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Cheryl Strayed

Recommended Books

Cheryl Strayed is an American memoirist, novelist, essayist and podcast host. The author of four books, her award-winning writing has been published widely in anthologies and major magazines.
19 books on the list
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The Hero of This Book book cover
The Hero of This Book
A Novel
Elizabeth McCracken - 2022-10-04
Goodreads Rating
A taut, groundbreaking new novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer's relationship with her larger-than-life mother--and about the very nature of writing, memory, and artTen months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother'...
Cheryl Strayed
2022-12-02T18:19:05.000Z
@TheBookMaven Just started reading "The Hero of this Book," by the great @elizmccracken and am loving it (of course!).      source
Also recommended by
Emily NussbaumNancy Pearl
I Am, I Am, I Am book cover
I Am, I Am, I Am
Seventeen Brushes with Death
Maggie O'Farrell - 2019-03-26
Goodreads Rating
We are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death.I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearl...
Cheryl Strayed
2022-03-17T02:37:17.000Z
@contactrebecca @literati It's one of my favorite books.      source
In a Sunburned Country book cover
In a Sunburned Country
Bill Bryson - 2001-05-15 (first published in 2000)
Goodreads Rating
A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ONE SUMMER Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely dif...
Cheryl Strayed
2021-04-03T00:59:07.000Z
@jteacher1402 @billbrysonn You must go! Australia is a gorgeous country. And I've never met an Australian I didn't like. (Now all the Australians will tweet to tell me there are PLENTY). And yes, I love that book and everything @billbrysonn writes. He's so smart and funny and good.      source
Also recommended by
Pamela L. Gay
Tales of a Female Nomad book cover
Tales of a Female Nomad
Living at Large in the World
Rita Golden Gelman - 2002-05-28
Goodreads Rating
“I move throughout the world without a plan, guided by instinct, connecting through trust, and constantly watching for serendipitous opportunities.” —From the PrefaceTales of a Female Nomad is the story of Rita Golden Gelman, an ordinary woman who is living an extraordinary existence. At the age of forty-eight, on the verge of a divorce, Rita left ...
Cheryl Strayed
2021-04-01T19:08:11.000Z
@AuthorCarmelB I loved that book too!      source
Mating book cover
Mating
Norman Rush - 1991-09-03
Goodreads Rating
Had Jane Austen been in the Peace Corps in Africa in the 1980s, Mating is the book she might have written. Set in Botswana in the days before the end of apartheid, Norman Rush's novel is, essentially, a comedy of manners played out in Austen's approved milieu: a country village. Granted, the village in question, Tsau, is a utopian society created b...
Cheryl Strayed
2021-04-01T15:00:02.000Z
@de_la_lluvia Amazing book!      source
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush book cover
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Eric Newby - 2010-12-21 (first published in 1958)
Goodreads Rating
When Eric Newby, fashion industry worker and inexperienced hill walker, decided after 10 years in haute couture he needed a change he took 4 days training in Wales then walked the Hindu Kush. This is his account of an entertaining time in the hills!...
Cheryl Strayed
2021-04-01T14:58:15.000Z
@rssenior Yes! Love that book.      source
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name book cover
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
A Novel
Vendela Vida - 2008-01-02 (first published in 2007)
Goodreads Rating
On the day of her father's funeral, twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa Iver­ton discovers that he wasn't her biological father after all. Her mother disappeared fourteen years earlier, and her fiancé has just revealed a life-changing secret to her. Alone and adrift, Clarissa travels to mystical Lapland, where she believes she'll meet her real father. T...
Cheryl Strayed
2021-04-01T14:51:07.000Z
@atzuniga @moorehn I love that book too!      source
Blue Highways book cover
Blue Highways
A Journey into America
William Least Heat Moon - 1999-10-19 (first published in 1982)
Goodreads Rating
Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads.William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space...
Cheryl Strayed
2021-04-01T14:44:22.000Z
@rebeccab65 Wonderful book!      source
Also recommended by
George Raveling
Less book cover
Less
A Novel
Andrew Sean Greer - 2018-05-22
Goodreads Rating
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked...
Cheryl Strayed
2021-04-01T06:24:20.000Z
@kimsrogers Yes! I love that book so much.      source
Nothing to Declare book cover
Nothing to Declare
Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone
Mary Morris - 1998-11-15 (first published in 1987)
Goodreads Rating
Traveling from the highland desert of northern Mexico to the steaming jungles of Honduras, from the seashore of the Caribbean to the exquisite highlands of Guatemala, Mary Morris, a celebrated writer of both fiction and nonfiction, confronts the realities of place, poverty, machismo, and selfhood. As she experiences the rawness and precariousness o...
Cheryl Strayed
2021-04-01T06:21:39.000Z
@drnels I love that book!      source
Wintering book cover
Wintering
Katherine May - 2020-11-10
To Shake the Sleeping Self by Jedidiah Jenkins
Citizen by Claudia Rankine
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
New and Selected Poems, Volume One by Mary Oliver
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
Charley Bland by Mary Lee Settle
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo