Slice Of Life / Literature

• Accidental Detectives: In several books, Ricky spends a lot of time with the narrator doing ordinary kid stuff like reflecting on his religious beliefs, going to summer camp, making home videos, playing baseball, and fishing (and often being accidentally thwarted by his little brother in all but the first of those), with some books taking several chapters to get to the mystery.
• The Book Thief is surprisingly slice of life about the friendships and struggles of the neighborhood residents, considering where it takes place.
• Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
• The Grandmother: There is no overarching plot; a number of stories pertaining to specific characters are interspersed with descriptions of the Grandmother's visits with the children to the locals and of various Czech folk customs.
• Ulysses: A slice of life cooked so rare the blood is still pumping.
• The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of books and also the Scotland Street series, both by Alexander McCall Smith, use this.
• ATL: Stories from the Retrofuture on its face may be about solving mysteries and fighting evil AI, but it also has entire chapters focusing on the joys of shopping for clothes, hanging out with your friends after work, and navigating the automated food court robots at the mall. Despite the plot, there is a considerable amount of focus on the tiny details of everyday life in a retrofuture world.
• A lot of children's books are like this. They may have titles like The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks or Ten Ways To Make Your Sister Disappear, but in the end, they're mostly stories about everyday life happenings, with whatever the title is about in the background as a recurring element, but not necessarily the dominant one.
  • For example, Ten Ways To Make Your Sister Disappear is really about the everyday life of a girl who happens to have a bratty older sister. Some chapters don't mention the older sister at all, though she's still the main conflict in the story, just not the only one.
  • Operation Dump The Chump is about a boy who wants to get rid of his younger brother by pulling schemes like trying to convince a neighbor to adopt him, and things like that. Most of the story is really just about his life and plays out like a series of anecdotes that happen to involve him and his brother.
  • Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade has the underlying plot of a morbidly obese girl who wants to be accepted, and the main character, who gradually comes to accept her, and tries to get others to do the same. But the book is just as much about everyday fifth-grade life portrayed realistically and in a fun way, with the totally random hitchhiking scene out of nowhere.
  • The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks: Most of the books deal with the characters' normal lives... which have been somewhat complicated by the arrival of the titular plants.
• Paula Danziger's Amber Brown books are the day-to-day adventures of a young girl who goes to school and has to deal with family, friend and general life problems, which include her parents' divorce, her best friend moving away, and having trouble with school standardized testing.
• Adrian Mole: slice of British early-teen-to-forties life.
• Nilda by Nicholasa Mohr is about a Puerto Rican preteen, the eponymous Nilda, living in Manhattan during World War II.
• Bridge to Terabithia stars two children and their made-of-imagination kingdom and the trials and tribulations of daily schoolkid life.
• The Anne of Green Gables series is a classical example: how Anne Shirley comes to live in Avonlea, and her Coming of Age by way of various scrapes and adventures.
• Ramona Quimby is slice of elementary school life. The books take place in different years in grade school, from kindergarten to fourth, but all capture that year of life excellently while being very light-hearted.
• Black Tide Rising: Much of the short story "Spectrum" follows an autistic living history demonstrator going through his normal routine (both on the job and at home) in blissful ignorance of the Zombie Apocalypse while vaguely wondering why the tourists have stopped coming. Fortunately for him, most of the zombies that do eventually arrive are Betas who end up imitating him to help take care of the park.
• Despite the horrific murder that kicks of the plot and the amount of Magical Realism in the region, Boy's Life is mainly about Cory's life in his hometown of Zephyr, with town festivals, church sermons, new music, baseball games, and his father being in danger of unemployment.
• Naive Super is a pretty purebred example.
• Subverted in P. G. Wodehouse short story A Slice of Life. The narrator tells a story about his brother's experiences (an adventure including a Damsel in Distress, a Dastardly Whiplash, and a dash of Mad Science) to show that such tropes occur a lot more commonly in daily life than people think.
• Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small quartet. Despite the fact that it's about a girl becoming a knight in a fantasy medieval world, there's essentially no overarching plot except for in the final book of the series.
• Stuck juxtaposes this together with the oddities rampant within Tre's life in Greyson City, which provides a lot of the humor in the first and second episodes.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid
• Dork Diaries
• This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn
• Saturday by Ian McEwan.
• The Babysitters Club: Slice of babysitters' life.
• Enid Blyton's The Children Of Cherry Tree Farm.
• R.H. Barlow's The Night Ocean is a slice-of-life story set in H. P. Lovecraft's uncaring cosmos.
• Milly Molly Mandy: The Title Character's adventures revolve around the day ongoings of a village —picnicking, attending school, running errands, interacting with her extended family, fishing, and exploring the woods..
• Brown's Pine Ridge Stories: In this particular case, a slice of life of a boy/young man growing up in rural southern Georgia during The '50s and The '60s.
• Enid Blyton's Noddy books follows the life of a wooden boy who lives in Toy Town.
• Any of the Busy Town books by Richard Scarry.
• Alien in a Small Town is a rare science fiction example, concerned more than anything else with everyday life in its setting, a Pennsylvania Dutch community some centuries in The Future.
• The Clémentine series is the day-to-day adventures of a third-grade girl named Clementine who deals with issues such as a spat with her best friend, getting sent to the principal's office, losing her kitten and worrying about bossy fourth graders during a school field trip.
