Books like Bewilderment

01

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Suzanne Simard · Science

Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who discovered that trees communicate and share resources through underground mycorrhizal fungal networks — the research that gave rise to the concept of the "mother tree" and, at several removes, Peter Wohlleben's popular writing on the subject.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert · Science

The Sixth Extinction is Elizabeth Kolbert's account of the mass extinction event currently underway — the sixth in Earth's history, and the first caused by a single species.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

David Wallace-Wells · Science

The Uninhabitable Earth is David Wallace-Wells's catalog of what climate change will do to human civilization if carbon emissions continue on or near their current trajectory.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren · Memoir

Lab Girl is Hope Jahren's memoir of becoming a scientist, told alongside a parallel account of plant biology that is one of the most original structural decisions in recent nonfiction.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway · Literary fiction

A Farewell to Arms is set during the First World War in northern Italy and follows Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse.

A kindred literary fiction read.

06

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry · Literary fiction

A Fine Balance is set in an unnamed Indian city during Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977, a period of suspended democracy, forced sterilization, and slum clearances that is barely taught in the West and barely taught in India.

A kindred literary fiction read.

07

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · Literary fiction

A Little Life follows four men from college into middle age and beyond — Willem, an actor; JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; and Jude, a lawyer with a past that is revealed in increasingly devastating detail as the novel progresses.

A kindred literary fiction read.

08

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce · Literary fiction

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traces the intellectual and spiritual development of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to the edge of adulthood, when he leaves Ireland to pursue life as an artist.

A kindred literary fiction read.

09

A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley · Literary fiction

A Thousand Acres retells King Lear on a thousand-acre Iowa farm in the 1970s.

A kindred literary fiction read.

10

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan · Literary fiction

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel told in thirteen chapters, each from a different point of view and sometimes in a radically different form — including one chapter composed entirely as a PowerPoint presentation.

A kindred literary fiction read.

11

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · Literary fiction

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins where Tom Sawyer left off — Huck Finn, the outcast son of the town drunk, has been taken in and given a respectable life he doesn't want.

A kindred literary fiction read.

12

American Pastoral

Philip Roth · Literary fiction

American Pastoral opens with a narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, learning at a high school reunion about the life and death of Seymour "the Swede" Levov — a man who embodied postwar American success so completely he seemed almost allegorical.

A kindred literary fiction read.