The most recommended books about New Jersey

I love a book that reads like a novel but is outrageously well-researched and transports me to another time. I love vivid characters who provide me with new lenses to better understand better historical events I thought I already understood.

This fast-paced nonfiction book about the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks that gripped the nation and inspired Jaws kept me on the edge of my seat. It also provides a look at the shark science of the day and the perceptions that informed it. It's definitely a beach read!

This award-winning novel follows Oscar, a young Dominican-American man from New Jersey struggling with his present as a self-confessed “ghetto-nerd” and the legacy of his family’s past. The book is a dazzling example of how complicated our relationship to our family can be. I read and reread passages trying to decode Diaz’s choice in language and how he created such a compelling cast of characters. Told in vary perspectives and points of view and leaping gloriously back and forth in time, the book brazenly displays how the past is never truly past when it comes to matters of family.

Welcome to the Neighborhood explores the complexities of forming adult friendships after moving into a new neighborhood and encountering an already established circle of friends.

I’ve felt like a fish out of water in a similar situation, and this story is eerily relatable.

I laughed and teared up too. This book gave me all the feels.

It’s an amazing debut about standing up for yourself, finding your tribe, and living a life that feels right to you. 

Drag pageantry owes a lot to Miss America, especially an Atlantic City pageant called Miss’d America. Greene documents the symbiotic relationship between the Atlantic City gayborhood that spawned this contest and the Miss America Pageant, where many gay locals worked as stylists, dancers, and on production crews behind the scenes. Launched in 1993, Miss’d America unified this community in response to the AIDS crisis and offered an alternative pageant for people who’d missed the real deal. Greene couches Miss’d America in the context of Atlantic City’s fascinating drag history going back to the turn of the century (because what better runway than the Atlantic City Boardwalk?), describing, for example, men who swanned along wearing “trick pants, pale purple hose, tan shoes with two-inch soles and lavender neckties” in 1925. 

A widow with a new lease on life thanks to her secretly wealthy aunt becomes involved in a murder.

Multigenerational, with the Italian grandma, her newbie journalist granddaughter, plus an ex-nun sister and an ex-sister-in-law.

This story involves food, jokes, and family love, albeit with much more brashness and outspokenness than any of the other books I listed, and also a lot more Italian, though the book is set in New Jersey.

Weekend treks to Chinatown, to satisfy cravings for dim sum, roast duck, et al, are a ritual for those of us of non-Chinese descent  with adventurous palates. But how many of us have considered the lives of the people who cook and serve us the food that we make the trek for? Jane Wong, a poet and creative writing professor, grew up as a "restaurant baby" in Jersey Shore's Chinatown in the U.S. A first generation American, a beneficiary of her immigrant family's struggle to assimilate and survive in America, her memoir is wise, tender, vulnerable, and poignant. The social issues facing new immigrants, from poverty and racism to lack of healthcare and affordable housing, that can make a creative work dense and depressing are revealed through Wong's meditations and recollections, nostalgic, poetic, joyful, and sorrowful. She holds nothing back in narrating her father's wrongheaded and failed attempts to capture… show more.

I loved this short story. The main character picks up an antique doll during one of his travels for his daughter. The doll’s name was Alice, and she was very creepy. I could imagine every feet patter and slam against the door with the author’s great way of describing details in the setting. The doll was on a mission and nothing was going to stand in her way. I enjoyed the twist regarding the bed and breakfast owner.

I was honored to read an early draft of this novel by fellow human and Jerseyite, Val Emmich, and was immediately taken with the voice of Joan, a 10-year-old girl with a special condition that gives her the ability to remember everything, but is afraid of being forgotten. To remedy that, she wants to win a prestigious songwriting contest by writing a song that makes people both want to dance and cry (two of the strongest feelings in her opinion). So she strikes a deal with Gavin, an adult songwriter who she believes can help her make that happen. Jersey City is the primary setting for this novel, a city that along with its many other charms, offers spectacular views of the New York City skyline. 

I couldn’t compile a list of books without including Judy Blume. In the forty years since I read my first Blume novel, a lot of things have changed, and—many have stayed the same.
Forever, first published in the mid-70s, is mildly erotic—and raw, and sensuous, and tender, and all the things that love and sex are. The sensual scenes are peppered in with great dialogue between the characters.

I especially love this book because no matter how many experiences I’ve had, I can still find a small piece of myself in protagonist Katherine—first sex, first love, first breakup, first death, and the many “firsts” that I’ve carried through my own life (divorce, pandemic, post-divorce love).

Forever may not always last, but it never fails to define chunks of our lives—always. 

A re-read – and a masterpiece. Roth's depiction of the life and world of Seymour 'The Swede' Levov is all-consuming, the Swede's troubles and fall (and rise) shattering. I re-read this after 20 years, now a father myself, and took a whole world more from it than first time out at 25. Sabbath's Theater may be a better or more extraordinary book but American Pastoral has its attack and pitch-black humor too and much more besides. In the “indigenous American berserk”, Roth named something at the heart of America – ever so but rarely more so than now. I don't read fiction, in general – but Philip Roth will always be the exception.