100 books like The Floating Opera and The End of the Road

This book’s celebration of rebelliousness of spirit and anti-institutionalism is why I like it.

Set in a psychiatric hospital, like Regeneration, its medical staff are closer in spirit to Dr. Yealland in that book, who prefers inflicting pain in order to cure than to the humane Dr. Rivers. I enjoyed the humour and the scandalous behaviour of McMurphy, the sane con-man in the asylum who battles the authoritarian and controlling Nurse Ratched. It is very much in the spirit of the anti-establishment 1960s when it was written.

Other inmates rebel too and draw down Ratched’s ire upon themselves, leading to suicide, and McMurphy attacks Ratched because, however rebellious, he cannot stomach this tragedy. There is a sad and bleak end for him, as ‘authority’ wins out. The ending is one of hope, but not for McMurphy. Like the other books on my list so far, this, too, was filmed.

Based on the boyhood memories of author Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio is one of the best portraits of small-town American life in the 19th century.

Centered around the coming-of-age of George Willard, the 22 stories in the book provide numerous character sketches of people in the fictional town of Winesburg. Anderson writes in a plain style that suits the world he describes.

The book pioneers an approach to fictional portraiture also taken up by Wiseman in his later Our-Town cycle of films that focus on individual rural communities—Aspen, Belfast, Maine, In Jackson Heights, and Monrovia, Indiana—and adopt a seemingly similar straightforward style. Like those films, the book features a series of glimpses that together add up more than just the sum of its parts.

Another book with an episodic structure, The Confidence-Man concerns an assorted group of Mississippi steamboat passengers whose individual hypocrisies are confronted by the mysterious character of the title.

Melville’s ship of fools features a variety of types, some of whom are caricatures of American literary figures including Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe. The book was published in 1857 on April Fool’s Day, an irony equal to the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula on Valentine’s Day, and a gesture that Wiseman, himself a great ironist, surely would appreciate.

Certainly, it is no surprise that Wiseman has referred to The Confidence-Man as his favorite novel. One might even find Melville’s elaborate prose style analogous to Wiseman’s careful editing and his ability to confront spectators with their own biases and preconceptions, as the eponymous confidence-man does in the book.

This is one of the few novels I’ve read twice for pleasure (rather than work). It’s a noirish novel that delves into the esoteric along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (which Kubrick allegedly considered adapting at one point but which I was unable to read twice!).

The book follows a film scholar who uncovers an incredible conspiracy around a fictional B-movie director called Max Castle, and the imperceptible images he placed in the gap between each of the twenty-four frames played every second in a movie: the so-called flicker of the title. Its author, Roszak, is better known for having coined the term "the counter-culture."

I have about five different editions of this amazing book. Heathcliff, Cathy, Thrushcross Grange…it’s all so bleak, gothic, and full of exclamation marks that you have to love its drama and tragedy set within the Yorkshire Moors.

At the heart of it, I love that Heathcliff (although exhibiting questionable behavior by today’s standards) is a foundling-done-good. I love a story where the discarded underdog ends up in a massive house on the moors with loads of money. Nevertheless, it is a tricky read, switching between narratives, but who hasn’t burst into song ‘a la Kate Bush’ upon hearing that title?

I absolutely loved this novel, not just for the craft (the writing is beautiful), but for the suspense created when a troubled man eavesdrops on a psychologist’s sessions.

Fascinated with one particular client, he gets deeply and actively involved in her search for identity and her ties to Nazi Germany. As a practicing psychologist, I tried, unsuccessfully I might add, to imagine how I would handle a similar situation.

Set in my town, 1970’s San Francisco during a tumultuous era marked by psychedelics, feminism, and the Zodiac killer, I even recognized the building where Ullman’s fictional psychologist practices because some of my colleagues have offices there.

A thin, little book and a true masterpiece!

Narrated by Manon Gaudet, the mistress of an 1830s plantation outside New Orleans, the novel forced me to adopt the perspective of a person who is both oppressed, as a woman in the 19th century, and oppressor, as a slave-owner, who is keenly observant and stunningly blind. Manon’s body-servant, Sarah, has given birth to a deaf wild-child who Manon cannot ignore, given his striking resemblance to her own husband. Manon, who is obsessed with Sarah too, is incapable of recognizing her as someone being victimized by her husband. She only sees a rival.

I teach Property in my classes. My students hate Manon. They also love the book!

White Ivy is such a zippy, delicious read. I don’t even normally like thrillers, but I loved this one. 

Part romance, part coming-of-age-story, and part social-climbing satire, this book had an absolutely magnetic protagonist in Ivy, who is the kind of terrible person you can’t look away from. Susie Yang’s writing is both astute and eviscerating, with plenty of memorable lines.

Plus it’s got the most spot-on description of WASP interior design I’ve ever read.

I’ve lived in Wisconsin since 1985, and somehow I had no idea there used to be a thriving Playboy resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

After the book came out I learned I even have a family member who worked security there—that’s how little people around here talk about this juicy history. Christina Clancy’s book is set in the 1980s in both Lake Geneva and the smaller community of East Troy, and she does an excellent job of balancing the celebrity and historical elements with the young Wisconsin women themselves and the complex relationship so many of them had with the seedy perception of Playboy. A lot of them were from farms and rural towns, and their families didn’t even know they worked there.

This particular Playboy resort was even known as a family-friendly destination. I loved learning about a world I had no idea existed, set against one I thought… show more.

The Heart of Redness is set in a rural Xhosa village on the Wild Coast of South Africa—a pristine environment threatened by a casino and hotel development. I used to visit this area on holidays as a child and was captivated by the rural way of life, tribal huts, unspoiled beaches, and dreamy lagoons. Mda is a master at capturing the beauty and romance of that coast through his evocative prose. The novel also presents a sober warning about the fragility of these environments and how easily they can be destroyed by unscrupulous development.