100 books like We Need to Hang Out

I could not stop reading this book—and when the TV series came out, I fell in love all over again. A trapped, imprisoned aristocrat who is elegant and only slightly snotty and who has a bedrock of humanity underneath any stiffness and propriety—that’s the protagonist, Rostov.

This novel features not one but two abandoned children, and, in both cases, their plights bring out the best in Count Rostov. He is naturally kind, but he also finds resources and courage he never knew he had. I’ve experienced the book three times—reading, listening to an audiobook, and watching the TV series and I was in love every time.

This is the Mother of all boy mom books. It’s required reading for anyone learning to speak boy. Equal parts despair—Lamott is a single mom who sometimes wants to leave her crying boy outside on the stoop—and equal parts gut punches of hilarious wisdom and ardor about boy life and mom devotion.

I’ve owned a number of homes. Most were small, one or two were fairly large. When I set about building my own writing shed I had a clue where to begin, but most frequently—when bashing a nail, jigsawing a piece of wood—I knew very little about why I was making one decision over another much beyond practical considerations. A window could only fit here, and the door must swing this way, lest it hit that support beam. Having a companion to that process, letting not my hammer but the Earth fine-tune my space gave that writing shed life far beyond its function.

I first heard Loory’s mirthful story “The Man and The Moose” while sitting in my car in my southern college town. He read it on an episode of This American Life. It was a Wednesday ritual of mine, sitting in that car and listening to stories and giving my entire being to be within them, to be completely enraptured and emphatic for at least that one hour. After hearing the story, I told it to whoever would listen. I remember the story and his voice and the way in which the inanimate became animated, the unpersonafiable personified. That story was a treasure and lives with me. It will, as with the others in this collection, live with you, too.

I’ve never read a book as quickly as I read this one. Our eponymous lead character is quirky and odd, but the story is written with so much empathy, depth, and humor that I was rooting for her from the start.

I loved how the relationship between Eleanor and Raymond plays out and avoids the predictable ‘boy meets girl’ ending. It doesn’t surprise me that the book is ‘in development’ as a movie, as the story plays out like a film when you read it. Definitely read this one first before you see the film! (It probably won’t take long as I couldn’t put this book down.)

Franz Kafka is best known for this book, though he has written many others, including The Trial. The novel explores social and political topics through the use of the fantastic, in this case, a man who wakes up one morning and finds he has turned into a gigantic cockroach.

I am drawn to books that explore things in ways that have not been explored before and books that make one think. I read this one in college; it has stuck with me and influenced me through my writing career.

This novel has everything I love – a narrator who’s definitely not telling us everything, newly arrived in a remote house by a lake in Norway that is so clearly drawn I can see and feel it in my bones.

Trond has secrets and this is where he’s going to live now. There’s a man down the track whose window he can see when it falls dark. A river flows fast beyond the trees. Petterson’s beautiful, spare writing creates a filmic atmosphere in which past mysteries unfold as Trond begins to learn to live alone with his past.

Stunning story-telling, wonderful place-setting, and a character utterly unlike me that I loved reading in his solitude.

Like the title suggests, this anthology is for those on the outside. It is a weird blend of strange works from well-known authors in the industry. I tend to like anthologies such as this because it creates work somewhat out of the norm for the writers. The standout story here is from Tanith Lee. I do not recommend it purely for the story as I do not consider it the best of this bunch. What did strike me was the prose. From her first words the reader knows they are in the hands of a master. It is simply impossible to stop reading once one starts because of the incredible descriptions and tone of the story. It is technically an excerpt from one of her novels but it does wow with the beauty of the words on the page. If someone believes horror cannot be literary they have not read… show more.

I love All the Names so much that I read it twice in a gap of ten years. I love it for two main reasons: how ordinary people can be immortalized by powerful writing and what decisions good people make in a moral dilemma. In his Nobel Prize award ceremony speech in Stockholm in 1998, Saramago said that his writings were to transform ordinary people into literary figures in order that he would not forget them.

He did exactly that in this book. An unknown woman was immortalized by the main protagonist, who was portrayed as an unloved, lonely clerk working at the Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Lisbon. As I was reading his story, I wondered what turned this unassuming, timid worker into a forger. Given the opportunity, would a good person turn into a tyrant? 

In this diagnosis story, author Kamins chooses to use a fictional illness—lepidopsy—to perfectly emulate the otherworldly confusion and uncertainty of being diagnosed with a disease you have no context for. Suddenly, everything changes for Anna. Nothing makes sense. It’s disorienting, uncomfortable, and terrifying. I loved how the book shows the character figuring out how to navigate this new life step by step by misstep. Despite the fictional illness, Anna’s journey feels incredibly real.