100 books like Enchanted, Inc.

While Bujold is famous for her science fiction Vorkosigan Saga, she has taken a welcome turn to fantasy in recent years with her Penric & Desdemona series, starting with Penric’s Demon. The book focuses on the accidental sorcerer Penric and the demon who possesses him and gives him power, Desdemona. Theirs is a complicated relationship, in no small part because Desdemona retains the memories and personalities of the many people—and animals!—she has possessed before. While having magical powers obviously has its advantages for Penric, demonic possession is not without its dangers, and quite a few people in the world of the Five Gods believe that sorcerers and their demons are best drowned at sea. The book features exciting adventures in an exotic world—but also touching mediations on death, fate, and destiny.

Tikaya Komitopis is a linguist on the Kyatt Islands, a small, isolated country that is targeted for conquest by the much larger Turgonian Empire. By breaking Turgonian codes, Tikaya foils the conquest and forces the Turgonians into an unfavorable truce with its rival great power, the Nurian Empire. After the war, the Turgonians kidnap Tikaya, she believes in order to execute her. But while the Turgonians certainly do plan to do that, they first want her to translate something—something extremely strange, which turns out to be connected to something extremely dangerous. Along with being a thrilling read, Encrypted is an excellent entry into Buroker’s sprawling universe of books about the Turgonians, Nurians, and Kyattese.

Lin is well-known among romance aficionados for her groundbreaking Tang Dynasty historical romances. With The Lotus Palace, the first novel in her Pingkang Li Mysteries series, she expands into crime and political intrigue. This is the only non-fantasy or science fiction title on this list, and it’s here because Lin not only crafts an engaging story of murder and romance, she also handles the historical setting like an absolute master. The world of the 9th century Tang capital Changan—from the seedy gambling dens and bars of the Pingkang Li red-light district to the luxurious family compounds of the exclusive northeast quarter—feels familiar and lived-in, rich and complete, fully detailed without reading like a history textbook.

Magic has appeared on Earth, and Addie doesn’t know what to make of it. In fact, she’s not quite sure what to make of anything—she has no recollection of who she is. What she does know is alchemy: While some people are magical, alchemists make magic using potions and powders. The magical don’t like the alchemists, and the New Magical don’t like the Old Magical, the creepy, secretive necromancers who run funeral homes and turn people into ghouls and zombies. The Final Formula has excitement, scares, and some mind-blowing twists—just know that, if you continue with the series, you cannot skip the “in-between” books.

Stansell’s book brings to life the lives and experiences of working-class women in New York City, a group often ignored by historians. She creates a vivid portrait of the hardships that these women endured as they struggled to survive and often had to make their living in occupations such as domestic service or sex work.

Stansell doesn’t paint them as victims, though, as Stansell points to their agency and strength. Her research is remarkable for its rigor and depth. After reading this book, I had a very different understanding of New York City in this period.

Adler’s book depicts a woman’s life through a series of moments, incidents, bits of speech that come at the journalist narrator. The short passages perfectly capture the neurotic energy, humor, and horror of New York City. When I first read it, I was blown away. It showed there is great latitude in ways to approach writing. The short, choppy format is the closest a book has come to mirror my experience as a writer who seeks to find meaning and/or humor in everyday life. It’s a jagged mosaic of a book when put together is a delightful treasure.

They were poets, actresses, singers, artists, journalists, publishers, baronesses, and benefactresses. They were thinkers, and they were drinkers. Edna St Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, Isadora Duncan, and Ma Rainey–knew how to have fun.

I love the way the author deftly describes each woman—women who lived in an era that still defined women as second-class citizens. Each was unique in her own way—bold, brassy, and making no compromise with gender and sexual norms of the day.

This book is an entertaining and informative guide to the music, martinis, and sometimes mayhem of these daring, brazen, and historical heroines! 

The stories in this book all take place on the same day in 1915, when over a million women marched in New York for the right to vote. Stories like this appeal to me because so many of the women who worked tirelessly for this achievement are not familiar names. These stories give them a voice. One of my own ancestors was a suffragette. Maybe she was part of this march!

I loved that, in addition to telling stories of her clients, Goldberg (an attorney) writes about how she herself became the victim of cyber abuse by a former boyfriend. I think hearing this from a smart, successful woman can help other victims overcome the tendency to blame themselves.

The stories Goldberg tells in her book make clear how life-destroying it is when nude images of a woman are posted online, whether because of so-called “revenge porn” or sextortion. I think this is only going to become a bigger problem because now, thanks to AI, it’s so easy to create nude deepfakes.

Accounts like Goldberg’s can help galvanize the laws we need to criminalize the sharing of nude images without consent.

This slim but dense book chronicles the ups and (mostly) downs of a young woman’s life in Montréal and New York in the 80s and early 90s, a scuzzy time capsule full of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Doucet’s maximalist, punk-inflected art packs each and every claustrophobic panel to bursting, a perfect fit for this tale of a suffocating, toxic relationship playing out in the shadow of the Cold War. It’s no exaggeration to say that Doucet, who recently won the Angouléme Festival's Grand Prix, is one of the most important figures in modern comics, she was one of the first women to break into the boys’ club of the alt comix scene and rewrote the rules of the medium. She remains not only a giant in the history of Quebec comics but of the entire graphic novel art form.