10 books like The Wall

I first read this novel when I was ten. Pages had fallen out and even though I later found intact copies, I read it over and over to fill the gaps in my understanding.

How I loved the way Jane took charge of her fate with such intelligence, the way she captured Rochester’s heart without demeaning herself. But oh that madwoman she encountered in the attic. What did Jane make of Bertha, this “clothed hyena?”

Unlike Rochester, she didn’t blame Bertha for her violence. And while she understood Rochester’s dilemma she couldn’t agree to stay with him. In an intolerable situation, I learned, you can love a person and still leave them. Then Bertha dies in a fire she sets, allowing the couple to marry. But I never took that tacked-on ending very seriously.

After soundly losing the 1912 presidential election to Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt wants to cleanse his mind and spirit. Rather than take a cushy ‘round-the-world cruise, he attempts the first unmapped trip down a rapids-choked, piranha-infested tributary of the Amazon. The name “River of Doubt” perhaps should have deterred him. But Teddy and his mates press on and persevere through disease, drownings, starvation, death, and Indigenous Indian attacks; providing Candice Millard with fodder for her wonderfully gritty book.

How hair-raising an adventure was it? Shortly after a frazzled Roosevelt returns to the comforts of home, two expeditions set out to duplicate his feat. One group quickly gets spooked by Indians shooting poison arrows and bails. The other expedition? Millard notes, “Its members were never seen again.”

One of the great pure sailors of all time was Joshua Slocum. Born in 1844 in eastern Canada he remains one of the most renowned sailors of all time—deservedly, because he completed the first documented circumnavigation of the world alone in a sailboat. A severe-looking man in maturity with a completely bald head and a very full goatee. His four children were born at sea on his ships. And his adventures literally around the world are too numerous to enumerate here. Suffice to say, this was a man “rocked in the cradle of the deep,” with saltwater in his veins.

Toward the turn of the century, in his early fifties, he decided to build a small sailing vessel and sail alone around the world. It was the seminal moment in his life, and he’d describe it beautifully in this marvelous tale. Slocum faced all the perils one would expect: terrible… show more.

The story of the journey of a shepherd from Andalusia to Egypt has sold more than 30 million copies since it first appeared in 1988.

It is about personal drive, taking risks, and following your dream – and how, if you do so, things fall into place to allow you to achieve it. While it might seem strange to base life decisions on a fiction book, the power of positive thinking has been backed up by scientific research.

This book was my introduction to the great Amor Towles, and since then I’ve read every book he’s written. A vast novel with an incredible premise (an upper-class man of note is sentenced to the rest of his life in a grand hotel) I couldn’t imagine how so much story could happen in a single hotel.

But it did, and A Gentleman in Moscow remains one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Towles does amazing things with Count Alexander Rostov’s character, making him both debonair and amusingly sarcastic. He has many delightful—and some not-so-delightful—characters to play off of, including the hotel staff and one precocious little girl who wants to discuss “the business of being a princess.”

I fell in love at that point, with her, with him, and this community inside the hotel. Because of the consequential period in history, there was a lot of suspense in the… show more.

I stumbled across this coming-of-age story by one of my favourite South African writers in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford when I was an undergraduate. I hadn’t been able to lose myself in fiction for a couple of years because I was so immersed in academic reading (history, mostly) – but this novel got me back on the wagon. It was the first novel I’d read in a long time that really made me want to write, to tell a story that could move a reader in the same way. In it, a white, middle-class girl growing up in a small colonial town in 1940s South Africa starts to see the world around her as it really is. Definitely one of those books that deserves a much wider audience.

Full disclosure: Mariko’s cousin, Gillian, attended my old high school, and part of the appeal of this book for me initially was the fact that I recognised so many details from that world. Kimberley “Skim” Cameron is a would-be Wiccan goth attending an all-girls private school that’s gone into high-gear mourning over the death of the boyfriend of one of its students. It’s poignant and perceptive and darkly funny, if somewhat angst-heavy. This was one of my earliest introductions to graphic novels and what the form can uniquely offer.

Like many people, I was really impressed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on the problem of a single story. So when I saw that she’d written a short chapbook of feminist advice for a friend who’d recently become a mother to a baby girl, I had to get my hands on a copy. My own daughter was still a preschooler when it came out, so I figured I had just enough time to make good on the fifteen pieces of advice she offers. Witty, wise, and supremely accessible, this is a book for mothers and daughters equally – as well as anyone with an interest in building a more just and equitable world for all.

I’m just realising now that some of my favourite books were accidental finds – I think that this one turned up at a sidewalk sale. The author is a psychologist who uses the life stories of twenty women to illustrate her theory that girls are their most powerful, authentic selves up to the age of about twelve; that after that, their sense of personhood comes under attack from a whole range of sources, so that much of adulthood is spent trying to piece that pre-teen girl and her distinct sense of self back together. It’s extremely convincing and something I’ve found really interesting to discuss with my now tween-age daughter.

This fascinating and charming book was written by a French magazine editor after he suffered a massive stroke and was locked inside his own body, unable to speak or move. Incredibly, he wrote this book in his mind throughout the day and then each letter was slowly transcribed by blinking his eyes. I kept thinking about this book long after I read it. It’s a nightmare scenario, but he leads us all the way through it. We’re with him as he survives and even finds meaning when almost everything else is lost.