The most recommended books about dads

I wish I had a book like this when I was a moody teenager! My dad and I could have been closer and shared more things. A journal like this helps show pre-teens that their father was pretty cool when he was younger, and that parents and kids probably have more in common than they think! This book for 8-12-year-old daughters has questions that both dad and daughter answer plus prompters such as What is your greatest talent? It’ll make a great keepsake for daughters to revisit when they are an adult.

The public tends to put more credibility when they see a doctor approve childbirth information. The Bradley Method is a proven and universal method that encourages and teaches natural childbirth – and, includes the father of the baby. While I believe that giving birth should be initiated and orchestrated by the baby, the mother and father are primary participants in the event. 

The Bradley Method helps couples prepare for a drug-free childbirth, discusses natural solutions for challenges during pregnancy, and focuses on bonding between mother, baby and father. This book is one of the most respectful books for couples planning to give birth.

It is rare to find the view of a birth father in a story or online, so I was keen to read this to help widen my perspectives. This insightful, reflective autobiography helped me to imagine how my son’s birth father may be affected by the adoption. Andrew shares how the loss of his son to adoption has affected so many of his choices throughout the rest of his life. I read this around the time that I was due to write a contact letter to my son’s birth parents, and I feel that it helped me to write something that I hope his birth parents will find supportive and reassuring, rather than a superficial update to “tick the box.”

I finished J. Ryan Stradal’s Great Kitchens of the Northwest coming home on a plane from Chicago this summer and wept as I read his acknowledgment of his mother’s powerful influence on his work. Stradal’s mother was an English major and often read her sons stories she had written as class assignments.

Stradal’s voice reminds me of singer/songwriter John Prine. Like Prine, Stradal’s prose is full of humor and kindness, and he writes convincingly from a woman’s point of view. Great Kitchens is centered around a food-obsessed family.

The characters are fully realized. They experience tragedy and hardship, work long hours, fall in love, make terrible decisions, feel burdened by family obligations and expectations, and still manage to find hope, friendship, and community. 

This book reminded me of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, a complicated family drama much like we see in “Little Monsters.” I love characters with false narratives, ones whose external voices don’t match their inner voices at all.

They lie to themselves, they lie to us. This is the kind of book that makes you relieved not to live in it yet perversely guilty for sharing in it. The Gardners are a dysfunctional family, and I found myself staying up late every night to discover all the secrets that created their complex dynamics.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks, mainly crime, and this was the year I discovered Harlan Coben. I only knew him previously as the source material for high-quality Netflix thrillers, so I knew he’d be good at plot.

Still, I wasn’t prepared for the quality of his prose and the amazing heart with which he creates an endless series of compelling characters. I’ve loved every one I’ve listened to this year, but his latest, I Will Find You, about a father wrongly jailed for the murder of his child, is utterly spell-binding.

The chill prison realism and haunting desolation on the part of the central character gradually turn to hope and determination, with a thrilling and totally believable dénouement. Superb.

Tracey Garvis Graves’s novel about second chances and starting over is filled with so much warmth, it’s impossible not to cheer for her characters and to feel true empathy for their situations. Newly-divorced Layla discovers she had to make peace with her past to find love in her present—and music is the key to it all. 

I first encountered Selasi’s writing in a short story she published in Granta over a decade ago. Her prose is entrancing. Thick with mood, ambiance, danger, and beauty.

For some reason, it’s taken me years to track down her novel, Ghana Must Go, but it did not disappoint. Following the story of a Ghanaian/Nigerian family who emigrated to America, this book was full of empathy and intrigue. As a reader—I couldn’t put it down. As a writer—I admired Selasi’s deft handling of structure and multiple points of view. A moving and impressive read. 

I studied the post-modernists in college, and find Barthelme to be the funniest and most likable of that group. His collection of short fiction, Sixty Stories, is my desert island book, but he also wrote a few novels that I like, especially The Dead Father. The dead father looms large in the ethos of his society, and is also literally big—3,200 cubits long. And the dead father is not really dead—though all agree he’s past his prime. So, a road trip is organized: nineteen of his followers attach a cable to drag the massive, complaining figure to a cliff at the edge of the world. A truly witty and absurd little book.

Now, I am no friend to graphic novels. As a novelist I prefer a story told in long strokes. For Taniguchi Jiro, however, I make an exception.

When I stumbled across A Journal of My Father, I was initially skeptical. Page after page, however, with an almost cinematic panorama laid out before me, I found myself in complete awe of the fine power of observation that Taniguchi brings to the small things in life. The simple and still finds artistic expression in his work, the every day suddenly seems notable, and anyone who – like me – often finds themselves reaching for a handkerchief, consider yourself warned: this touches you, though without a show of sentimentality.

After the death of his father, a man travels to his hometown and, through various conversations and encounters, pursues memories that have stayed with him since childhood. That doesn’t sound all that exciting. But… show more.