100 books like Cog

An immortal druid and a talking dog. What’s not to love?

Think American Gods, but funnier. In the Iron Druid Chronicles, the gods are real, and Atticus O’Sullivan loves to piss them off. The immediate blending of humor and suspense pulled me in right from the start, and I didn’t stop reading until well beyond this book and only took a breath when I ran out of books.

I loved this book because it combines three of my favorite things—humor, fantasy, and baking. What’s not to like about a wizard whose familiar is a sourdough starter?

There’s a small army of hilarious gingerbread men, to boot. T. Kingfisher manages a weird balance between humor, horror, and heart. Her world, like ours, has some really dark stuff in it, but she has such a deft touch that I felt cozy even during murder, political scapegoating, and siege.

This is one of my favorite books, period. I love the warmth and heart Kagan puts into her writing.

Hellspark is a far-future science fictional murder mystery set on an alien world. Tocohl Susumo, an expert on languages and cultures, is sent to investigate. The suspects—the planetary survey team—are a powder keg of fascinating, but clashing, cultures and backgrounds.

Helping Tocohl is her ship’s AI, Lord Margaret Lynn, aka “Maggie.” Maggie is, quite simply, the best. She’s childlike in many ways, but also loyal and clever and so much fun. The relationship between Tocohl and Maggie reminds you of a loving parent-child partnership.

Starbridge is another old favorite. The book is written with heart and warmth. It’s the kind of story that always makes me feel better when I finish reading.

Mahree Burroughs is almost seventeen, and on her way to Earth from her colony world when their ship gets caught up in a first contact situation. As is often the case, secrets and misunderstandings abound, and things get messy.

While the alien Simiu is interesting, one of my favorite characters is the sentient fungus Mahree meets and names Doctor Blanket. Doctor Blanket doesn’t come along until later in the book, but he’s great: wise and curious and simultaneously old and youthful.

I might be cheating a bit on this one; half of the story is told by Dog, yes, but the other half is told by Robot. This is a wordless graphic novel, and it is a deeply moving story about the seasons of friendship.

Robot Dreams shows us just how fragile our dearest relationships can be if we don’t lovingly and tenderly take care of them. This story shows the bliss and joy of a new friendship, the pain of a friendship ending, and the growth it takes to move forward.

I love this book with my whole heart, and I believe it is the perfect graphic novel. It is now an Oscar-nominated animated feature, so I’m not alone in my love of this beautiful story. 

The second in his entertaining detective series in a near future where 2% of the population is paralyzed and has to teleoperate robots in order to interact with the world (interestingly, it was written before the pandemic). The protagonist, Chris (we never are told their gender, making for a delightful guessing game), is an FBI agent investigating a murder and along the way faces the kind of casual discrimination that the disabled undoubtedly face every day. Chris maintains a wry sense of humor through it all, adding an Elmore Leonard or Donald E. Westlake vibe that makes me laugh out loud. 

Don’t worry; this gripping 534-page tale of mystery can sweep you through its pages in a single day, especially since its gritty-but-stunning brown and white artwork acts like a movie as it speeds you and a young orphaned boy through an underground train station and across the streets of Paris and up a clock tower in 1931. Why was the boy’s dead father obsessed with repairing a broken clock? And who is the mysterious angry old man anyway?

In Turned On, Kate Devlin takes us on a ride through the history of sex and technology, from the Ancient Greeks to modern sex robots. 

This book is written by a technologist with an acute sense of the human. Not strictly a book about human rights, Devlin raises human rights and ethical considerations around sex tech as well as offering optimism and imagination about the ways that we could enhance our intimate lives with technology. 

The way we experience sex and intimacy is at the heart of our right to private lives, Turned On offers an erudite, funny, and sensitive exploration of what technology could mean for us.

"Reason" is a science fiction short story first published in the April 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and collected in I, Robot (1950), The Complete Robot (1982), and Robot Visions (1990). It is part of Asimov's Robot series and was the second of Asimov's positronic robot stories to see publication. It tells the story of Cutie, a new class of robot that was designed to autonomously run a space station, which supplies energy via microwave beams to an energy-starved Earth. Cutie comes to realize, because he is so perfect and his human companions are so imperfect, that humans could not have created him. The book explores what it means to be human.

These educational comics are perfect for kids who devour non-fiction books and graphic novels! I especially liked this book because it touches on drones as well as typical robots. I read this book when I was doing research for my own book, T-Bone the Drone, and found it extremely helpful in seeing how another author explained robotics in a kid-friendly way.