100 books like World War Z

A friend insisted I borrow The Hot Zone from him. I explained I wasn't fond of nonfiction books, but he told me to trust him and that the book read like a real-life thriller. I gave it a try and couldn't put the story down.

I read this 25 years before Covid. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I remember thinking, "Oh my God, the Hot Zone has gone global." With every turn of the page, I kept telling myself, "This can't be real." Not only was it all true, but it was exciting. And terrifying. That icky feeling stuck with me.

When I write, I do my best to use the five senses to create the perfect atmosphere.

If you are going to read one book about how to be a better salesperson, read this one. Cialdini is a master, and most modern sales psychology books are built off of his work in this book. I have used all six of the principles that he lays out in this book to grow the real estate business, but I especially love the principle of reciprocity.

In a nutshell, this is the power of giving gifts to build relationships, and it is one of the main things I learned from reading to grow my business. When I show a property, I bring water, snacks, and beer. I follow up with my clients with at least 5 personal gifts a year. Cialdini also teaches the power of accepting gifts from others, and I always accept a glass of water, a snack, or anything else my clients offer me. You are not… show more.

This book is why I became an author. 

I started reading this book in class at school, when I was around thirteen years of age. The class read the first two chapters, and I was so enamoured with it I couldn't wait to get home and read it. I read it in its entirety that very night. I found the language and description used within it quite breathtaking. I couldn't wait to read the next chapter. It had a lasting effect on me and led me to start writing my own stories down. 

At the time, when I read this book, I’d just become a father. Naturally, the story about a father trying to protect his son in a harsh dystopian world was captivating for me and still is to this day.

I loved the book's gritty realism and felt as if I were walking beside the characters during the entire journey. I also found McCarthy’s writing style unique and something new from the best-selling paperbacks I’d often read before picking up his book.

Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, was not, he said, “a book about what is, but a book about what could be.” Further, “it is mostly about managers and engineers” and more precisely, about automation and what American society could become if machines took over work, and labor, as we have known it, was made redundant. His imagined city of Illium was socially and physically split between the managers and engineers of its industrial plant and the former workers had been displaced by automation and now led meaningless lives of busy work provided by the government. The engineer Paul Proteus becomes disaffected and joins in a revolution being plotted against the new order. They succeed, but soon realize that the people of Illium were “already eager to recreate the same old nightmare.” The logic of the machine continued its sway.

I like that you have to watch Vonnegut carefully.… show more.

This book is set in motion in the cultural revolution in China—a background that profoundly shapes the main characters’ choices and destinies.

A young scientist who has witnessed her father’s persecution ends up at a science center looking for radio-wave evidence of extra-terrestrial life. Not only does she find it, but she figures out how to communicate with it.

Couple the scientist’s views of humanity with those of a disillusioned heir to an oil fortune, and the stage is set for an epic novel with a unique take on first contact. This book—the first of a trilogy—provides frightening insights into how history can shape humanity’s future.   

I’m fascinated by the possibilities presented by post-nation futures. Infomocracy looks at a future where ‘centenals’—groups of 100,000 people without historic nationalist borders—elect an international corporate-affiliated body to govern the world.

High-stakes political intrigue fuels the biggest election in a century as multiple factions battle it out to seize power through the vehicle of futuristic democracy. To me, the highlight of this novel is its exploration of democracy—it’s peppered with paradoxical and intense arguments that are rewarding to engage with, and enhance the richness of its world. 

William Gibson’s latest novel Agency is as prophetic as his establishment of cyberspace and cyberpunk culture in the 80s and 90s. His latest novel chronicles reality-busting skirmishes among gangsterish multi-generational families based in a glitzy post-apocalyptic 22nd century London. In this future, nano-machines conjure luxuries from nothing while sky-high scrubbers struggle to restore a ravaged atmosphere after the jackpot, a global environmental catastrophe. Agency tells a heist-type story about the emergence of Eunice, a sentient AI born in our stub out of American special operations research. Leading a cross-dimensional band of techies, publicists, hipsters, and hackers, ace software designer Verity fights to introduce Eunice to her world in order to save it. Yet Gibson is telling us about today's ecological and technological forces. He writes of pre-jackpot life in our era: “‘Did we ever come to terms with the sheer cluelessness of it?’

I can’t get enough of this supernatural classic, which is made all the more vivid by the way its story unfolds through letters, telegrams, diary entries, and newspaper clippings. It is the found-footage horror story of its era.

Like Frankenstein, it has been adapted hundreds of times, officially and unofficially, into nearly every medium, yet the original novel is unparalleled for holding the reader in its icy grip. Stoker brought his own fears to the page, and I am always surprised at how, in just a few pages, they become my fears, as well.

Humans are always curious about what the future will look like. They are also concerned about the state impinging on their privacy and interfering with their lives. George Orwell masterfully combined these two human impulses in his classic novel. He wrote the book in 1949 to present his view of the future.

I read this book when I was in my mid-20s. I found it an interesting read, especially since many of his predictions did not come true. I was curious to know how past generations viewed our generation.