Powered by a book like {foo}
Recommendations based on All That Isby James Salter
* statistically, based on millions of data-points provided by fellow humans
Stoner
by John Williams
An academic's life of quiet desperation, finding solace in literature.
William Stoner is born on a small farm in 1891. After high school, the county agent advises he go to agriculture school. Stoner enrolls in the University of Missouri , where all agriculture students ... (Wikipedia)
Butcher's Crossing
by John Williams
An adventure tale of a young man in the American West, searching for a place to belong.
William Andrews, a Harvard student in the early 1870s, , is not happy with the mundanities of everyday life. After becoming inspired by the poetry and philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, , he decides ... (Wikipedia)
Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
A man's attempt to escape the pressures of adult life and find freedom.
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, formerly a high school basketball star, is now 26, and has a job selling a kitchen gadget named MagiPeeler. He is married to Janice, who was a salesgirl at the store where he ... (Wikipedia)
The Circle
by Dave Eggers
A cautionary tale of a powerful tech company that blurs the boundaries between privacy and surveillance.
Mae Holland, a recent college graduate, lands a job at The Circle, a powerful technology company run by the "Three Wise Men"—Tom Stenton, a ruthless businessman; Eamon Bailey, a likeable public ... (Wikipedia)
The Art of Fielding
by Chad Harbach
A college baseball team's success and failures are intertwined with the lives of five individuals.
Henry Skrimshander begins the novel as a 17-year-old playing on a Legion baseball team in Lankton, South Dakota. Although physically short and not muscular, Henry has an unusual gift for fielding, ... (Wikipedia)
Appointment in Samarra
by John O'Hara
A wealthy man in 1930s America tries to escape his fate, but ultimately meets it in a tragic way.
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly ... (Goodreads)
Shortcomings
by Adrian Tomine
A man's introspective look at his relationship, as he reflects on his past and current life.
Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings is his only work that fully deals with themes of being a young Asian-American male in American society. Ben Tanaka, the story's protagonist, lives in ... (Wikipedia)
The Bone People
by Keri Hulme
A story of three damaged individuals who come together in a remote coastal community in New Zealand, and their journey towards healing and redemption.
The Bone People is an unusual story of love. What makes it unique are the way of telling, the subject matter, and the form of love that the story narrates. This is not a romance, but a story filled ... (Wikipedia)
The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
An exploration of memory and its impact on the present, looking at the choices we make in life.
By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be ... (Goodreads)
The End of Eddy
by Édouard Louis
Autobiographical novel revealing the oppression and social exclusion experienced by an impoverished rural French family.
The most talked-about European novel since My Struggle —a sexually frank, brutally honest coming-of-age story “Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over ... (Goodreads)
The Sea
by John Banville
A man reflects on his past and reconciles his memories of youth with the present.
The story is told by Max Morden, a self-aware, retired art historian attempting to reconcile himself to the deaths of those he loved as a child and as an adult. The novel is written as a reflective ... (Wikipedia)
Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen
A family saga revealing the struggles of a divided nation, and the power of love to heal.
The novel opens with a brief look at the Berglund family during their time living in St. Paul, Minnesota , from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. The Berglunds are portrayed as an ideal ... (Wikipedia)
Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
A reverend's reflections on life in the Midwest, and the lessons of faith and family.
The book is an account of the memories and legacy of John Ames as he remembers his experiences of his father and grandfather to share with his son. All three men share a vocational lifestyle and ... (Wikipedia)
The Stories of John Cheever
by John Cheever
A collection of short stories that explore the human condition in the modern era.
Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising ... (Goodreads)
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
by Ben Fountain
Billy Lynn and his fellow soldiers are hailed as heroes during a football halftime show, but the reality of war and their uncertain future loom over them.
19-year-old Specialist Billy Lynn is part of an eight-man unit, Bravo Squad, fighting in Iraq. After key moments of a brief but intense fight anointed as "the Battle of Al-Ansakar Canal" are filmed ... (Wikipedia)
The North Water
by Ian McGuire
A gruesome, dark journey on a whaling ship to the icy north, uncovering the depths of human depravity.
A ship sets sail with a killer on board . . . 1859. A man joins a whaling ship bound for the Arctic Circle. Having left the British Army with his reputation in tatters, Patrick Sumner has little ... (Goodreads)
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
by Cormac McCarthy
A violent and bloody western epic, exploring the depths of human depravity.
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." ... (Barnes & Noble)
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy
A man's passage from a broken home to embracing a life of freedom and solitude.
The novel begins with Suttree observing police as they pull a suicide victim from the river. Suttree is living alone in a houseboat, on the fringes of society on the Tennessee River, earning money by ... (Wikipedia)
Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson
An elderly man reflects on his past, uncovering long-buried secrets and memories.
We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and one of the first days of ... (Goodreads)
This Is How You Lose Her
by Junot Díaz
A collection of stories about young love, heartache, and the struggle to find one's place in the world.
On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a ... (Goodreads)
Our Souls at Night
by Kent Haruf
An elderly couple's exploration of love, loneliness, and companionship.
A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future. In ... (Goodreads)
Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham
A young man's struggles to find a sense of purpose, despite a series of catastrophic misfortunes.
The book begins with the death of Helen Carey, the much beloved mother of nine-year-old Philip Carey. Philip has a club foot and his father had died a few months before. Now orphaned, he is sent to ... (Wikipedia)
The Razor's Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
A spiritual journey in search of personal fulfillment, as an individual in a rapidly changing world.
Maugham begins by characterizing his story as not really a novel but a thinly veiled true account. He includes himself as a minor character, a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the major ... (Wikipedia)
Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
Interconnected stories of ordinary lives in 1970s New York, inspired by a high-wire artist's death-defying feat.
The events of the story are told in a largely non-linear fashion, with several different narrators telling the story from different perspectives. The story is interspersed with fictionalized accounts ... (Wikipedia)
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
A social commentary on the English legal system, exploring themes of inequality, injustice and corruption.
Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually ... (Goodreads)
100 Love Sonnets
by Pablo Neruda
Collection of love poems exploring the depths of passion, desire and longing.
Against the backdrop of Isla Negra - the sea and wind, the white sand with its scattering of delicate wild flowers, the hot sun and salty smells of the Pacific - the poet sets the poems in ... (Goodreads)
Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez
An epic love story spanning decades, exploring the power of true love.
The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Florentino and Fermina fall in love in their youth. A secret relationship blossoms between the two with the help of Fermina's ... (Wikipedia)
Sputnik Sweetheart
by Haruki Murakami
A surreal exploration of love and longing, as two people struggle to come to terms with their feelings.
Sumire is an aspiring writer who survives on a family stipend and the creative input of her only friend, the novel's male narrator and protagonist, known in the text only as 'K'. K is an elementary ... (Wikipedia)
Saga, Volume 2
by Brian K. Vaughan
An intergalactic adventure of two star-crossed lovers and their families.
Each issue of Saga is titled with a numerical Chapter, such as "Chapter 1" for the debut issue. Every six chapters comprise a story arc designated as a "Volume" and are reprinted as trade paperbacks. ... (Wikipedia)
Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov
by Anton Chekhov
A collection of short stories depicting the lives of ordinary people in Russia.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Karenina, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring ... (Goodreads)
