I’m looking for recommendations for books written in the first person. Preferably a book that you really like.
I did a search and the last such thread I could find was started in 2003.
I’m looking for a story where the protagonist really shares a lot of himself and his feelings. I’m thinking of a book like Catcher In The Rye or Fight Club.
Thanks in advance.
*Huckleberry Finn *, of course.
Davy by Edgar Pangbourn
Cat’s Cradle
Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar.
Amaze your friends! Awe your teachers! Read a great short 1968 hippie novel no one reads any more!
Also, Moby-Dick is good. A little longer, though.
Emergence, by David R. Palmer. Shorthand notes of a teenage girl surviving an apocalypse.
Papillon, without a doubt. One helluva story, however much it might be embellished.
Lots of genre fiction. But, I get the impression you’re interested in Serious Literature.
The Name of the Rose, or Foucault’s Pendulum, both by Umberto Eco, then.
If you don’t mind tilting toward a bit toward the young-adult style, there’s an early-20th-century series starting with The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald. It’s narrated by a child, and is mostly about children, but it astutely observes all the realities of the world it’s set in (southern Utah, around 1900).
i didn’t read that series until hs but its one of the first kids series that points out the hypocrisy of kids and adults both in everyday life and it was written in the 20s and 30s …and it’s based on real things/people in the authors life like the story about their friend who was diabetic (you find out the person it was based on died as a teenager 5 years before insulin was released to the public in a PS)
The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg. It’s first person, but from 4 different characters. Each chapter is FP from one of the 4.
Looks like I have a trip to the library in my future!
Only partly first person, but I love Feersum Endjin by Iain M. Banks.
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust is great.
The Stranger by Camus, likewise.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter - surreal and a masterwork.
One of my favourites is David Copperfield.
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
Catcher in the Rye. If it were in third-person with no interior monologues, it would be a pretty unremarkable story about a guy ditching school for a couple of days.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Interestingly, I was going to suggest the Great Brain series as well. They were my very favorite books when I was a kid, and are immensely readable. Just to make a slight correction, they were written a bit later than you’re remembering. The first book, The Great Brain, was published in 1967. The seventh and final book, The Great Brain Does It Again, came out in 1976. (There was an eighth book, The Great Brain Is Back, published in 1995, but it was compiled from Fitzgerald’s notes after his death).
John Fowle’s The Collector, written in the alternating first person perspective of the both kidnapper and his victim.
My favorite first-person novel might be John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.
And that made me think of Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, which influenced it.
And that made me think of Susan Howatch’s Starbridge series, another series of interrelated books each with its own narrator.
All good stuff.
My two favorites have been mentioned, but I’d also throw in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kidnapped by RL Stevenson. The latter is more of an adventure, but the first person perspective really gets you caught up in it.
I can guess what one of them is based on your username, but what’s the other?
That’s like asking which of my favorite narrative stories begin with a vowel. I’m guessing that at least a quarter of them were first person tales. I read the John Carter of Mars series back in elementary school, enjoyed North to Freedom when I encountered it, and found myself immersed in many an autobiography.