100 books like The Tunnel

It centers on and celebrates becoming—molting from one skin to another. For Ishmael this is a transition from a tired and limiting worldview to something fresh and alive.

The “bosom buddies” at the heart of the novel, Ishmael and Queequeg, seem comprised of opposites, but Ishmael’s etherealizing is grounded by Queequeg’s pragmatic ingenuity in ways that quiet and expand the young pagan-Presbyterian’s buzzing, anxious mind. Theirs is a friendship of succor, probably sex, and survival—all of it shadowed by the delusional obsessions of their mad captain.

Cormac McCarthy does the impossible in this book—he writes an emotionally satisfying, literary-minded travelogue of horrors. It shatters the reader but then lifts them up with its beautifully wrought prose.

Be patient: the novel gets brutally dark before the light.

What an outstanding tale by novelist Morris.

The book tells the true story of Slovakian Jew Lale Sokolov, who falls in love with a young woman that he was forced to tattoo upon her arrival at Auschwitz concentration camp in WWII.

The book rocked me as I asked again and again the question: "How can humans do this to each other?"  

This is a concise noir with clear and simple prose. There is no metafiction, magical realism, or non-linear narrative to contend with. The protagonist, Mr. Machi, is a terrible person, almost psychopathic, a symbol of everything that is wrong in Argentina. The book is a critique of unbridled capitalism and its status symbols. To kick things off, Machi finds a dead body inside the boot of his beloved BMW and from there the action and the hilarity don’t stop. Told from the point of view of Machi, we have an uncomplicated antihero, a person completely without redeeming features. According to legend, the author still works as a subway station cleaner.

More about hiding out and the lead-up to the final shoot-out than the bank robbery at the start, this novel is based on a real case from the 1960s. After they rob a bank in the Province of Buenos Aires, Dorda and Brigone, escape with the money over the Rio de la Plata. They find a bolthole in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a country much like Argentina culturally and historically, but with fewer hysterical tendencies. Not happy about this are the politicians and police officers involved in the robbery and anxious for their cut of the loot. Piglia does a good job of recreating Argentina in the 1960s. Despite some stylistic pretensions and his overwriting of the main characters, the author manages not to get in the way of the story.

An atheist doctor, a former priest with wavering faith, and a whiskey-sodden British consul in sweltering Northeastern Argentina. The Honorary Consul has all the elements of a classic Greene novel. The author in his autobiography ‘Ways of Escape’ said it was his favourite work. Over the river from the small town of Corrientes is Paraguay and the American backed dictator, General Stroessner. In a muddle up Charlie Fortnam gets kidnapped by Paraguayan rebels hoping for an exchange of prisoners; the American Ambassador was the real target. The British government isn’t eager to get involved, Charlie is a sixty-year-old ‘honorary’ consul and alcoholic. Worse still he has recently married Clara, a young prostitute – not a becoming image at all. 

An Agatha Christie-style mystery set in Buenos Aires. At two in the morning, Pancho Soler returns drunk to his apartment building on Santa Fe Avenue. He presses the button for the lift, and it arrives with a surprise inside: a beautiful blonde woman, sitting upright, but dead. Many of the suspects who live in the building are recent immigrants from Europe and, as the novel is set in the 1950s, their memories and secrets from WW2 are still fresh. Boris, a Bulgarian chemist who worked for the Nazis, is the most entertaining of the lot. There are the usual red herrings and revelations in the search for the murderer. The young Argentinian detective is a little flat by Christie's standards, but this is a satisfying whodunnit.   

Blending sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man takes readers to places they’ve likely only seen in their dreams or, more likely, their nightmares.

From heartbreaking tales of space disasters (“Kaleidoscope”) to frightening tales of a VR nursery gone wild (“The Veldt”), the strength of Bradbury’s legendary fiction is found in the way he brought humanity to even the wildest, most out-of-this-world premise. In addition, his immaculate prose is as much a joy to appreciate on the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence levels, as it is on the story level.

The Illustrated Man was one of the first short story collections I ever read. The fact that so many of the tales included within its pages still stick with me to this day is proof of its power and legacy.

Argentinians in 1950s Paris argue about art and philosophy. They fall in and out of love to a jazz soundtrack. The novel itself is in love with the modern city and the secret patterns of chance. Prefacing it is a ‘table of instructions’ in which the author writes that "this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56... The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter."

There’s an exhilaration of structure, a deadpan formal playfulness that still thrills. It’s the book that taught me the most about reading. And, not entirely coincidentally, it’s the book that made me realise I was going to become a writer.

Paradoxes—a 2010 translation of his 2001 work—was an important addition to the emerging literature on anarchist cultural politics—a literature that began with a fellow Argentinian historian Dora Borrancos, who wrote Anarquismo, educación y costumbres en la Argentina de principios de siglo (1990). My book built on this emerging exploration of anarchists outside the workplace. Paradoxes explores anarchist newspapers, culture, plays, meetings, and other activities radicals used to promote anarchism while also offering entertainment and relaxation. Suriano is not myopic. He notes that in a time when other forms of entertainment like cinema emerged, workers had competing forms of commercialized amusement to pursue. This book—like other cultural histories—breathes life into old histories of anarchism that often were boring “ABC histories,” i.e., stories of one union acronym after another.