On the Transformative Power of Fiction
Photo by Sandi Sonnenfeld
175 Books Worth Reading
Dec 2021: As people are always asking me about books I like, I’ve updated this to include some new gems I’ve recently discovered over the past five years.
My mother said I was a late reader. Since I didn’t start to talk until I was three years old (though when I did so I supposedly skipped the typical baby talk and went straight to full sentences), I guess that isn’t surprising. I didn’t begin reading until I was seven, which isn’t all that usual, but given that two of my older siblings began reading as early as four, it probably seemed delayed to my parents. Either way, I certainly made up for it, as by the time I was eight, I had already read both The Secret Garden and the entire More-of-a-Kind-of-Family series (if you are not familiar with that group of novels, think of them as the Jewish version of the Little House books—only set in the Lower East Side rather than the pioneer towns of Minnesota) at least three times.
Writers are first and foremost readers. Like with any other craft, it helps to study with masters who can show you how to maximize your tools. Luckily, for writers, all you need is a library card and your free apprenticeship can begin.
I do know that my parents made sure that my siblings and I participated in the summer reading program at our local public library in elementary school, whereby participants were expected to read at least one book each week for 10 weeks. I recall the children’s librarian asking my mother to withdraw me from the summer program at the end of third grade because I plowed my way through 10 novels during the first week and it made the other students “feel bad” to already see my name at the end of the “race track” posted to the wall of the children’s reading room that charted each kid’s progress when the program had just began.
I also remember the shame I felt the day the same librarian called my mother at home (by that time, I was able to ride my bike to the library on my own) because I wanted to check out books from the adult section of the library. I was 11 and had just read The Diary of Anne Frank, which set me off on a year-long obsession with Holocaust literature, reading just about every book I could about find about child survivors of the concentration camps. My mother told the librarian that she didn’t believe in censorship, that any of her children were free to read whatever we liked. I will be forever grateful to my mother for that, even though my interest in the Holocaust stemmed not, as my mother suspected, from the fact that several of my father’s mother’s relatives perished in Nazi-occupied Hungary, but because I was being bullied by my eldest brother-cousin, whom my parents adopted, along with his two younger sisters, after my aunt and uncle died.
Years later, a therapist helped me understand that I likely was drawn to the Holocaust stories because the young victims served as role models—if they managed to survive even the most cruel and heinous of acts, atrocities so debased that too many in Europe refused to acknowledge their occurrence even as the smell of the flesh burning in the crematoria wafted across the nearby towns of Treblinka, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the twenty other death camps, not to mention the nearly 20,000 additional camps where the Nazis held Jews, Communists, gypsies, homosexuals and other undesirables—surely I could learn to cope with the bullying I suffered at home. That my brother’s own parents were dead made me feel even worse, which is why, even though the attacks went on for five years, I never actually told my parents what my brother (with the silent complicity of the rest of my siblings) was doing—just kept hoping for rescue that never came. I turned to books then, and, to a lesser extent, movies, to help me make sense of a scary, confusing world. I also turned to books for entertainment and solace when I contracted a particularly virulent strain of flu in the fourth grade, forcing me to stay in bed for three long weeks.
Writers are first and foremost readers. Like with any other craft, it helps to study with masters who can show you how to maximize your tools. Luckily, for writers, all you need is a library card and your free apprenticeship can begin. As for your tools; if you are a prose writer as I am, they are the core elements of narrative: language usage, point of view, voice, setting, character development, plot structure, dialogue and theme.
I have read thousands of books, mostly fiction, over the course of my life so far. Some blew me away with what writers could do with plot structure; others experimented with voice or point of view to create captivating characters. Many appealed to me for their sense of adventure or setting in exotic locales or time periods not my own. Most stories, however, sated me the way a good meal does, but within a few hours, I found myself hungering for something different.
The 172 works of fiction and creative nonfiction complied below, however, transformed me in a permanent way. The characters haunt me; I can still tell you what each book on this list elicited in me and why. These narratives helped shape not only the way I write and how I use the tools of my craft, but why I write at all. Finally, certain works, those by authors like Didion, Kingsolver, Atwood and Fitzgerald, speak to me in the deeply intimate way that friends do; despite the often dark nature of their stories, these writers make me feel as though I finally found a home where I’m understood for who I am.
