Fans pick 100 books like Believe in People

I recommend Arendt’s book for its guidance in helping readers interpret signs of totalitarianism—a growing concern in today’s civil society. Arendt is a pivotal thinker and an inspiring source of first-hand experience when it comes to fascist regimes.

This is an absolute must-read if we hope to prevent fascism from emerging once again.

The identity of “Murray Constantine” wasn’t uncovered until the 1980s, long after Burdekin’s death, but only a woman could have created such a persuasive patriarchal dystopia, half a century before The Handmaid’s Tale. Burdekin’s futuristic Nazi empire, a brutally misogynist quasi-religion, is dying slowly from within and an English airman named Alfred has been given explosive proof that Hitler was not in fact a Thor-like deity. Though the plot fizzles out, the ideas are extraordinarily ahead of their time.

As The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Muggeridge exposed Stalin’s man-made famine in 1933; in the 1940s, he became one of Orwell’s closest friends. In between the two, he conducted this caustic post mortem on a catastrophic decade. Some of it still feels timely, like his observation that a cultural obsession with information perversely incentivises the manipulation and fabrication of data. All of it is deliciously quotable: he compares the human rights activists who whitewashed Stalinism to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughterhouse because it displayed a notice recommending nut-cutlets.”

I have always been fascinated with Russia, and love reading any book about Russia and Russians, whether the classic fiction of Dostoyevsky, or the absurdist work of Gary Shteyngart. But for insightful political analysis of Putin’s destruction of Russia’s democracy and society, written with a love for the people and country, and a keen eye toward their humanity, nothing beats this dead-eyed read from the great Masha Gessen. Her analysis of modern Russia under Putin’s grip came out a few years before the invasion of Ukraine, which is sort of a culmination of the ideas and stories here. This book is a portrait of individual tragedies woven together as a collective, where the historical resentments of one man (Putin) doom the future of an entire people. If you want to understand how Russia got here. Or what it might feel like to be a young Russian, caught up in this… show more.

This masterpiece from one of the giants of mind-blowing SF is best known as a canonical example of alternate history: set in a world where the Axis powers won World War II, and the former U.S.A. is divided between occupying forces of Imperial Japan on the West Coast and Nazi Germany. As such, the conflict in the book is really about the underground resistance forces’ efforts against the occupiers.

Lots of writers have played with similar premises, but I love Dick’s the most because of its narrative daring, from using the I Ching as a device to generate plot to the Borgesian engine of the imaginary novel within the novel on which the story’s ultimate revelations turn.

The classic exposition of the idea that central governmental economic planning will inevitably be wasteful and tyrannical. Hayek today is caricatured by both right and left, but he is not the minimal state absolutist that both sides often take him to be. Hayek thinks that the way to attack poverty is not redistribution – there isn’t yet enough wealth in existence to give everyone a decent life – but the opportunities created by free markets. Another impetus for my own work was reading this book and discovering that I agreed with him much more than I had expected to. 

Adam Johnson visited North Korea once as a tourist. Based on his keen observations during those weeks, he spins a fantastic tale about Pak Jun Do, an orphaned boy who uses treachery and deception to rise to a high position in the North Korean regime. Pak is part of a crew that kidnaps a little girl from Japan, and later marries North Korea’s most famous actress. The genius of the book is that Johnson imbues the characters with believable personalities, even as he moves them through a nightmarish reality most would find completely unbelievable. The book is so good that one need not have any interest in, or knowledge of, North Korea to enjoy it.

Oh, man… I love this book so much! Donnelly writes the kind of prose that makes me jealous. I frequently stop and go back, rereading her words just to savor the imagery and effortless flow. Characterizations are rich and full, not only for the leads but also for the background characters. Now, I need to point out that there is no magic in this book, so if you’re looking for dragons and lightning bolts, it won’t scratch that itch. But Amberlough feels like a proper fantasy world, and that earns it a place on this list. if you enjoy the encroaching global conflict of Lord of the Rings, but also love John LeCarre and Cabaret, Amberlough is the perfectly-blended cocktail you’ve been looking for.

The ultimate dystopia survival story .. if you can call it survival. Although its title is only 10 years after Francine Prose’s book, it was, of course, written decades earlier by Orwell, who was looking across Europe at the totalitarian Soviet Union for his inspiration.

I read this book in junior high and have returned to it many times; contemplating Orwell’s insights about the ways authoritarian politics infect societies and destroy souls is more urgent and relevant now than ever.

This is a play script, but I have to recommend it as the most adult and provocative exploration of fairytales I’ve ever read. A storyteller in a totalitarian state is interrogated about his tales after they have been linked to a series of child murders. It’s about the risks storytellers take and the dangers of stories being misinterpreted or misused. Martin McDonagh is best known as a screenwriter of films such as In Bruges or The Banshees of Inisherin, but this play is burned into my soul.