Here are 96 books that Feet Of Clay fans have personally recommended if you like
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One of the questions that I’m constantly asked by other authors is how do you make characters memorable in a genre that has done it all? My criteria are twofold–the characters need to be flawed and relatable; no one can truly relate to Superman. Secondly, I believe there is strength in a group. When I write with a diverse group of characters with their own personalities, the characters tell the story for me. I find that if I can emphasize and start having fun like I’m part of the group, I become enthralled with the novel. I am passionate about characters and letting them breathe and feel real.
The imagination of a child should be nourished and fed–growing up, this book did just that for me. I could relate to the protagonist in the sense that I loved to learn–and to this day, I am a sponge for knowledge–but I was easily bored with the mundane, often creating worlds that led to my becoming an author.
This was probably one of the earliest works to cultivate that. The characters are rooted in real-life comparisons and still live in the back of my mind. It continues to resonate with me today because despite some tropes being beaten into the ground, this novel took simple concepts, like talking dogs and numbers and letters at war, and made them have a fantasy life of their own.
With almost 5 million copies sold 60 years after its original publication, generations of readers have now journeyed with Milo to the Lands Beyond in this beloved classic. Enriched by Jules Feiffer’s splendid illustrations, the wit, wisdom, and wordplay of Norton Juster’s offbeat fantasy are as beguiling as ever.
“Comes up bright and new every time I read it . . . it will continue to charm and delight for a very long time yet. And teach us some wisdom, too.” --Phillip Pullman
For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only…
For the last decade, I’ve spent the majority of each year traveling. I’ve been to 60 countries across 6 continents and every US state. My love of travel was inspired and encouraged by my parents from a very early age. I’ve also been inspired by a wide variety of other sources, like movies, TV, photography, and, of course, books. Often, I’ll plan an adventure around a cool location I saw or read about and then just go. I’ll just show up and see what happens. All it takes is that little initial nudge, like what I found in these books.
No book has had a bigger influence on me as a person or a writer than this one. I suppose a lot of hoopy froods could say the same. It’s an adventure on a galactic scale, and yet, at its core, it’s just about a guy who wants to go home and have a cup of tea.
It’s a brilliantly funny satire and full of jokes and moments I’ll never forget. All four books in the series are amazing, and I’ve re-read them countless times. The fifth and final book is a downer worth skipping.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
The best stories are the ones that take very silly ideas seriously. This doesn’t mean that they’re not funny; on the contrary, you don’t really hear the truth until it makes you laugh. These books all lean heavily on tropes, specifically B-movie tropes. I used to write detailed reviews of terrible movies, afterschool specials, and creature features. I host a podcast all about the funnier parts of TV criticism. Figuring out how something simple speaks to the core of us is the height of fiction, and all five of these do that and do it with humor.
It’s hard to beat Scalzi for nailing the execution of a high concept.
Redshirts could have so easily been nothing but a gimmick, but Scalzi really gets into the guts of the horror and humor of being a character written for the sole purpose of dying. I picked up the book with a cynical eye, expecting to hate it, but it drew me in.
Scalzi went so much further with the concept, shined a light on every corner of the idea, that he managed to create a deconstruction and reconstruction of the same trope at the same time.
'I can honestly say I can't think of another book that ever made me laugh this much. Ever' Patrick Rothfuss, New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Wind
Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It's a prestige posting, and Andrew is even more delighted when he's assigned to the ship's Xenobiology laboratory. Life couldn't be better ... although there are a few strange things going on:
(1) every Away Mission involves a lethal confrontation with alien forces
As a child, I was a maladaptive daydreamer. I could often be found crafting elaborate fantasies in my head featuring fully-fledged worlds and characters that I would actively interact with and speak to as if they were real. I was a strange child, and I kept that strangeness with me when I went into fiction. Since then, I’ve always wanted to encapsulate the feeling of giving a movie-like experience in book form. I want the people who read my work to feel like they’re experiencing something real.
Peake writes with the experience of someone who paints and that has a remarkable effect on his use of imagery. There are certain figurative turns of phrases he uses, such as “a face like scrunched up paper” or describing a cat purring as “the sound of an ocean inside a shell,” that click in my mind like—yes! You’ve put that into words! And Titus Groan is, once again, full of that amazing and immersive wordsmithery that elevates the text into something cinematic.