While a number of these books come straight from the traditional Western literary canon, encountering them for the first time as part of a school or college assignment, most I discovered on my own wandering the back stacks of the local library or among the crowded shelves of an independent bookstore in Boston, Seattle or New York. Perhaps that’s why so many of the books are by women, whose work, though they write far more novels, memoirs and story collections than men do these days, remains woefully under-represented in reviews by top book critics and fails to be taught in contemporary university classrooms.
While I read the majority of these books for the first time before the age of thirty, one of my greatest joys in life today is being transported by the work of an author whom I never heard of before, building and expanding upon the influences of my past.
By sharing this list, I hope that other readers too will find a book that speaks to them, or at the very least brings them joy, insight or inspiration. I encourage you to recommend books not listed here that transformed your life in some small way.
Early Influences (Ages 8-18)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Red Badge of Courage by Stephan Crane
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
The Diary of a Young Woman by Anne Frank
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L Konigsburg
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’engle
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Secret Language by Ursula Nordstrom
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emma Orczy
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
All of a Kind of a Family (series) by Sydney Taylor
Night by Elie Wiesel
Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Novels
Of Love and Shadows by Isabelle Allende
Daughter of Fortune by Isabelle Allende
In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Afterlife by Julia Alvarez
Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
Emma by Jane Austen
The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler… by Italo Calvino
The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Democracy by Joan Didion
The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion
The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Vine of Desire by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Magus by John Fowles
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg*
The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein
Intuition by Allegra Goodman
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
The Binding Chair: Or, a Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society by Kathryn Harrison
Poison by Kathryn Harrison
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Empress of the Splendid Season by Oscar Hijuelos
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Dreamer by Charles Johnson*
Middle Passage by Charles Johnson*
Eva’s Man by Gayl Jones
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries by Kaylie Jones
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
The Fifth Book of Peace by Maxine Hong-Kingston
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
The Fixer by Bernard Malumud
Beatrice & Virgil by Yann Martel
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Last Life by Claire Messud
The Strangeness of Beauty by Lydia Minatoya
Beloved by Toni Morrison
A Mercy by Toni Morrison
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Ahab’s Wife: Or, the Star-Gazer by Sara Jeter Naslund
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
July, July by Tim O’Brien
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Termite & Lark by Jayne Ann Phillips
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
The Ghostwriter by Philip Roth
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
The Fatigue Artist by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Waterland by Graham Swift
The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan
A Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
Rules for Saying Goodbye by Katherine Taylor
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Meridian by Alice Walker
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Short Story Collections
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
Come to Me by Amy Bloom
What Do We Mean When We Talk About Love? by Raymond Carver
My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers by Kelly Cherry
Short Stories by Anton Chekhov
Goodbye Without Leaving by Laurie Colwin
Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander
The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Edited by Mathew Bruccoli)
Drunk with Love by Ellen Gilchrist
The Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway
Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel
Transparency by Frances Hwang
Dr. King’s Refrigerator & Other Bedtime Stories by Charles Johnson*
Why I Don’t Write by Susan Minot
Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
A Good Man is Hard to Find & Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor
The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley
Delicate: Stories of Light & Desire by Mary Sojourner
Memoir
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Shanghai Diary by Ursula Bacon
Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal by Toni Bentley
The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lourde
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
The Color of Water by James McBride
Who Do You Think You Are? by Alyse Myers
Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
The Diary of Anais Nin (in four volumes)
Paradise, Piece by Piece by Molly Peacock
The Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez
Still Loved by the Sun by Migael Scherer
Life-Size by Jennifer Schute
Darkness Visible by William Styron
A Man without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
Collusion by Evan Zimroth
Personal Essays/Commentary
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
The White Album by Joan Didion
Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
From Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnick
Why I’m Like This by Cynthia Kaplan
Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver
High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver
On Animals by Susan Orlean
An Italian Education by Tim Parkes
Living Out Loud by Anna Quindlan
Naked by David Sedaris
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem
Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell
Bachelor Girls by Wendy Wasserstein
Promiscuities by Naomi Wolf
The End of America by Naomi Wolf
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Writers on Writing
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood
Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
Writers Dreaming by Naomi Epel
On Authorship (aka The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster
On Writers & Writing by John Gardner
Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist
Monster in a Box by Spaulding Gray
The Way of the Writer by Charles Johnson*
Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life
Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See
The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan
Anything We Love Can Be Saved by Alice Walker
One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty
Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times
* Authors I’ve studied with, so have had a special impact on my work
Sandi Sonnenfeld 
One Response to “On the Transformative Power of Fiction”
THIS: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L Konigsburg Thanks for sharing, Sandi!
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