100 books like Tree of Smoke

This book lays bare the furious tensions in American society during the Vietnam era. I have read it three times, and each time, it reveals new treasures and nuances.

It’s a dark story about a war correspondent who decides to get rich by smuggling heroin home from Vietnam. So, while it opens in Saigon, most of the book is set in a California riven by culture clashes and soured idealism. Stone is one of America’s best late-twentieth-century novelists.

I mean, hello! The opening sentence “All happy families are alike…” is probably my favorite opening sentence of all time. This book is what I place in the “epic story telling” category for its breadth and scope of time. In many ways it is the story of two separate families and it hits on several themes I have come to crave and demand from art. Tolstoy looks at class, cultural and societal norms, and the emotional toll of familial expectations. It is a book so dense with interesting, flawed characters and it is one of the rare works I come back again to read every few years.  

This wild, uproarious classic still makes me laugh out loud when I read it, though I must have been through it eight or ten times. And while it’s darkly funny, that’s not even the best thing about it.

This book gives an intimate portrait of early-seventies drug culture, as well as American society and its political realities, in real-time. There’s no sense of distance or retrospection, except when he thinks about the countercultural explosion of a few years earlier. He sees it nostalgically and clearly sees its demise. Not everyone will agree with his assessment of that demise, but his take on it is an important one. For all its hilarity, it’s a very dark book.

I’m pretty certain Invisible Man is The Great American Novel. Some lines make me laugh aloud: “I would remain and become a well-disciplined optimist and help them to go merrily to hell.” But the moments that really sing for me are those that ring with humor, horror, tragedy, and beauty all at once.

Near the end, during a moment when the nameless narrator hides and listens to some men telling a story, he aches with the urge to laugh while realizing what’s been said isn’t only funny: “It was funny and dangerous and sad.” The book reminds me that all of those things can be held in my head at once. 

A powerful parent dies and each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways -- and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. This is an “everything” book. It took over my life. It overwhelmed my brain and mind. The utterly believable characters so generously intermingled and interwoven, familial and dynamic in their pushing and pulling, loving and hating - ignited by a precipitating event so abrupt yet simple, with consequences that spin out of control. Reading this tale, you feel as if you are drowning in a fever dream - Joyce Carol Oates once again as she has since Them (1969), offering innumerable reasons for wonderment.

This 20th Century masterpiece by the great Thomas Mann is not for the faint of heart, as it requires great powers of concentration, the antithesis of the Digital Age's distracted attention. But it is well worth the effort, for those with stamina, because all of humanity's foibles are found in The Magic Mountain, a book that remains incredibly relevant to our times. Mann's novel is about 20-something Hans Castorp, who visits his tubercular cousin residing in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps; intending to stay two weeks, Castorp winds up staying seven years, waylaid and fascinated by the colorful sanatorium residents he meets and his own imaginary health issues.

Written on the eve of WW1, the book chronicles a group of dissipated Europeans rotting from the inside out, and ends with Castorp swept up and renewed by nationalism and marching down the mountain to join Germany's militaristic cause, a… show more.

This heavy, sardonic novel about a commune of hippies whose utopian dream is rapidly fraying kept me totally compelled and frequently laughing all the way through.

They find land in Alaska and try to move their scene to the great North, but the realities of weather and wilderness don’t conform to their plans.

This novel is a strange triptych, with three tangentially connected parts that all have to do with the darker side of the '60s counterculture. I loved it.

One part is about the early days of the Rolling Stones, with the band members themselves as characters. Then there’s avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who made a movie in which Mick Jagger appeared alongside Bobby Beausoleil, who later joined the Manson Family. The third part is about the Manson Family itself, leading up to their inexplicable crimes.

The book engaged and compelled me in spite of (also because of) its disjointed nature—it’s beautifully written and a true work of art.

A newcomer to fiction, David McClosky is another “former” who infuses his storytelling with details only an insider would know.

He tells an excellent tale, diving deep into the fractured regime of Bashar al-Assad's Syria and showing what harm the nasty world of despots and the dark world of spying can wreak on souls. The story intertwines a forbidden love affair between a CIA officer and his agent with collecting intelligence on Syrian chemical weapons and Washington bureaucrats trying to decide what to do next.

It is an excellent representation of what it’s like to serve in a denied area and, having served in Damascus, I can say the scenery is accurate, the personalities are spot on, and the tradecraft is good. I’m looking forward to Moscow X.

When I was a kid, I used to love W. Somerset Maugham short stories. Often they were about two strangers, usually men, meeting in a remote colonial outpost, and one of the two would then proceed to tell the other a strange, violent, heartbreaking, life-altering story that had happened to him or that he had witnessed. Mouth to Mouth, which I loved, reminded me of those stories.

I listened to it on audiobook, and the narration is pitch-perfect. This novel is about two men who meet at an airport when their plane is delayed. They go into a lounge, where one of them, a rich art dealer named Jeff, proceeds to tell the other his life story.

It’s gripping. I sat in my car after I got home so I could listen to the last twenty minutes.