What to Read Next if You Liked The Rosie Project,The Opposite of Loneliness, Dreams of Gods & Monsters, Everybody’s Got Something, or The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
The Opposite of Loneliness, by Marina Keegan, is a slim collection of insightful short stories and essays by a writer at the beginning of a promising career—one cut short by tragedy when the author died in a car crash a few days after she graduated from Yale. Similarly, This Star Won’t Go Out is a posthumous collection of the art and journal writings of Esther Earl, a young writer who lost her battle with cancer at the age of 16. John Green has credited her with inspiring his novel The Fault in Our Stars, which is dedicated to her memory.
It might seem like a no-brainer to recommend an author’s earlier work, but Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy, capped off by the recently released Dreams of Gods & Monsters, proved to be such a smash I fear it has overshadowed her marvelous debut Lips Touch: Three Times. A collection of three shorter works, it displays all the intense emotion, memorable characters, and gorgeous prose of her breakthrough trilogy.
The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion, has a delicious premise (a brilliant but socially awkward genetics professor believes he has developed the perfect algorithm to find a mate) filtered through an utterly unique point of view (imagine a novel narrated by Sheldon Cooper). You’ll find similar pleasures in Something Missing, by Matthew Dicks, narrated by the world’s most peculiar thief—a man with obsessive-compulsive tendencies who steals from the same people over the course of years, taking only things he knows they won’t miss, like a spare lightbulb or a few egg—whose life is turned upside down when he gets too close to one of his “victims.”
Journalist Robin Roberts shares the personal story of her very public battle with cancer in Everybody’s Got Something. If you are looking for another inspiring story of someone facing difficult odds, there’s much wisdom in The Priority List: A Teacher’s Final Quest to Discover Life’s Greatest Lessons, by David Menasche. His account of how he discovered he had an inoperable brain tumor and what he did next reveals that the way to react to an unbeatable challenge is to rise to meet it anyway.
If you enjoyed the combination of quaint, small-town life and literary intrigue in The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin, you’ll find similar pleasures in Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn. The title character is a woman living on the island of Nallop, named for the inventor of the famous typesetting phrase “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” (which uses every letter of the alphabet). Emma runs afoul of the powerful town council, which insists on banning various letters as they fall off the statue of the island’s namesake (at which point they drop out of the novel as well).
What book are you recommending to people these days?