Book Recs From Friends #7: Sara Hildreth

Substack's favorite former English teacher

Jun 26, 2025

This is Book Recs from Friends. A series where some of my favorite book-loving people on Substack share book recommendations. Because books are always better with friends...

Friends, you're in for a literary treat today. I'm thrilled to welcome

Sara Hildreth

of FictionMatters
to the newsletter, here to share some fantastic book recommendations. Sara is a former high school English teacher turned professional reader and writer. She lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and daughter—and chances are, many of you already know her from her beloved Instagram account, @fictionmatters, which has since grown into a best-selling Substack.

I first discovered Sara’s work when I joined Bookstagram back in 2018, and I’ve been a devoted reader ever since. She brings a teacher’s thoughtfulness and a deep love of literature to everything she shares. Reading her posts always feels like getting a mini English lesson (in the best possible way), and I know I’ve become a more attentive and engaged reader because of her influence.

One of the things I admire most about Sara is the way she blends her love for classic literature with a keen eye for new releases. Whether she’s reflecting on a buzzy bestseller or weighing in on literary news, she always offers insight, clarity, and a genuine passion for books—and she manages to do it all with nuance, which can be rare in the world of social!

Today, she’s returning to her literary roots to share a few favorite classics with us. Without further ado, I’ll let Sara take it from here...

Book Recs from Friends: Sara Hildreth

Written by

Sara Hildreth

of
FictionMatters

My interest in classic literature has ebbed and flowed over the years. Majoring and then going to graduate school for English lit, I have always loved exploring the canon and getting granular with my reading. But now, as someone who has made reading my career, I try to shirk any additional “shoulds” in my reading life. I have enough required reading on my plate that picking up a book simply because I think I ought to have read it is just not going to happen. Instead, I find myself returning to older literature because the deeper my understanding of classic books becomes the more expansive my understanding of all literature becomes. For me, reading is like spinning a web. The more I read, the more connective threads I see between books and the more expansive my entire literary world feels.

One of the books that first helped me realize the connective tissue that exists between classic and contemporary literature was Nella Larsen’s Passing. When I read this book in a college course in 2009, it seemed like no one other than my professor had heard of it. The only copy available for purchase was the Norton Critical Edition (it’s excellent, by the way!) and when I would tell other English majors what we were reading, they were baffled. While it’s a stretch to call Passing a thriller, especially by contemporary standards, it might be one of the first domestic suspense novels, predating that other classic of suspense Rebecca by nearly ten years. Passing follows two light-skinned Black women, both of whom can pass for white and one of whom, Clare, has a white supremecist husband who’s completely unaware of her racial identity. Irene, on the other hand, is a beacon of her Black community in Harlem and only passes when convenient or necessary. The two friends living their inverted existences become increasingly involved in and obsessed with the other’s life. Told entirely through Irene’s unreliable perspective, this book simmers with tension, desire, and peril. Every book I’ve encountered since about toxic female friendships, suspicious wives, or homoerotic desires can be traced back to Passing. With the publication of Brit Bennet’s The Vanishing Half and the release of the movie version starring Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson, this book is now getting the play it deserves.

It was the books I read in class that served as my initial foundations in this type of connective literary thinking, and this year I was missing the intellectual rigor of academic reading. I ended up taking a course on John Milton’s Paradise Lost from Orlando Reade, who wrote an excellent book on Milton’s epic poem called What in Me is Dark. As an English teacher, I knew that many, many texts reference Paradise Lost, but wow did reading it for myself unlock a whole new world of literary allusions. Some books are so part of the cultural ether, that I feel like I’ve read them when I haven’t. I’m not necessarily determined to go out and read all of those cultural capital books cover to cover, but experiencing the nuance, playfulness, weirdness, and complexity of Paradise Lost is wildly different from knowing the broad strokes of the plot and characters. This epic poem is a high fantasy story filled with angels and demons that also grapples with the purpose of human existence in a way that invites readers to constantly ask questions and make meaning. The nuanced exploration of good and evil, the contemplation of free will, and the themes of companionship and labor have added a new richness to how I read books that reference this classic epic, from Victorian tomes like Middlemarch to joyful novellas like the Emma Lion series.

Recently, I’ve enjoyed reading classics that aren’t well known members of the Western literary canon. A favorite has been The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki which is sometimes–and understandably–billed as a Japanese Pride & Prejudice. The story follows four sisters; the elder two are already married, but the younger sisters are facing some challenges on the marriage market for a whole slew of reasons. Much like an Austen novel, The Makioka Sisters excels at rich character development and humorous, yet meaningful setpiece scenes. What I so enjoyed about this book was experiencing a culture and literary tradition I knew little about through the familiar conventions of the marriage plot. The blend of disorientation and familiarity was delightful and engaging and provided an ideal entry point into Japanese literary tradition.

Other recent noncanonical favorites of mine have been Margaret Kennedy’s The Feast, which feels like reading a midcentury version of The White Lotus; J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, which is a perfect gem of a novel and a precursor to the sliver-of-life books being published today; and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, which reads to me like the godmother of the novel in stories. There is so much great fiction that’s being rediscovered and republished for modern readers. While it’s impossible to draw a direct line of influence between some of these works and the books being written today, I am fascinated by the idea that similar themes, stories, and characters have intrigued human beings for centuries. How mundane and miraculous that we humans keep writing and reading stories to make meaning of these messy lives we lead.

Thank you, Sara! You always inspire me to be a more thoughtful, inquisitive reader through the way you share your reading life. You can connect with Sara by subscribing to her Substack or following her Instagram.

I’d love to hear from you, too—do you have a favorite classic? One you’ve been meaning to read? Let me know in the comments!