100 books like Animal Farm

Incredibly, I had never read Moby-Dick until spending weeks at sea every summer, so Melville’s Great American Novel, which D.H. Lawrence called “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world” found me on the boat. 

My book has been dubbed “the Moby-Dick of empty-nest tales” since my husband and I sail off in search of a rare white bear, inspired by Melville’s great white whale. I had no idea how funny and captivating Moby-Dick was – not to mention inspiring for armchair seafarers – until I settled in with its pages that first summer. It’s a brilliant novel. 

Machiavelli is often despised as the man who promoted both authoritarian leaders and the notion that the ends justify the means, but this is to misunderstand the importance of the context within which he was writing: 16th century Florence – which was besieged by enemies on every side who proclaimed adherence to the Christian faith but acted as monsters. Machiavelli’s writing made two things clear to me. First, leaders and leadership cannot be understood if you abstract them from their context – when political morality is a contradiction in terms then leaders must be wary of sacrificing their followers for the sake of that same fallacious morality. Second, he lays out how dictators obtain and retain power – and in doing so establishes what we need to do to stop them or remove them. 

In the dystopian future that Bradbury creates, technology has eliminated the need for books.

We are not smarter in this future without history or literature, in fact, we are dumber, relying on meaningless entertainment to fill the intellectual void created by the written word’s eradication. Many successful science fiction authors are masters of the craft of writing, but Bradbury is on another level.

His stark vision of the future is propelled by ordinary characters living in extraordinary times, with each setting painted with beautiful prose that is both prophetic and thought provoking. The Dewey Decimal System has no hold on where one can find literature in a bookstore, nor do the critics.

Slaughterhouse-Five is my favourite book of all time, and the book I would most like to have written myself (if only I had Vonnegut’s skill and didn’t have to live through the fire-bombing of Dresden).

Dealing with the atrocities of war while throwing in a mix of aliens and time travel, and regularly breaking the ‘fourth wall’, it’s a novel that shouldn’t work... but works superbly because of that.

Hilarious and tragically sad, mind-bending but soundly logical, the story of Billy Pilgrim and how he is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians to be mated in a zoo with a beautiful movie star on the other side of the universe, and how he survives World War II, is one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking stories ever.

Wells is one of the great early masters of science fiction, creator of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, but with Moreau he was also one of the masters of what David Cronenberg fans know as body horror—the gross, startling, and menacing intermingling of the human body with exterior elements.

In this case, pumas, pigs, you name it. With characters like Ape-Man and Sloth-Man, there is a definitely campiness here, but never enough to distract from the fact that it’s deeply, resonantly disturbing.  

The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel set in a near-future New England in a totalitarian patriarchal state known as the Republic of Gilead.

The leaders of Gilead have overthrown the United States government and placed all women of childbearing age in the role of handmaids, conceiving and giving birth for mothers of the ruling class. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, this novel is an ominous reminder of the delicacy of a woman’s body sovereignty.

I do not recommend 1984 because it is one of the most powerful books ever written. Readers know that. I love this book for its artful prescience.

While Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Me normally gets credit for being the first dystopian novel, Orwell perfected the genre. The novel becomes more important with each passing decade. Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth altering documents for the government.

Catchphrases like “doublethink” and “thought police,” coupled with the pervasive use of surveillance technology highlight why science fiction shines a light on a future our “betters” had just as soon we not see and does so in a spare, literary style that is both eloquent and to the point. 

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K, for without him having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” This is how Kafka’s stark novel The Trial begins. It is a thrilling, hilarious, and bleak tale, set in a strange bureaucratic world of bizarre rules and arbitrary justice. K never knows why he is on trial or what crime he is supposed to have committed. If you want to know where the adjective “Kafkaesque” comes from and what it means, read this book. And if you are a boss, remember that all organisations can show Kafkaesque tendencies from time to time: watch out for them!

Nelson Mandel’s autobiography from his early life through the 27 years he spent in prison before becoming South Africa's first democratically elected President.

This book taught me about trying to be a better person despite your circumstances and being wronged by others. It also gave me hope that my imprisonment could be just a chapter in my journey and didn’t need to be the defining experience of my life.

I get it. This topic is low-hanging fruit, yet classic science fiction is always worth revisiting, particularly when it is the first of the genre. And the first was written by a woman.

It was 1818 when Mary Shelley explored what can happen when a laboratory experiment goes wrong. In this case, an experiment that eliminates the need for human propagation. Taking such an experiment to its logical conclusion eliminates the need for women. Or men for that matter. The prose holds up surprisingly well.

I recommend it because it illustrates why science fiction is as much an art form as anything Rembrandt produced. And perhaps more impactful. A literary masterpiece, Frankenstein considers a future where technology succeeds, but humanity fails.