100 books like Portnoy's Complaint

I read this powerful graphic novel series when the first collections came out in the 1980s.

It shows the horrors of the Holocaust and the impact it has on the families of the survivors. Maus is best known for depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, but Art’s troubled relationship with his father Vladik and the death of his mother Anja by suicide frame the story.

Maus is my favorite graphic novel series and a must-read for understanding the Holocaust and how it shaped Jewish life since.

I’ll end with a book that started it all for me!

I still remember, in the year 2010, reaching the end of the essay "Goodbye to All That" where the date of publication is noted—1967—and how startled I was to realize something that feels so contemporary and alive had been written decades earlier. As in so much of her work, in this collection Didion offers vivid details from her life and brings her extraordinary powers of analysis to understanding their meaning.

As she once put it herself—in another essay, "Why I Write"—"Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”

I have always shied away from reading Lolita, not having the slightest desire to read about a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a twelve-year-old. Still, I could not compile a list of books about girls in inappropriate relationships without including this novel, the most famous book of all time on the subject.

I now fully appreciate why it has stood the test of time. I loved the dark comedy, often tipping into farce, the fabulous turns of phrase, the elaborate yet pin-sharp descriptions, and the blending of such sinister subject matter with the banalities of American post-war consumerism. Humbert Humbert is a truly deviant, disgustingly loathsome paedophile, but he’s funny and clever, and no one hates him more than he hates himself.

With its repetition and echoing of phrases, Kafkaesque chronology, and circular logic, Catch-22 illustrates the absurdity of war more than any other novel I have read.

Every time pilot Yossarian, the book’s anti-hero, gets close to flying the number of bombing missions required to go home, the requirement is raised. A paradoxical catch keeps them flying. If you ask to be grounded because you understand the dangers, you aren’t insane. Insane soldiers just need to ask to be grounded. But asking proves you aren’t crazy.

Beneath the absurdist comedy, there is an existential dread at the heart of the book. The death of Yossarian’s friend Snowden leads him to see that ‘Man was matter.’ For me, this is the dreadful secret that war exposes - the precarious preciousness of life - as our fragile bodies are turned to quiet, still matter.

This wild, uproarious classic still makes me laugh out loud when I read it, though I must have been through it eight or ten times. And while it’s darkly funny, that’s not even the best thing about it.

This book gives an intimate portrait of early-seventies drug culture, as well as American society and its political realities, in real-time. There’s no sense of distance or retrospection, except when he thinks about the countercultural explosion of a few years earlier. He sees it nostalgically and clearly sees its demise. Not everyone will agree with his assessment of that demise, but his take on it is an important one. For all its hilarity, it’s a very dark book.

My son’s a young adult now, but I treasure the memories of the hours we spent reading together. We went down all the well-trodden paths and shared countless joyful hours with J.K. Rowling and Dav Pilkey and The Mysterious Benedict Society, but the creativity of this book is exceeded only by its humor. Also, it clocks in at around 700 pages, so it’ll entertain you and your children for a good while. I always enjoy a laugh as a reader, and if my work elicits a chuckle from you, then I feel my mission is complete.

You cannot mention a coming-of-age novel without mentioning this classic.

Pip is an orphan who meets an escaped prisoner in a graveyard, does him a good deed, then is made a gentleman from an inheritance he knows nothing about. All of us enter our youth with great expectations and some of us are lucky enough, or unlucky, to meet our own beautiful Estella or the damaged and doomed Miss Havisham or the worldly and wise attorney Mister Jaggers.

Set in London where the worlds of extreme poverty and privilege co-exist side by side, we experience this world firsthand as Pip does wondering, all the time, if we can survive it unscathed. Ignore all other movie adaptations since they will only disappoint. Screen the 1946 version directed by David Lean. It is a great film.

There’s no list I can create in my head about haunting locations that doesn’t include this book. One of the most interesting aspects of horror novels that take place in a vivid setting is that they draw you in and both make you wish you could visit the location while at the same time thanking all that’s good and holy that you’re not there. That’s what The Shining did for me when I read it. 

The Overlook hotel is larger than life, treacherous, and inviting, and King does an incredible job at maintaining the high-pitched hum of tension from the moment the Torrances walk through its doors.

Set in Naples, Italy, this culturally rich book is the first in a series of four connected novels that tell the complete story of a profound and intense friendship between two women who are opposites in almost every way.

It is a friendship-love story that illustrates how a deep and abiding love can help and hurt two people. My Italian ancestors are from Naples, and Elena Ferrante’s books capture the spirit of their passions while delivering complex and emotional life lessons.

Published in 1943, this was certainly my favorite coming-of-age novel which I read in high school. I grew up in a neighborhood in Queens with trees and parks while to me, Brooklyn was a world of concrete.

Francie intrigued me with how she survived her drunk father, her single-minded mother, and the harshness of poverty. My working-class world was a lot less dangerous and drastic than Francie’s so she intrigued me as she never wavered or lost her belief that everything would work out. The novel is the epitome of the coming-of-age book since it is truly about growing up and looking back on childhood memories no matter how unforgiving they are.

You are only young once and the novel tells us to relish those memories since there is always something good in them even if they are buried. The movie directed by Kazan is a good watch showing the… show more.