Books like

Books like In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

12 books with a reading profile close to In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger. Inward-looking and contemplative; a moderate read.

1

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

Also inward-looking and contemplative · philosophy, memoir

Part biography and part memoir, this book follows Lulu Miller’s investigation into David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist who spent his life naming thousands of new fish species and rebuilding his collection after the 1906 Sa…
2

Stay True

by Hua Hsu

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Hua Hsu recounts his undergraduate years at Berkeley in the mid-1990s, focusing on his complex friendship with Ken, a Japanese American peer whose mainstream tastes Hsu initially judged as conventional.
3

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

In August 2022, thirty-three years after the fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institution.
4

Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice

by Cristina Rivera Garza

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

In 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered in Mexico City by an ex-boyfriend who refused to accept the end of their relationship.
5

M Train

by Patti Smith

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

In this memoir, Patti Smith tracks her daily routines, centered on her singular habit of visiting the same Greenwich Village café to drink black coffee and write.
6

The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

Also inward-looking and contemplative · philosophy, narrative

Following the sudden death of his father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear the voices of inanimate objects.
7

Mortality

by Christopher Hitchens

Also inward-looking and contemplative · philosophy, memoir

Christopher Hitchens chronicles his final eighteen months following a stage four esophageal cancer diagnosis.
8

My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

This book contains the formal lecture Kazuo Ishiguro delivered upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature.
9

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss

by Amy Bloom

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

After Amy Bloom’s husband, Brian Ameche, receives a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, he decides to end his life on his own terms before the illness erases his identity.
10

Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

In this memoir, Kiese Laymon addresses his mother to recount a childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, shaped by academic rigor and physical discipline.
11

Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Joan Didion examines the illness and 2005 death of her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, while confronting her own physical decline.
12

Women Talking

by Miriam Toews

Also inward-looking and contemplative · philosophy, narrative

Based on real events in the Manitoba Colony in Bolivia, this novel centers on eight Mennonite women meeting secretly in a hayloft.

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