Books like Book smart by Jane Mallison

During World War II, a foster girl in Nazi Germany steals books to share with neighbors and a hidden Jewish man, proving literature’s power to nourish the soul amid darkness.

At Culver Creek Boarding School, Miles "Pudge" Halter leaves his uneventful home life to find adventure, only to be drawn into the complex world of Alaska Young – a brilliant, enigmatic student whose presence challenges and changes him forever.

A coming‑of‑age epistolary novel that follows introverted teen Charlie through his freshman year in a 1990s Pittsburgh suburb as he navigates high school, friendship and the challenges of adolescence.

In an elite New England college, a charismatic classics professor lures a group of eccentric students into obsessive study, leading them from intellectual curiosity to corruption, betrayal, and ultimately murder.

Colin Singleton, a washed‑up child prodigy obsessed with naming patterns, embarks on a cross‑country road trip to prove his "Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability" and finally win a girl.

Don Tillman, a genetics professor with Asperger’s, designs a scientific survey to find a wife, only to meet Rosie Jarman, a drinker and late arriver who challenges his controlled worldview and leads him to discover that love can’t be measured.

Two twin sisters navigate college life while wrestling with loyalty to a beloved fandom, family tensions, and burgeoning self‑worth.

A guide to unlocking the hidden meanings in literature, showing readers how to decode symbols and symbols and find deeper meanings in texts.

In a Texas town where high‑school football dominates, sixteen‑year‑old Viv sparks a feminist revolt by publishing anonymous zines that challenge the town’s sexism.

A collection of essays by Nick Hornby, focusing on his book collection and the books he reads in his busy life as a writer in America.

An approachable entry into literary theory, guiding readers through major critical approaches, their historical and political contexts, practical examples, and further reading, to show how theory transforms the act of reading.

A curated list of 501 books voted best across genres—from children’s tales to classic and modern fiction, history, memoirs, science‑fiction, thrillers, and travel—recommended by eminent bibliophiles and writers.

Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here--spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism--are thirty-six immediately relevant, elegantly written, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.Following the title essay, which explores fourteen definitions of "the classic," Calvino offers writings that are at once critical appraisals and personal appreciations of, among others: Homer, Xenophon, Ovid, Pliny, Nezami, Ariosto, Cardano, Galileo, Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot, Ortes, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Twain, Henry James, Stevenson, Conrad, Pasternak, Gadda, Montale, Hemingway, Ponge, Borges, and Queneau.At a time when the Western canon and the very notion of "literary greatness" have come under increasing disparagement by the vanguard of so-called multiculturalism, Why Read the Classics? gives us an inspiriting corrective.From the Hardcover edition.

See https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19781733W/Eleanor_Oliphant_Is_Completely_Fine