100 books like Birds Without Wings

This brilliant book summarizes the history of Indigenous people in this country. It was written by a person with Indigenous heritage who participated in global Indigenous movements for over four decades.

I wish I had had this book accessible when I studied Native American history long ago with Western Cherokee Professor Dr. David Edmunds. 

This award-winning book provides a new way to understand Native people and why they have struggled so tenaciously for their human rights, even in a country that promotes itself as the world’s beacon of democracy. I recommend it unequivocally to everyone.

The most iconic and somehow most misrepresented vampire story of all time. I read this book because it was iconic and for no other reason. It was not long before I began to see this book's Christian themes and messages. Though the book may not be explicitly Christian, the influences and messages are most apparent in Mina Harker.

I loved how the character of Mina becomes a prototype of what people would eventually call “The Final Girl”, not because of her physical strength or survival instincts, but because of her unwavering faith in God. I knew this was essentially a story of good and evil, but I was wonderfully surprised by this being a story of faith vs flesh and corruption vs holiness.

I read this book as a college student while on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Athens, Greece. As I sat reading while intermittently gazing at the view of the Acropolis from my hotel balcony, a frappe at my side, the book captivated me.

Written by a world-renowned historian in response to his son’s question, “What is history?”, this book opened vistas of reflection about our connections with past cultures and why we do history.

In a present where we are often being pushed to look forward, to innovate, and move on, The Historian’s Craft helped me to better articulate the value of understanding history. Surrounded by the rich cultural heritage of ancient Greece, this book just made perfect sense.

This book takes the lives of very ordinary Canadians and throws them into the maelstrom of war. I love that it carefully sets up a world few know about—Toronto in the 1930s—and shows the ambiguity of the times, how anti-Semitism was at home as well as across the water in Europe.

I so enjoyed the Romeo and Juliet love affair at the novel's heart, and I was moved by the trials love is subjected to—as well as shocked by excellent descriptions of war's brutality.

Over the years, I’ve read hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Many of them have moved, stretched, and entertained me, but there are only a few I wandered into and realized early on that I would not get out of this one unchanged.

The author's inventiveness is astonishing, managing to create not one new world we inhabit but three, all deftly interconnected by the unlikely thread of a simple fable passed from generation to generation. Perhaps most striking to me is the sheer power of the book, its capacity to take us places and share lives we would otherwise never dreamed of.

While the mysterious document—itself a fascinating story within a story—wends its way through a narrative that spans a thousand years, its message is less important than the lives it touches.

And what lives. Each character is drawn so vividly and infused with such essential, defining human traits that we… show more.

Upon opening this book, I was quickly caught up in Jahren’s lovely prose. Her story is one of a woman trying to make a career in plant biology despite struggles with mental health, sexism, and lack of funding, but it’s the way she tells the story – lyrically and with such vivid imagery – that makes it such an excellent read.

This book became my ultimate escapism at a low point in my life. It’s a wonderfully written, well-researched epic novel about the eleventh century Scottish king, Macbeth, based on the bold premise that he and Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney, were one and the same man. Most of us—especially those who went to school in Scotland!—are familiar with the Macbeth of Shakespeare, but Dorothy Dunnett brings him alive in his own time, no guilt-ridden villain but a complicated warrior of great depth and humanity, true to his beliefs, his people, and his wife who is nothing like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth either! This is a rattling good read by any standards—engrossing, exciting, humorous, and moving. Even knowing the tragedy was coming, I cried. Each time.

I first read this in my teens and was utterly blown away. It tells the story of the young Prince Rupert of the Rhine, most famous for fighting for his uncle, King Charles the First in the English Civil Wars. I knew little about “Roundheads and Cavaliers” at the time but had the vague idea that cavaliers were silly dandies with long hair who deserved to lose, and that Rupert was a mere mercenary desperate to make money out of someone else’s war. The Rupert of this beautifully written and impeccably researched novel is so much more—dashing, yes, and fascinated by war, but also skilled, thoughtful, honourable, loyal, and unexpectedly vulnerable to those he loves. I believed in Ms. Irwin’s Rupert utterly. After my own studies, I still do.

I discovered this in my early teens, which perhaps explains why I didn’t bat an eyelid that the heroine is only fifteen years old when she marries our hero. It’s based on the true story of Harry and Juana Smith during the Peninsular war and is a very appealing novel, brilliantly researched and written in Georgette Heyer’s inimitable, light-hearted style. Harry shines as the brave and lovable young officer. Both main characters, their friends, and Wellington himself, leap off the pages fully formed. I’d probably blackball a book written now about a 25 year old man marrying a fifteen year old, yet I can still easily buy into this one, accepting the different customs of their time and simply enjoying their story. 

Of course, the characters in this book are the stuff of legend: King Arthur, Guinevere, and the narrator of this tale, Lancelot.

But I think what is great about Mr. Kristian's approach is that he makes them all completely and recognizably human, with all the frailties and failings of ordinary people who are forced, by world events, to rise to the extraordinary.

Men who will be myths are, at heart, only men. A beautifully realized setting, a credible and incredible world for one of the great stories to play out against.