88 books like You Will Know Me

This book may seem out of place in a list of psychologically-minded self-help recommendations. And it is long, and hard to read. Don’t even get me started on the use of end-notes in a work of fiction. But it is quite simply one of the best books written in the past 100 years and it is all about people who have gotten stuck, trapped by habit or circumstance, and are yearning for a way to find meaning in life.

To me, this book is a self help book because it is written so powerfully (in a not-so-distance fictional future) that as the characters are inevitably transformed and sometimes freed from their assumed destinies, Wallace somehow illustrates how we too can be transformed in our daily routines and interactions by finding moments of clarity and meaning right where we are, rather than being saved by some outside force that promises liberation… show more.

This criminally overlooked gem of a novel follows Owen Webb, a troubled young man with trouble at home. And the boy he befriends (or more accurately befriends him). Even more trouble. Basketball is Owen's obsession and outlet, and while it simmers in the background of this novel, it's one of the most accurate and lovingly depicted hoops books you'll ever read.

This first-person tale of a North Dakota wrestler chasing glory in his senior season isn't what you think it is as you spend a couple of hundred pages in the mind of a kid who is obsessive, hilarious, and above all, lonely. I know jack about wrestling but the sports sequences are engrossing because it's less about what's happening and more about Stephen's reaction to what's happening. Also criminally underrated.

Originally written as a tennis coaching text – the wisdom of this approach transcends the world of tennis and carries an important message about how changing our thinking can release the latent potential in us whatever we are doing.

The focus is on the importance of self-talk – what our outer self is telling the inner self and in doing so chimes beautifully with what we know about our unconscious mind. We know that more than 90% of our behaviour is driven by our unconscious and it hears everything we say to ourselves – so consider the impact of critical self-talk and the potential damage to our confidence and performance.

The book is summarised in the formula: Potential minus Interference = Performance

We achieve at our best when we manage the ‘Interference’ we impose on ourselves!

This anthology is full of heart and features a wide field of sports and experiences and identities. The poems are a mix of serious, moving, and funny moments, but most of all they’re relatable and accessible. I’ve read many of the poems several times, making new discoveries with each read, and other poems beg to be read aloud in a spoken word performance. This is a great collection for teens to enjoy by themselves, or for teachers to share in the classroom. It might even inspire you to write your own sports poem.

The complexities of the human, the whole human. That’s what Paley explores. How we think, how we act and feel, how we play and fight, how we talk. And talk. Paley is a master of nuance, and often reveals her mastery through dialogue. There is always a convincing urgency in the way her characters speak, and a delicious talking-around a thing, an idea. Her worlds richly detailed and urban. I’d like to live in the apartment building of Grace Paley’s mind. 

Joe Keenan’s madcap farces made me want to write my own. They’re the kind of books that make you laugh so hard you just have to read lines from it to the person sitting next to you (preferably someone you know because strangers on mass transit don’t appreciate that kind of thing). As zany as they are, his novels are rooted in the real, doing-whatever-you-can-to-make-it lives of theater people. So they’re not as far-fetched as you might think. Life in New York City really can be that wildly glamorous. And hilarious.

By most accounts, immigrant literature deals primarily with how immigrants struggle to adapt to their adopted countries.

Its readers have come to expect stories of identity formation, of how immigrants create ethnic communities and maintain ties to countries of origin. Yet such narratives can center exceptional stories of individual success or obscure the political forces that uproot millions of people the world over.

This novel simulates the intimacy of immigrant memoir by seemingly giving readers access to his narrator’s interiority; it seems to cater to readerly expectation. And yet this is ultimately a ruse to obtain readerly investment, which Cole then redirects to the global history of forced migration and dispossession.

I love the combination of erudition and subtlety in a novel that, while ranging across three continents, allows readers to think simultaneously about dislocation across history and in our contemporary world.

This is post-modern crime fiction thematically linked and all with increasingly unreliable characters—because they’re each going insane.

In City of Glass private investigator, Daniel Quinn, goes mad sinking deeper into an investigation about identity. Who is telling his story and can they be relied on? Is it any of these characters who appear: ‘the author,’ ‘Paul Auster the writer,’ ‘Paul Auster the detective’?  Whoosh.

I love this stuff but understand it’s an acquired taste!

This beautifully written history focuses on another nineteenth-century Black New Yorker who defies expectations and deserves our attention. Like Educated for Freedom and Black Gotham, White’s story places us in historical moments surrounding the 1827 law ending slavery in New York State. White puts us on the vibrant, noisy, streets of the city, inviting us to see both hope and defiance in how Black people dressed, how they walked down the street, and what they did at the theater. At the center of this history emerges James Hewlett, a man whose life is worthy of at least one feature film, but has remained largely unknown outside of specialists in the field. Hewlett was a Black Shakespearean actor who insisted on his right to interpret Shakespeare for himself and for the community, even as white tastemakers sought to keep the bard’s words to themselves.