100 books like The Width of the Sea

What’s not to love about a book structured as a tree? This is a vast, episodic novel that takes traditional storytelling and turns it on its head.

A cast of characters connect through stories that grow from seed to trunk to limb. I finished this long read and immediately wanted to start again. It’s the kind of book that rewards a second or third pass. Complex, rife with science and faith and desperate longing, this book is a celebration of the tree, a clarion call to return our attention to our roots before it is too late.

One of Powers’ characters asks, “What do all good stories do?” He answers, “They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.” I think that’s true of all of these books, and most definitely this one.

I found this novel, a kind of elegy for Antarctica, completely transporting. I was swept up in the immensity of the glaciers, the cold and danger, the intensity of life lived so apart from the rest of the world.

The story is about several kinds of love – a romance between a female field researcher and another worker, love for the emperor and Adélie penguins she studies, and most of all, love for this imperiled continent in which most of the action takes place. I was completely captivated by the love story and the penguins, and my heart was in my mouth when the novel builds toward a disaster at sea amid dangerous calving icebergs.

The scenes in this stunning landscape are truly breathtaking. This is a truly unforgettable book, one that makes the strongest case for saving our planet than any I’ve read. I enjoyed learning about Antarctica, scientific… show more.

I love camping out in the wild, so for me reading this novel was a vicarious extended vacation.

The novel centers on a woman who escapes to Alaska with her two children and makes her way across the state in a beat-up rented recreational vehicle they call the Chateau. The fantastically flawed and appealing Josie and her two children are all wonderfully drawn. Anyone who has ever gone camping will get a kick out of all the details of life in this wreck on wheels.

The novel is not just laugh-out-loud funny; it’s also profound and deeply felt. I also wouldn’t have expected a novel that makes a compelling argument that we need to address climate change to be set in Alaska, where there’s so much untrammeled wilderness. But this novel taught me that in fact, the effects of climate change are actually more harsh closer to the poles.

Heroes… show more.

This marvelous novel allowed me to travel to the remote southwest coast of Ireland, on the Beara peninsula.

The landscape is so evocatively and vividly described that I felt as if I were hiking along with the appealing protagonist, Annie Crowe. Like me, Annie turns to walking and nature when she is depressed or needs thinking time, and boy does Annie have demons to battle! She’s a great character - both tough and fragile, a recovering alcoholic. 

On a job assignment as a public relations expert in support of a copper mine, she finds herself thrust into controversy with the local community. It opposes the mine because it would despoil this wild landscape and also endanger the nesting Red-billed Chough. I loved every detail of the walks and the cliffs and the ocean that Johnson describes.

And running throughout is a spicy thread of ancient mythology and Gaelic mysticism, which… show more.

The Tashjians’ book challenged the idea that Puritans rejected visual art. Their study is important in documenting a new aesthetic, where the skull (death’s head) gives way to the winged faces of angels (cherubs), which were more gentle and sentimental in style rather than dark and threatening. Specific stonecutters discussed in this book include John Bull, William Codner, Zerrubbabel Collins, William Young, Henry Christian Geyer, Joseph Lamson and his shop, William Mumford, John Stevens and family, and Jonathan and Moses Worster. These are names well-known to anyone versed in this art form.

I was taken by the fact that new motifs in gravestone design could spread through the stonecutter community with such personalized innovations and styles. Further, in chapter 8: "The Icons of Essex," County provided a contrast with another style of cutting faces in stone. This book significantly broadened my view of stonecutting styles in New England. It also… show more.

This book is densely illustrated (I’d guess that about three-quarters of the 430 8”x10” pages of the main text are filled with images). This was what first led me to travel to New England to see these stones for myself, which I did six years later.

This combination of rich art and Puritan values should challenge anyone’s assumptions about early American sensibilities.

No one does family dysfunction in beautiful places like Maggie Shipstead.

In this novel, she sweeps us to a fictional island in New England (I imagined Martha’s Vineyard), and into the Van Meter family who, for all their wealth, have the communication skills of elementary school kids at recess.

Part comedy of manners, part dramatic exploration of our very human obsessions and anxieties, you’ll want to read this book with a lobster roll and a gin and tonic nearby.  

A ground-breaking work, which demonstrates how the theoretical witch was embodied by real women, and how a seemingly bizarre fantasy was plausible in among the shapes and rhythms of daily life. This influential study is as much a social, economic and cultural history of seventeenth-century New England as it is strictly speaking a history of witchcraft – indeed, Karlsen demonstrates clearly that the latter cannot be assimilated with an appreciation of the former. Context is everything, and without it we just fall back on stereotypes and tired assumptions.

Witches and neighbours were two-sides of the same coin, the former a projection of the hostile emotions of the latter, and, as Karlsen explains, this fraught relationship was fundamentally gendered. To appreciate how some people were accused of witchcraft, we need first to explore relationships between people in the community, including relations between women. Honour, reputation, age, status and so on, were… show more.

Ulrich, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for A Midwife's Tale, first wrote this ground-breaking study of women in early New England. With her characteristically elegant prose and inspired organization, she details the varied roles women played in family, community, and religious life. An illuminating work, and a page-turner.

I first read this book as a teenager but didn’t appreciate Louisa May Alcott’s gift for storytelling until years later, when I reread it. 

This time, I didn’t want the story to end because I’d fallen in love with the four March sisters Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy. I laughed. I cried. Though fictional characters and separated by hundreds of years, the March sisters felt real to me, and I was a little bereft at the end of their story. 

Along with universal themes of love, betrayal, anger, lust, revenge, and death, Little Women deftly portrays each sister’s struggles and aspirations and explores the conflicts each sister has between personal ambition, familial responsibility, and wanting to embrace the unknown.  

For one brief moment, I wished I had more than one sister…and then I came to my senses.