90 books like A Book of Tongues

This book is a raw peek into America’s troubled past. It’s a series of interviews that Hurston conducts with a man who was on the last slave ship to make the transatlantic passage. It is a difficult read on two levels: subject matter and English. Hurston presents the words of a man named Cudjo Lewis as authentically as possible. What may seem to some today as parody, is translated to the page with accuracy. For me it communicated first-hand some of the past my main character has lived through. Books like this help to inform my protagonist’s current attitude toward the world (Alexander Smith in Blood For The Sun and All The Dead Men).

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series might be uneven at the end, but the beginning is masterful.

Roland, a dusty old cowboy on the edge of reality, is the prototypical antihero. He doesn’t care much for other people, he’s got a dark past, and I wanted to follow every dusty step of his journey. The broken pieces of Roland are what make The Dark Tower series unique—that and some astral plane travelling shenanigans. With each dark deed or questionable decision, I wanted to know more about Roland and what led him to that point.

It’s difficult to stay grounded in a world with interdimensional travel and monsters, but I always felt like I had one foot planted in humanity through Roland.

In 2007, I was writing a biography of Liverpool merchant William Davenport, who had made his fortune via the slave trade.

As I researched Davenport’s dry ledgers and letterbooks, I was fortunate to have Marcus Rediker’s exceptional The Slave Ship to hand. Pushing back against the “violence of abstraction” inherent to the accounts of slavers like Davenport, Rediker’s book exposed the horrors of the Middle Passage in unflinching detail.

His book is also filled with powerful individual stories of captives, captains, and crewmen that demonstrated to me the importance of writing “human histories” of the slave trade.

I read this when my son was born, looking for a familiar story in more ways than one. This imported classic European fairy tale has our gunslinging Snow White escaping to the wild west and feels like a new comfort fable… if replacing dark twisted forests for a wind-whipped big sky can be comforting. It’s a story that doesn’t know how to end, or even if it should end—making it another facet to join numerous retellings. The Huntsman becomes a Pinkerton, the dwarves now a band of women on the run, and the Prince a melancholy expression of America’s history where many have no voice. It’s a bit cerebral and reveals heart-wrenching lessons when reflected on current times. Which, I suppose, is the purpose of a fable, right?

A reimagining of how one decision could change the American landscape… why Thomas Jefferson decided against introducing hippopotamuses to the swamps and marshes of the American South, I’ll never know. But Sarah Gailey gives us a glimpse into this alternative history and it is full of water bearers as fearsome and loyal as any war horse. Reading this in one sitting on a plane ride, I was fascinated by how vastly different—and dangerous—the Mississippi bayous could be when full of a certain shady type of gunslinger creeping through the water with Spanish moss hanging overhead. I suspect if I were alive in this alternative timeline, I might’ve ended up seeking my fortune by holding up a steamboat… especially if I had a hippo as my trusty companion.   

A serious Welcome To The Nightvale-styled western, Golgotha is like any other mining town… except full of writhing demonic worms desperate to possess you. So many legends and religions rub elbows in this saloon-heavy godforsaken place that it feels like any re-imagined version of a dark fantasy americana world, warts and all, is possible. Each character threatened to whisk me on a new journey. I mean, there’s a doctor who can keep severed heads alive? A boy with a mysterious green eye? An unkillable gunslinger sheriff? An angel running a casino? An assassin queen? What is even happening? But all this allowed my imagination to flourish. Instead of spelling out the reasoning for the clashing magic and lore, it reminded me why I love speculative fiction in the first place: the possibilities. 

I don’t often read “steampunk” because it usually reflects the Victorian era of England or a ‘what if’ scenario involving the Confederacy and I’m just sick to death of the subjects. Along came “steamfunk,” an addition to the genre where the focus wouldn’t be on exclusively white characters, but Black sourced from the African continent. Then once upon a time, Broaddus cracked a joke on Twitter: “I’m going to write a steampunk story with an all-Black cast and call it ‘Pimp My Airship.’ To his chagrin (and eventual delight) several editors asked to see the story. The worldbuilding in this story is phenomenal. It take place in Indiana, part of an alternate history where England has established a “United States of Albion” and Native Americans have managed to retain a sizeable chunk of territory. There’s so much more to the book in relation to history and cultural norms. I thoroughly… show more.

Here is a book about history that is horrific, often referenced, and not as fully understood as it should be. It’s about entire towns erased from existence or whole segments of a population violently displaced in one night. Full of terrifying tales, the author began looking into the subject thinking there’d be several historical incidents and instead found too many to include in the book. It is a harrowing accounting of racial cleansing right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. and a potent reminder of how this country operated well into the twentieth century. Again, this sort of thing is good background to inform my character’s current attitude and makes for ripe pickings in flashbacks or background stories.

This book is such a classic Western plot.

A confederate soldier, Paul Cable, returns from the Civil War to find Union men have taken over his farm. Cable thinks his fighting is over, but he couldn’t be more wrong.

The book is tense and moves quickly. It’s also short, yet packs a punch far above its weight. Highly recommend.

I chose this series, not because of the fun crimes Scotland Yard Inspector Rutledge solves, but because he is a soldier from WWI who battles PTSD. He experiences some of the symptoms other soldiers had, or have, following a traumatic war experience. His dead corporal constantly pesters him throughout the series by being a voice in his head. Additionally, after his fiancée leaves him following the war, he has intimacy issues and cannot express his feelings for the woman he loves. To cope with his sleeplessness and PTSD, he immerses himself in the cases he’s assigned. This series, in part, inspired my book.