Fans pick 43 books like To Fudge or Not to Fudge

While the city sleeps a small boy accompanies his dad on his night shift as a school custodian, playing ball in the gym while his dad sweeps, sharing a meal they brought with them, listening to a game on the radio as they go from classroom to classroom, reading aloud on a couch until he dozes off while his dad polishes the library. I love this story for its tender sense of togetherness and for sharing the adult world of work. The night time makes it special too.

This is a unique entry in that the cursed place is a framing device, for this collection of mostly disturbing tales. For his first-ever collection of short stories, Palahniuk brings his wretched cast of characters to a haunted house, where each in turn offers his or her own demented tale. They don’t all work, but a number of the stories really stick with you, and this spooky old house at the center of it ratchets the intensity up another level—it’s not a static situation they are in, there, so the plot progresses to its own warped conclusion on this front as well. 

A bracing slap to the face, this book. Or maybe a punch to the gut. The conceit is the series of portraits of hoarders based on the reality show of the same name, and the recipe is to combine their testimonials—“I save old soda cans and turn the tin snips into flowers,” say, or “I want desperately to change”—with lists of objects, described as though in a slow camera pan across a filthy room. But the alchemy is the way Durbin mashes the two together, not quite at random but not correctly either. It’s a harrowing litany of fragments, so specific that the unspoken point is all too clear: what’s broken is much bigger than any of these individual people or things.

Bea Schumacher is a plus-sized fashion blogger and outspoken critic of the lack of diverse body types in the media and on the reality dating show, Main Squeeze, in particular.

When she is asked to star on the show and pick the man she wishes to marry, Bea agrees, excited about what this might mean for her career and her love life. 

This book gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at reality television and provides a satisfying answer to what is real and what is staged. I loved how the plot of Main Squeeze and the novel formed co-centric rings and how Bea learns to recognize and use her power in both these arenas.

While romance and insights abound, they are also tempered by laugh-out-loud humor, making this read both enjoyable and thought-provoking.

This book opened my eyes to my own obsessive need to find the truth. The main character is a seemingly ordinary person; however, you quickly get the sense that everything is not what it seems. It is easy to get drawn into the arc of the story, which appears simple only on the surface.

There was a lot of uncertainty that captured my imagination. The author did a masterful job of keeping the mystery flowing. This led to an outcome I was pleasantly surprised by. A well-written quick read that leaves you satisfied. 

This light-hearted romcom is guaranteed to be a hit with Pride and Prejudice fans. The heroine, Emma Brady, is cast in a Jane Austen-themed reality TV dating show… Only she isn’t there looking for romance. Unlike the other contestants, her ulterior motive is to get exposure for her activewear brand so her business will thrive. Only things get complicated when she falls for Mr. Darcy after all – and he is committed to the show for reasons Emma can’t comprehend. Full of twists and turns, characterful contestants, and a truckload of Pride and Prejudice references, this story is an absolute riot.

Also environmentally themed (a town threatened by a giant clear-cutting lumber operation), Whispering Alaska is ultimately a family story of twin sisters coming to Alaska. I loved the way Jones depicts the vastly different twin girls: one compliant and friendly, the other withdrawn and driving her father nuts. Tolstoy famously said all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Well, this family is struggling with the loss of the girl’s mother on top of trying to find their places in the rainy Southeast coastal town. Listed as “middle-grade” Y/A, it’s a great read for adults interested in Alaska too. 

A struggling actress catches her big break when she's hired onto a reality TV/soap opera show produced by and watched by mythical creatures. They're fascinated with humans and more than willing to accept the soapiest of soap opera plots as reality. Dawn is an entertainment journalist and she mixes humor with insider details that make the set seem authentic. Well, as authentic as a set populated with fawn producers, cameradryads, and security dragons can get.

Although much of the story happens on set, the New York City bits by this Brooklyn-based author feel both authentic and fun to me.

A survival book list should definitely contain at least one treasure from your childhood. This one never left me and it’s a book I return to for its haunting, beautiful, disturbing depiction of Marianne, the little girl who dreams what she draws. Battling against a mysterious, unnamed illness, she escapes from the daily monotony by drawing a house, and a boy, and some sentinel stones. Slowly, this dreamworld becomes her reality. As the children struggle to break out of their house, surrounded by them, the stony watchers, the reader is dimly aware that it mirrors their fight to recover from their sickness. Lyrical, very scary, and a cliffhanger ending like no other, it is deservedly a classic.

I first read it when I was 10, the exact same age as Marianne (the story begins on her birthday), and I have reread it for the umpteenth time forty years later.… show more.

This book made me laugh out loud at the primal truth of two cavemen competing for who is the best—from cave size to fire burning to towering show-off technological feats that quickly spin manically out of control.

I really appreciate the message that to develop as a human species, we need to share and celebrate our resources together. I return to this book, which is written so simply and powerfully with wonderful illustrations, again and again with kids because it’s a hilarious reminder that mindless competition just leads us back into the cave. I want my kids to know that we can all be the "best" together.