100 books like O Pioneers!

Jane Austen would have made such a great therapist! Her razor-sharp observations, combined with profound insights into people and relationships, make this book an all-time favorite of mine. I love her descriptions of falling in (and out of) love and how fallible each of her characters is, reminding us of our humanity–especially when it comes to matters of the heart.

What also strikes me is how true it is that pride, image, and status can still play out in our more modern relationships today. This book feels very old-fashioned in places, but it warns us how easily we can hurt other people and damage relationships, sometimes irrevocably. There’s a lot to learn from Emma, and I enjoy seeing relationships depicted in fiction, where so much can be explored through a fascinating and absorbing story, too.

I first read this classic story in my teens and was instantly besotted by Hardy’s farming world and the characters he filled it with. It is still the one I would take with me to my desert island if I was only allowed a single book to keep me company.

And what company I’d be in. Bathsheba Everdene is the ultimate in strong female protagonists and she was carving her path as a farmer in a man’s world long before she inspired me to write about my own feisty heroine, Jude Gray. 

As a student I fell in love with Bathsheba’s steady shepherd, Gabriel Oak, and their pitted, frustrating but ultimately wonderful relationship is still one of the best love stories I’ve lost myself in.

What an amazing time to grow up in America as a pioneer settling into life on the prairie. This is the true story of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s resilient and loving family as they built their own home, hunted for their own food, and farmed the land. I read this book and others from the series to my daughters who were mesmerized by the life Laura led and the courage she displayed. The story depicts the challenges and the joys her family found in forging their own path and living life the way they wanted. The fact that the author captured all the ups, downs, and lessons learned and became a writer during that time period is another remarkable pioneering effort.

Annie Proulx is a genius with character, and she’s obsessed with how hard humans work to uphold their myths of identity and achievement even when the odds are stacked against them. Close Range is the best of her three very good story collections about the West. It’s famous, and rightly so, for the trail-blazing tale of cowboy queerness "Brokeback Mountain". But each story is taut with observation and image. “The Mud Below,” “The Half-Skinned Steer”—there’s more than one American classic in this book. Some Westerners aren’t fans of Proulx, but I am. She doesn’t pull her punches about what it’s really like to ranch, rodeo, fantasize about retirement, or care for family in a place with no safety net, extreme weather, and no neighbors around the corner.

Mollie was 18 years old and a new bride in 1860 when she and her husband left eastern Nebraska for the gold diggings of Colorado.

The 7-week journey across the plains tested her strength and endurance, but Mollie battled the hardships and isolation of pioneer life with humor, intelligence, and honesty. She never intended her journal to be published, but it was, and I found it inspirational.

The hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, cross-dressing heroine of the American West continues to keep a python grip on the imagination. “I’m a howling coyote from Bitter Creek, the further up you go the worse it gets and I’m from the headwaters,” she used to rap. Calamity fascinates because she is a self-made myth and Linda Jucovy’s biography is an informed and insightful exploration of that myth.   

Is Undine Spragg Edith Wharton’s least admiral protagonist? Perhaps. But as well, she is her most beguiling.

With her modest mid-western roots and her hunger for something more, she personifies the American dream, only she incarnates its less noble form. Cunning and beautiful, she uses her every charm exclusively in service to her ambition.

There is something thoroughly modern about her self-belief, her perpetual reinvention. It’s impossible to look away as she ruthlessly forges her own future, defying expectations and conventions time and again. 

They say what goes around comes around; but when it comes to Undine Spragg we are constantly left wondering if the truism can hold.

This novel is sometimes described as the Victorian Pride and Prejudice, and it’s true there are many similarities.

Margaret Hale moves with her parents from rural southern England to a northern manufacturing town and experiences profound culture shock. She spars with John Thornton, the wealthy owner of a cotton mill, whose outlook and opinions are very different from her own.

In time their antagonism gives way to mutual understanding, and finally to love. But North and South isn’t only a love story.

There’s the ongoing conflict between the mill workers and the owners, and Margaret’s discoveries about herself as she begins to find ways to help the downtrodden. Gaskell was a minister’s wife in Manchester and interested in social reforms.

In this novel she explores many issues that are still relevant today. The book delves more deeply into the spiritual lives of the characters than does the BBC mini-series… show more.

Liese is a game-changing voice in neurodivergent romance, and her portrayal of generalized anxiety disorders in Ever After Always is spot on. The hero, Aiden, has to navigate the overwhelming feelings of having anxiety, battling his demons, and his fears of being vulnerable with his wife. This is also probably the best marriage in trouble romance I’ve read, really showing the work of two people finding each other again after they build up walls. It shows the power of vulnerability, the reality of mental illness, all perfectly mixed with hilarious banter and glorious sibling hijinks. 

Every discussion about the evolution of writing in ‘the West’ has to start with Willa Cather, who was the first writer from the west to be awarded a major literary award when she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, which isn’t even one of her five best novels. Cather wrote openly about alcoholism, domestic violence, and other painful topics, transforming western writing from cardboard cutout characters to real people. My Ántonia has become an American classic, not just in western literature but in all literature. My Ántonia is told from the point of view of a young farm boy who falls in love with the enchanting Ántonia, and it’s beautifully written, taking us into the emotional heart of youth and idealism in the West.