AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Jean-Christophe

Romain Rolland · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Of Human Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham · 582 pages

Of Human Bondage is a moving exploration of loneliness, obsessive love, and a young man's search for meaning and direction in life. Written in the third person, it tells the story of Philip Carey, a self-conscious orphan with a club-foot who learns medicine. Not only is this a significant work in the Bildungsroman tradition, but its largely autobiographical basis gives it a special interest in vie

BildungsromanArtist ProtagonistSprawling EpicClassics
❤️

Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth

Thomas Wolfe · 912 pages

This book continues the story of Eugene Gant, the protagonist in Look Homeward Angel. If you have read and liked Angel you should definitely follow through and read this(vol 1 and 2). Autobiographical in nature..

BildungsromanSprawling EpicClassicsLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow · 536 pages

Augie's nonconformity leads him into an eventful, humorous, and sometimes earthy way of life.

BildungsromanSprawling EpicClassicsLiterary Fiction
❤️

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce · 228 pages

Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin, feeling different from the other boys. His childhood and adolescence are shaped by bullying, his father's weaknesses and the growing realization that in order to make his way in the world he must reject a conventional life and boecome an artist. Penguin Popular Classics are the perfect introduction to the world-famous Penguin Classics series — which encompass

BildungsromanArtist ProtagonistClassicsLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · 817 pages

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra

BildungsromanArtist ProtagonistSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
❤️

A Tale of Two Cities / Great Expectations

Charles Dickens · 792 pages

[Tale of Two Cities](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8721465W/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities) After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of the two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become e

BildungsromanSprawling EpicClassicsLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Fortress of Solitude

Jonathan Lethem · 511 pages

This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most si

BildungsromanSprawling EpicLiterary FictionMusician
❤️

Aurora Leigh

Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 403 pages

Aurora Leigh is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth-century poem of contemporary life. This verse-novel is a richly detailed representation of the early Victorian age. The social panorama extends from the slums of London, through the literary world, to the upper classes and a number of superb satiric portraits: an aunt with rigidly conventional notions of female education; Romney Leigh, th

BildungsromanArtist ProtagonistClassicsLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal

BildungsromanArtist ProtagonistSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
❤️

Genius

Theodore Dreiser · 736 pages

Dreiser's semi-autobiographical novel about a young man's unhappy marriage, adulterous relationships, and struggle to retain his artistic integrity.

BildungsromanArtist ProtagonistClassicsLiterary Fiction
🙂

Netochka Nezvanova

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 172 pages

Netochka Nezvanova (Russian: Неточка Незванова) is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's first but unfinished attempt at writing a novel. It translates to "nameless nobody.". The first completed section of the book was published in the end of 1849. The story is about the sorrowful life of a young girl living in extreme poverty in Saint Petersburg, who ends up an orphan and is adopted by a wealthy upper-class fa

BildungsromanMusicianClassicsLiterary Fiction
🙂

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides · 544 pages

A unique coming of age story. While the main character in this novel is dealing with gender identity issues the main focus of this brilliantly written story is the confusion we all face as we grow into the person we were meant to be. The reader finds himself identifying with the main character's experiences. This is a brilliantly written story. The prose is honest in a way that few authors dare t

BildungsromanSprawling EpicLiterary FictionClassics
🙂

Body & Soul

Frank Conroy · 464 pages

As A Boy, Claude Rawlings looks up through the grated window of his basement apartment to watch the world go by. Poor, lonely, supported by a taxi-driver mother whose eccentricities spin more and more out of control, he faces the terrible task of growing up on the margins of life, destined to be a spectator of that great world always hurrying out of reach. But there is an out-of-tune piano in the

BildungsromanMusicianLiterary FictionMale Lead
🙂

Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak · 542 pages

***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be

Artist ProtagonistSprawling EpicClassicsLiterary Fiction
🙂

My Name Is Asher Lev

Chaim Potok · 352 pages

"Memorable...A book profound in its vision of humanity, of religion, and of art."THE WALL STREET JOURNALHere is the original, deeply moving story of Asher Lev, the religious boy with an overwhelming need to draw, to paint, to render the world he knows and the pain he feels, on canvas for everyone to see. A loner, Asher has an extroardinary God-given gift that possesses a spirit all its own. It is

BildungsromanArtist ProtagonistLiterary FictionClassics
🙂

Sacred Country

Rose Tremain · 384 pages

BildungsromanSprawling EpicMusicianLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Song of the Lark

Willa Cather · 393 pages

Determined to leave behind the dull values of her small hometown, an opera singer devotes increasing amounts of energy to developing her art.

MusicianArtist ProtagonistClassicsLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss · 667 pages

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as "quothe." Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I've had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it's spoken, can mean The Flame, The Thunder, or The Broken Tree. "The Flame" is obvious if you've ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple of hundr

BildungsromanMusicianSprawling EpicMale Lead
🙂

Maestro

Peter Goldsworthy · 149 pages

Against the backdrop of Darwin, that small, tropical hothouse of a port, half-outback, half-oriental, lying at the tip of northern Australia, a young and newly arrived southerner encounters the 'maestro', a Viennese refugee with a shadowed past. The occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many.

BildungsromanMusicianLiterary FictionMale Lead
🙂

The Recognitions

William Gaddis · 956 pages

Obsessed with seventeenth-century Flemish masterpieces, Wyatt Gwyon forges original artwork amazingly faithful to the spirit and techniques of the time.

Sprawling EpicArtist ProtagonistClassicsLiterary Fiction
🙂

The World According to Garp

John Irving · 568 pages

BildungsromanSprawling EpicLiterary FictionClassics
🙂

Refiner's Fire

Mark Helprin · 407 pages

The hero is Marshall Pearl born in a sea battle in an illegal immigrant ship of the coast of Palestine in 1947. Adopted into America by the wealthy and childless Livingstons, he grows up on a Hudson Valley estate, taught by his adventures on the river riding ice floes, jumping freights, climbing precipices and shaped by the imperatives of his own personality and destiny – his peculiar sensitivity

BildungsromanSprawling EpicLiterary FictionMale Lead
🙂

The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand · 727 pages

The Fountainhead is a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand. It was Rand's first major literary success and brought her fame and financial success. More than 6.5 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide.

Artist ProtagonistSprawling EpicClassicsLiterary Fiction
🙂

Beneath the Wheel

Hermann Hesse · 189 pages

BildungsromanClassicsLiterary FictionMale Lead

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.