100 books like Earthlings

Murakami is a magical realist genius, and this book is him at his mystifying, dream-like best. Expect otherworldly portals, sexually voracious ghosts, woodlands afflicted by mysterious fainting episodes, and, of course, an entire cast of talking cats.

What amazes me about Murakami’s writing is his ability to transfuse the mundane with the truly magical and to avoid all whimsy–even when writing about something as inherently whimsical as talking cats.

In this claustrophobic modern classic, a grieving father and Ted Hughes scholar finds himself haunted by an oily, unnerving, anthropomorphic crow.

I’m a fan of anything Porter writes, but his debut is deserving of the indelible mark it’s made upon the modern literary landscape. The crow is a character like no other, and Porter’s poetry brings this strange and beautiful bird to life.

One of the most inventive novels I’ve read in recent years, this beautiful Pyrenean patchwork is supposed to evoke the orchestra of voices of the mountain region in which the book takes place.

Thus, you have the points of view of local farmers and their families, but also of the mountains themselves, of storm clouds and baskets of mushrooms and plenty of animals, wild and domesticated. The Deer takes us on a delightful tangent, but the most memorable chapter might be the one from the point of view of the spirited, breathlessly energetic dog.

Not strictly a book about talking animals, in that the animal that talks is actually a human when the story begins. Lewis and Wren are going about their unassuming married life when Lewis is told by a doctor that he has one year until he turns into a great white shark.

A wacky premise that delivers so much more than expected, this beautiful, tender fable about love and mortality is packed with lovesick ocean creatures and mothers masquerading as Komodo dragons.

This story is about Benny a teenager who can hear objects speaking and his mother, who is a compulsive hoarder.

Benny finds a group of people in a hidden wing of the local library which introduces him to a new world where he is accepted. He meets Aleph a drug user who leaves lines of poetry on paper in the books of the library and Slavoj a homeless drunk man who spouts much philosophy from his wheelchair. Ozeki makes the reality fantastic, the work is grounded in ordinary details.

The book is a beautiful portrait of a mix of characters you ordinarily would ignore and makes magic of the everyday. It's this everyday magic that I also wish to capture in my own fiction.

It’s science fiction writers like Carol Emshwiller that must be mentioned here, especially when she writes about Ruthie and Joe, who own a robot whom they call the “grey-green” thing, the hound, the Rover, or sometimes just “bitch”. In order to increase their chances for a successful hunt, Joe programs the robot to track a bear, and it does so with ease. Eventually Joe commands the “grey-green thing” to actually kill it, and the robot carries out its deadly mission. At the end you shudder at the thought of the careless use of the machine, not to mention what would happen if the “grey-green thing” had been programmed to kill a human being.

This book is amazing. It’s about a kid named Jackson whose parents are having trouble making ends meet. It looks like they’re going to be homeless... again. But that’s when Crenshaw, Jackson’s old imaginary friend shows up. I love how Katherine Applegate shows Jackson’s fears and hopes. I grew up pretty poor, and so I know that she does a great job with this tough situation. Yet, despite the hardships, Applegate fills this book with fun, like when Crenshaw, a giant imaginary cat, takes a bubble bath.

Imagine if you could meet someone from the past without realising? This is what drew me to this magical book. When you are young there are things you just don’t question and this is what I was like. I saw things that adults would have said weren’t there. But I didn’t believe them. I only believed in the power of my imagination. For me anything could appear; a small creature under a tree in the garden or Santa’s sleigh flying through the sky at Christmas – it was all so real I could reach out and touch it. In Darkling Wood is one of those stories that wrap themselves around you and whisk you away, where you’ll leave believing in magic!

Besides having one of the best book titles ever, this novel immediately draws readers in and is hard to put down; the action is matched by its intelligence. In it, freedom-seekers create a fast-growing, virtual society on the Internet that grows so fast it terrifies governments and their “security.” With no possibility of oversight and control, the System fights to co-opt this cyber-society before it undermines and overwhelms the dominance of corruptocrat governing elites. The free souls in this novel lead us through a clever plot wherein principles of economic freedom, individuality, and justice lead to a free market uncontrolled by tax-hungry government lackeys. Profiled here are a group of individuals determined to transcend paradigms that the human psyche often forms for us, almost autonomically, as a reaction to fear.

Bulgakov, a Russian born in Kyiv, wrote The Heart of a Dog in 1925 when the Soviet Union was in its infancy. It’s the breezy tale of a surgeon who transplants a human gland into a stray dog, turning an amiable mutt into a vile man.

There’s a punning reference to Stalin in the name of the least flattering character, and the author was clearly inviting his readers to read between the lines: this was an early satire on the Bolshevik social experiment.

It was rejected for publication and circulated instead in samizdat form. Remarkably though, Stalin took the writer under his wing and, while Bulgakov died young, he did so in his own bed. A political satirist can get away with a lot if they do it with charm.