• Anna Dewdney's Llama Llama books and the Animated Adaptation are about day-to-day issues of childhood, such as separation anxiety during a first day of school, dealing with a bully, or struggling with sharing toys.
• Mail Fox Tales follows the daily live of a group of Youkai and other supernatural beings living in modern Tokyo.
• The Six Bullerby Children focuses on the daily life of six children living in a rural village in Sweden. Like several of Astrid Lingren's works, the point of the narrative is depicting a carefree childhood with little drama.
• Soon I Will Be Invincible tells of a totally average week for mad supervillain Dr. Impossible. There is a plot, but it’s just a typical supervillain scheme of the sort that Impossible has carried out hundreds of times; the real focus is on the character interactions and showing all the complexities behind super-heroism/villainy.
• Very long sections of War and Peace consist of very little actually happening. The novel is about the small details of its characters' lives.
• The obscure 1885 novel Nínay largely revisits the everyday life of its title character, her family, friends, and boyfriend Carlos, in the midst of 19th-century, late-Spanish-colonial Manila and environs.
• America Is Not the Heart is largely about a Filipino extended family and their friends going about daily life as they adjust to the Bay Area in California, as well as flashbacks from when most of them were back in the Philippines.
• Although the Mouse Math books do teach math concepts, most of the basic stories about slice of life stuff such as going to school, making snacks, cleaning up a messy room, etc.
• The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul follows the lives of a group of friends in Kabul, Afghanistan. It includes holidays, culture clashes, and dealing with fears.
• The Winnie Years: The books follow the everyday life of a preteen/teen girl as she deals with ordinary issues involving friends, family, boys, and growing up.
• Dreaming is a Private Thing: This is a Science Fiction Short Story that focuses on a day in the life of Jesse Weill, owner of Dreams, Incorporated, and executive producer of dreams.
• ''Moonlite Seasons: It might be fantasy, but with its plots focused on the daily life and work of Clarity the witch, it fits.
• Banished from the Hero's Party: Most of the story is dedicated to Red and Rit living their days in peace in Zoltan, with occasional forays into the struggles of a Hero Party bereft of Red and the fallout of his expulsion.
• Ballad Of A Shinigami is a Slice of Life both in terms of the lives of humans, which are presumably about to die, and of the grim reaper Momo. This sounds more depressing than it is, since Momo is (mostly) kind.
• GJ-bu: Slice of life in a school club that doesn't really have any goals.
• Here Comes the Three Angels: Slice of life about three young girls requesting the help of an older guy to form a rock band.
• Hokuou Kizoku to Moukinzuma no Yukiguni Karigurashi: Slice of life set in a county in (what appears to be) Lapland as the region's Count and his wife get to know each other during their one year trial marriage.
• Hyouka: Slice of mystery-solving, high school life. Notably, the protagonist prefers his slice of life to be a little more bland than other people's. Part of his Character Development is him realizing that having an interesting life isn't so bad.
• I Had That Same Dream Again: A grade-schooler's time with her friends as she tries to figure out the meaning of happiness.
• I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level: In spite of the stupidly overpowered nature of its protagonist, some dramatic misunderstandings, and the occasional Curb-Stomp Battle, most of the plot centers around Azusa and co.'s domestic life, like gathering mushrooms, attending dragon's weddings, and being a family of sorts.
• Listen to me, girls. I am your father!: A 19-years-old college freshman finds himself as the legal guardian of his three nieces.
• My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, as I Expected: Slice of life of a cynical pessimist in High School.
• Only Sense Online: Slice of a novice player's life in a virtual reality MMORPG.
• The Tatami Galaxy is a slice of quirky College life, albeit with time rewinds.
• Teen Power Inc.: The odd jobs the kids take, their hobbies, and their relationships with their families get a lot of attention in many of the books, with it sometimes taking most of the book before they ever realize there is a mystery going on (or at least that they might be able to solve it).
• Legends & Lattes is about an orc barbarian opening a coffee shop. Nothing more or less. In between the plotlines dealing with the local Protection Racket and Viv's greedy former teammate Fennus are many scenes depicting the renovation of the shop out of a neglected livery, the trials and tribulations of getting the good citizens of Thune to try Viv's weird gnomish "bean-water," and the day-to-day running of the shop, including interactions with regular customers. And rebuilding the place from the foundations after Fennus burns it down.
• The Makioka Sisters is a loosely-driven story about four upper-class sisters from late-1930's/early-1940's Osaka living their surprisingly mundane lives as World War II looms over them. The book is noteworthy for being written during World War II, and was in fact banned from serialization and publication by the Japanese government during the war specifically because it wasn't making a big deal out of the war (to quote the censors: "The novel goes on and on detailing the very thing we are most supposed to be on our guard against during this period of wartime emergency: the soft, effeminate, and grossly individualistic lives of women.").
• Star Wars: The Living Force: Much of the book focuses on how the people of a once prosperous but now struggling planet live their lives, and how the Jedi can affect those lives in different ways than their usual Knight in Shining Armor heroics (like by providing counseling, repair services, and labor dispute resolution, looking for misplaced texts, or spending time with a dying old man).

---