Books like

Books like The Things They Carried

12 books with a reading profile close to The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

The Complete Maus

by Art Spiegelman

Also deep and inward-looking · history, memoir

Art Spiegelman uses the graphic novel format to document his father Vladek’s survival during the Holocaust.
2

Survival in Auschwitz

by Primo Levi

Also deep and inward-looking · history, memoir

Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist, details his eleven months of imprisonment in the Monowitz-Buna concentration camp.
3

The White Album

by Joan Didion

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, narrative

Joan Didion’s collection of essays documents the fragmentation of California life during the late 1960s and 1970s.
4

Night

by Elie Wiesel

Also deep and inward-looking · history, memoir

In this memoir, Eliezer, a Jewish teenager from Sighet, Transylvania, is deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the final years of World War II.
5

Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

Also deep and inward-looking · history, narrative

In 1945 London, fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his sister Rachel are left in the care of a mysterious figure nicknamed The Moth after their parents depart for Singapore.
6

The Best We Could Do

by Thi Bui

Also inward-looking and contemplative · history, memoir

Thi Bui narrates her family’s history through a graphic memoir format, beginning with the birth of her own child in the present day.
7

Human Acts

by Han Kang

Also deep and inward-looking · history, narrative

Han Kang’s novel reconstructs the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and its aftermath through seven interconnected perspectives.
8

Stay True

by Hua Hsu

Also deep and inward-looking · 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.
9

Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Also deep and inward-looking · history, narrative

This three-volume collection tracks the socio-political evolution of Nigeria through specific family lineages and individual migrations.
10

The Known World

by Edward P. Jones

Also deep and inward-looking · history, narrative

Set in antebellum Virginia, the narrative centers on Henry Townsend, a black man who, having purchased his own freedom, becomes a master himself and owns thirty-three slaves.
11

Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, narrative

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

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

by Cristina Rivera Garza

Also deep and inward-looking · 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.

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