10 books like Wish You Were Here

The original, and still unsurpassed! First published in Japan in 1906, this gleeful skewering of the foibles of Japan’s upper-middle-class during the Meiji era—told in first-person narration from the perspective of an eminently observant and sardonic housecat—manages to feel fresh and modern more than 100 years later and reads like something that could have been published last week. When I first set about writing my own novel from a cat’s perspective, Love Saves the Day, this was the first book I turned to for inspiration. It was so good, it almost left me too intimidated to write mine. Almost.

The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov is one of my favorite pieces of Russian writing.

Encapsulating the, often deadly, absurdity of life during the 50’s Soviet system and how it is not less than the devil’s musings and doings, the story still, excellently evokes notions of hope, love, comedy, tragedy, and learning within this setting.

What still remains with me is the vivid richness in description and characters. In my words, Bulgakov and specifically The Master and Margarita are to literature what Tarantino is to cinema and films.

Her business card simply says, Holly Golightly, Traveling. With darker undertones than the classic fifty-year-old film, this very short novel is a portrait of a nineteen-year-old woman who runs away from her husband in Texas, establishes herself as a socialite in New York City, then runs away some more. Holly seems all fun and bubbles—witty, resourceful, resilient, and flirtatious, but her insides are haunted by trauma. She describes her past with an “almost voluptuous account of swimming and summer, Christmas trees, pretty cousins and parties...” in a way the narrator concludes is certainly not the background of a child who had run away. Holly is dissociated most of the time. And as a writer, I’m really impressed by all of Capote’s characters—each extraordinarily sculpted; his descriptions simply leap, all with delightful images.

We absorb this tale, like Peter Pan's, from childhood, and it provides us all with a leaning to light-hearted fantasy and a story pattern of leaving the real world and returning to it. An adventure may begin by going through a wardrobe as in the first Narnia novel, or into and out of Tom Bombadil's Old Forest in Tolkien. Alice goes down a rabbit hole. There are rabbit holes, wardrobes, forests, sailboats.... The world Alice gets to is full of strangeness appealed to me for Orpheus Rising whose characters have a similar variety.

Zany family members and weddings gone wrong provide page-turning laughs in the first book in the Meg Lanslow series. The heroine is smart, funny, and… a blacksmith. The small-town shenanigans just keep coming in this laugh-out-loud mystery, but the heart comes from the familial relationships. (No peacocks are harmed in the making of this mystery, but they do provide plenty of laughs.)

As the domestic slave trade became more expansive alongside the growth of the cotton economy, it attracted the increased ire of antislavery activists in the United States and England alike. Using sketches and paintings of the slave trade made by British artist Eyre Crowe in the 1850s as an entry point, Maurie McInnis explores the landscape of the slave trade in major American cities such as Richmond and New Orleans. In the process, she also opens a fresh window onto the world of transatlantic abolitionism.

If you like reading fast action and involved mysteries, you’ll enjoy Patricia Cromwell’s novel, Isle of Dogs. This action-packed story delves into the historical plots surrounding a small island off the coast of Virginia, where it is said ancestors of long-ago pirates reside, and to this day a sunken treasure remains at the bottom of the sea off their shores. The Governor of Virginia decides to build speed bumps on the small island where the preferred mode of transportation is golf carts. Disarrays begin, so State Trooper Andy Brazel is assigned to investigate and discovers a gang’s intentions to raid the island in search of the treasure.

I loved The Waltons, the closeness of the family, and how they solved typical family squabbles. As an adult, I watched every episode again with my kids, so I was thrilled when I actually met The Homecoming author Earl Hamner, Jr. (the real John-Boy Walton/Clay-Boy Spencer) in an online writers’ group way back when the internet was first invented. We became great online friends. His John-Boy character inspired the character in my book, a good-hearted teen who, despite living in modern times, traverses his small southern town on a horse, just as John-Boy rode Blue, his mule.

Growing up on a farm in a community begun by freedmen after the Civil War in Virginia, this African American writer shows how freshly grown food sustained her family even in hard times.

In this memoir and classic southern cookbook, the “first lady of southern cooking,” as she has been called, evoked a warm agrarian sensibility, portraying a distinct southern sense of place through poetic prose that describes the sensual nature of life close to nature.

The tastes, smells, and sounds of the South jump off the page as she describes her family’s sustenance through their knowledge of farm life. Seasonal produce and the dishes from them give the book a structure that continues to resonate.

The recipes breathe an authenticity of a remembered life around food, and the reading experience is an immersive one, putting readers in a beloved place to its author.

First of all, isn't that an awesome title? This narrative is a child-appropriate and compelling description of Mildred and Richard Loving and their path to the Supreme Court. The two got married in D.C. in 1958, when interracial marriage was illegal in their home state of Virginia. Returning home after the wedding, they were arrested, jailed, and told to leave the state. They took their case to court arguing that Virginia's ban on interracial marriage violated the Constitution, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. As described in the back matter, the creators of this book themselves have an interracial marriage. An author's note reflects on their lives and their perspective on the Lovings' story.