66 books like Winter in the Blood

This book scared the hell out of me when I was a teenager because its vivid descriptions stayed in my dreams yet it never stopped me from reading and loving the entire book.

It taught me a lot about following your intuition and/or gut feelings. Although it has been a long time since I read it, the main thing I remember is that your intuition is your protector, and listening to that inner voice helps a lot along the way.

Vonnegut’s book is a unique combination of satire, science fiction, and raw war critique. Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, lives out the trauma of surviving the Dresden bombing by becoming "unstuck in time," drifting through different moments of his life, from past to future. This strange, nonlinear structure mirrors how we process trauma in fragments and waves, never in a neat, chronological order. The randomness of death, the meaninglessness of war—all these themes come together in a way that’s both absurd and deeply moving. As we witness terror and violence continually unfold across the globe, the echoes of Slaughterhouse-Five feel ever-present.

The phrase “So it goes” serves as a refrain throughout the novel, after every death—reminding us of the inevitability of loss in wartime, no matter the scale. This book hit me hard with its dark humor and cynical commentary on the glorification of war. Vonnegut forces you to laugh in… show more.

Perhaps the most “realistic” novel of this bunch, Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award-winning novel follows an unnamed black narrator’s life in a small southern town, as detailed through his memories, dreams, and desires.

Ellison didn’t intend to write a “protest novel,” apparently, but it has become exactly that: a protestation of the inequities of an American system designed to keep Black people in the shadows. The novel’s voice, though singular, is representative of an entire social movement. A perfect novel. 

I read this novel when I was twenty-two years old.

I remember exactly where I was (in the kitchen of a dilapidated apartment I loved) and what time of day I read it (early afternoon until early evening). I cackled and sobbed (I am not a sobber), and afterward, I couldn’t get the main character’s voice out of my head for days. He narrated everywhere I went and everything I did.

Before then, I’d always written casual nonsense for my own entertainment, but I knew afterward I wanted to do that—I wanted to make people laugh, horrify them, and put their hearts through the wringer. 

In this book, George Eliot’s novel of provincial life in 1830s England, nearly everyone marries the wrong person. Even the future happiness of its heroine, Dorothea, when she finally unites with her true love, Will, is questionable. And yet it stands for me, not only as one of the finest novels ever written but one of literature’s greatest romances.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that it is a novel “for grown-up people.” I believe it is essential reading because it reflects real life where couples are mismatched, love goes unrequited, and ambitions are thwarted. It illuminates the small ways our better selves become compromised—and the larger gestures by which we are redeemed. As Eliot’s characters zigzag their way to each other, it is love that brings this redemption. How very romantic!

I’m the youngest of six sons. Our father read this book aloud to each of us. By the time I came along, he’d had lots of practice. He had distinct voices for all the characters. I can still hear him doing Jim’s voice after Jim gets whacked by the rattlesnake. I had nightmares for a week.

Your grasp of reality is altered when you read Huck Finn as a kid. Twain sweeps you out onto the Mississippi, where you mentally, emotionally, and physically, yes, physically, endure the journey with Huck and Jim.

I didn’t realize until I read the novel years later that this book was the first to blow my mind. And what was I? Nine? Maybe ten? Thanks, Dad!

Faulkner is a problem, and for a Southern writer, he’s a problem that must be confronted.

The Bear is about the annual hunt for the “taintless and incorruptible” Old Ben, the legendary animal living along the Tallahatchie River. It’s also about ownership and inheritance and ‘manhood,’ filtered through Faulkner’s obsessions and nostalgia and limitations.

A story that taught me that grappling with, and arguing with, a work of literature is an unending struggle but sometimes a necessary one.

The main character, Bruce Robertson, is repulsive. But there’s something deeply funny about a pathologically miserable bastard.

Bruce does and says terrible things, he believes terrible things, he plays sadistic tricks against coworkers (he’s a detective sergeant in Edinburgh). But the thing that really makes me squirm about Bruce is the food he eats and how he goes about eating it. Despite Bruce’s repellent nature, Welsh’s approach to the character is magical.

I was locked in from the first page—I couldn’t look away—and the glints and glimmers of Bruce’s humanity ultimately made my heart break.

It has been interesting to read the reviews for this book. I ordered it when I learned it was about family history, but another wanted it because of horse whisperers in the title, yet another was drawn because of the artwork of one of the Allen brothers.

This is a corner of history that was new to me—a family moving from Missouri to the wilds of Montana to oversee a timber operation, but the sons learning training horses from Blackfoot Indians, which turned into jobs. They also trained horses for the army during WWI. They were hunters and mountainmen. Leather items they made still survive among descendants. Lee and Edd Allen's interests were so different.

Lee stayed with their parents when they moved to California, still cherishing the outdoors. Edd was an artist, illustrator, printmaker, and lived in Paris for a time. One etching is in the Smithsonian, and others… show more.

McGuane sure kicked it off for me in terms of seeing a way to write new fiction. Story is not a priority in his world rather observation of characters battling the odds of surviving each day. The reader wants to be like some of the characters and run to the hills from others but the sense of humor, dirt under the fingernails of these singular people we’ll never meet, relationships we’ll never be in, and locations such as Livingston, Montana or Key West, Florida we won’t spend much time in, draws me to McGuane’s page. McGuane, who wrote scripts for Missouri Breaks and Rancho Deluxe, writes like a filmmaker – the smells, the weather, the alcohol, the drugs – the reader is in the scene, the sun on your neck, the dust in the air, the sound of the ice-cold creek. McGuane is a travel agent.