s just devoured, it’s also a cool and clever introduction for kids to some classics and to different genres of writing.
What’s more, the book ends on a note that suggests a sequel that I can’t wait to read!
Mishaps and madness ensue when magical drawing ink comes to life in the Rylance home and 11-year-old Ethan tries to prove he's just as talented as his famous father.
A moving but light-hearted story about grief, family and a sixth-grade rivalry. When Ethan's class is given the task of creating a graphic novel and magical ink jumps out of his father's sketchbook, a strange series of events is set into motion. To his younger sister, Inkling is Lucy, her beloved dog; to his father, Inkling is a second chance at a dwindling career and a chance to solve his family's…
After my dad died, I didn’t know where to turn. People felt uncomfortable talking to a seventeen-year-old girl about her dead dad. They felt even more uncomfortable talking to me about it one, two, ten years later. Still, I couldn’t, can’t, stop thinking about it. I turned, then, to books. These books made and make me feel seen. They aren’t about “moving on” or “letting go” but the ways in which leaning into grief’s deep well connects us to love’s true depths. These books are honest and pure, and if you don’t know what to say to a friend who’s mourning, let these authors speak for you.
This book is a cold-water plunge: shocking, disorienting yet grounding, a reminder of the body and its limits.
In recounting the death of her son, Naja Marie Aidt explicitly invokes Didion (as well as Anne Carson, C.S. Lewis, and Nick Cave), wrestling with the inability of language to hold grief. She returns to the death scene again and again, like a stitch through the book.
Each refrain adds more context and pushes us further into the moment before digressing, ruminating, and exploding the narrative. The book is a lyric essay, written in fragments, because Aidt understands this, in the end, is what we’re left with.
'Extraordinary. It is about death, but I can think of few books which have such life. It shows us what love is.' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny
'There is no one quite like Naja Marie Aidt' Valeria Luiselli
'Devastating, angry, challenging, fragmented and filled with the beautiful hope that the love we have for people continues into the world even after they're gone.' Culturefly
'Fragmented, poetic, informative and truthful, Aidt faces the greatest loss we can ever know with all the force of great elegy writers like Anne Carson and Denise Riley. Essential.'…
Grief is now an unwanted travel companion and a friend to me. At times, I find myself incapable of understanding it. Even so, it has helped me view myself through a different lens. When I wrote my book, my mother was still alive. Grief had yet to announce itself as my lifelong companion, but I was aware of its menacing presence. That amazing prescience spilled into my book. After my mother died, I discovered that there was a lot more to discover about death and grief. For months, I reviewed books on these topics for various publications. I'm still on this enlightening journey.
I admire the author's ability to write about the conflicting mesh of emotions she had to cope with after her father's unexpected demise. After losing my mother in 2021, I realized that grief isn't a linear process. Instead, it often felt like I was navigating unfamiliar terrain without a roadmap.
Adichie's memoir helped me understand that grief is a “cruel kind of education,” and we need to equip ourselves for it by having more meaningful conversations about death. Notes on Grief also encouraged me to view grief as an opportunity for self-reflection and spiritual growth.
A personal and powerful essay on loss from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun.
'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language'
On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria.
In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father.…
I’m an author and human rights lawyer passionate about making reproductive rights accessible in law and in real life. My written work translates my legal cases into stories to engage readers in the fight to expand rights for all. My legal work leading the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine seeks to make medication abortion legally available in all 50 states, regardless of a person’s ability to pay for it. I have 2 daughters and am always looking to learn from their experience in an ever-changing world and from a diverse range of other women making decisions about whether, when, and whom to have and raise children.
There are three things that Americans try to avoid talking about: sex, money, and death. This book takes us on a journey to explore the meaning of life and how we find wisdom in its endings.
Examining our habits, culture, and rituals it shows us different ways to face loss. As someone who has never liked to peer too closely into the dark cave to explore the meaning of death, I found the book gently and intelligently leading me by the hand into thinking about loss. Reading it even helped me to reconcile the pain of my mother’s loss and death by Alzheimer’s, shifting my focus to the parts of her that remain with and as a part of me.
When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die?
With a keen eye towards that which makes life worth living, interfaith minister, mom and perpetual seeker Barbara Becker recounts stories where life and death intersect in unexpected ways. She volunteers on a hospice floor, becomes an eager student of the many ways people find meaning at the end of life, and accompanies her parents in their final days.
I love middle-grade books (for eight to twelve-year-olds), which is why I write in that genre. My Summer of L.U.C.K. trilogy is sprinkled with magical adventures, but each one has real-life kids struggling with real-life problems and finding real-world solutions. I believe that books whose characters experience magical elements along with themes of friendship, perseverance, and self-acceptance will help them learn, as I did when I was a young reader, that whatever troubles they're experiencing, other kids have those troubles too, that they're not alone, and that help is possible.
I’m a sucker for books about restored faith, particularly one with a Victorian house on the cover (see The Diamond in the Window below). That’s what caught my eye about Jess Redman’s beautifully written book, but the main character, a kid named Wunder, really drew me in and kept me reading.
I loved following Wunder’s journey as his faith in miracles falters after the death of his newborn sister. What touched me the most was how his connection with a woman–maybe a witch–who resides in the crumbling Victorian house helps reawaken his belief in everyday magic. This is one of my top favorite magical middle grade books of all time.
In the tradition of heartwrenching and hopeful middle grade novels such as Bridge to Terabithia comes Jess Redman's stunning debut about a young boy who must regain his faith in miracles after a tragedy changes his world.
Eleven-year-old Wunder Ellis is a miracologist. In a journal he calls The Miraculous, he records stories of the inexplicable and the extraordinary. And he believes every single one. But then his newborn sister dies, at only eight days old. If that can happen, then miracles can’t exist. So Wunder gets rid of The Miraculous. He stops…
My first toy was a plastic dinosaur, which I took to school and it bears my toothmarks on the tail. As a young teenager, I stumbled across the Dragonriders of Pern books, and my allegiance transferred to dragons. I find them fascinating, both beautiful and dangerous, and prefer books in which they have their own cultures and are strong characters in their own right. The novels I’ve recommended have great world building to draw you into the fascinating lives of dragons, and the humans who come to know them.
This is like a Dickens novel, but the characters are dragons rather than humans. All of the elements of a Victorian romance, such as obsession with manners and purity, are present, along with draconic elements like the heirs eating their dead father and parents killing off weak hatchlings. Social class and women’s rights are set in a culture of dragons!
A family of dragons gathers on the occasion of the death of their father, the elder Bon Agornin. As is custom, they must eat the body. But even as Bon's last remains are polished off, his sons and daughters must all jostle for a position in the new hierarchy. While the youngest son seeks greedy remuneration through the courts of law, the eldest son - a dragon of the cloth - agonises over his father's deathbed confession. While one daughter is caught between loyalty to her family by blood and her family by marriage, another daughter follows her heart -…