The first volume of the GORMENGHAST trilogy of fantasy novels. Titus Groan is born the heir to Gormenghast castle, and finds himself in a world predetermined by complex rituals that have been made obscure by the passage of time. Along the corridors of the castle, the child encounters some of the dark characters who will shape his life.
I’ve now completed four books in my New Rock fantasy series; and, while the stories are full-on adventures in a strange (but strangely familiar) new world, they contain lots of comedic characters and situations. I come from a background of comedy writing. Comedy isn’t nice people telling jokes. That’s a dinner party. Comedy is all about pain, fear, misery, confusion, suffering, mistakes, betrayals, accidents, dangers, and things going horribly wrong—and what good adventure doesn't have those? And why wouldn’t any strange new world be full of them? New Rock New Role, the first book in the series, is published on December 12th 2023 by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy.
Robert Sheckley stands out from his contemporaries of the golden age of science fiction by being not just great but also often very funny.
Sheckley has a wry, insightful wit, which puts him in a class of his own among the giants of the post-WW2 era. Start with his eight stories of the AAA Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service. Great idea, great characters, great settings (two shysters running a fly-by-night planetary fixer-upper service, on the cheap): they are light, effortless, unpretentious, insightful, and brilliant.
It’s basically Ghostbusters in space. What more could you want?
Robert Sheckley (July 16, 1928 – December 9, 2005) was a Hugo- and Nebula-nominated American author. First published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist, and broadly comical. Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.This volume has the following great stories: Warm, Ask A Foolish Question, Beside Still Waters, Cost of Living, Forever, Keep your Shape The Leech, Seventh Victim, Watchbird, Warrior Race, One man's poison, The Perfect Woman
I love mysteries, but I find that after a while, a lot of them tend to run together in my head. So I just love it when I find a book with a setting so unique that it sticks in my mind forever. And it’s even better when the author uses that setting to show me something new about human nature, history, or society while still delivering me a plot that keeps me turning pages.
Like a lot of folks, I found out about this book when the movie version came out, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
The world-building in the movie was so compelling and unique that I decided to pick up the book. And I’m so glad that I did. The plot in the book is much more complicated, and the social satire is even sharper. One of my all-time favorite noir mysteries.
The best stories are the ones that take very silly ideas seriously. This doesn’t mean that they’re not funny; on the contrary, you don’t really hear the truth until it makes you laugh. These books all lean heavily on tropes, specifically B-movie tropes. I used to write detailed reviews of terrible movies, afterschool specials, and creature features. I host a podcast all about the funnier parts of TV criticism. Figuring out how something simple speaks to the core of us is the height of fiction, and all five of these do that and do it with humor.
No one, and I do mean no one, can craft a sentence like Larry Doyle.
What Usagi Yojimbo is to a katana, Doyle is to the English language, building statements that manage to at once stretch the imagination but be immediately recognizable. Doyle will describe a feeling, an instant, a moment that is universal in words you’ve never seen strung together.
On top of that, this book is a hilarious romp in an alternate history with monsters and mad science, and it manages to pull off one of the most incredible narrative twists I’ve ever seen.
The best stories are the ones that take very silly ideas seriously. This doesn’t mean that they’re not funny; on the contrary, you don’t really hear the truth until it makes you laugh. These books all lean heavily on tropes, specifically B-movie tropes. I used to write detailed reviews of terrible movies, afterschool specials, and creature features. I host a podcast all about the funnier parts of TV criticism. Figuring out how something simple speaks to the core of us is the height of fiction, and all five of these do that and do it with humor.
I’m cheating a little with this one since this is technically three books but go with me. Slaves of the Volcano God, Bride of the Slime Monster, and Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies are some of those series that used to be thick on the ground but now are harder to find.
They’re adventure novels that play with the tropes of B-movies, and not only are they hilarious, but they made a young Justin like B-movies more. Playing with tropes can get exhausting, but when it’s done with genuine love, as it is here, it makes for an airy joy of a series.
My name is Sara Jo Easton, and I’m the bisexual author of the Zarder novels, a fantasy series where a race of dragon-like creatures called Onizards learns to get past their prejudices. When I was at a book signing for my third book, The Blood of Senbralni, a strange man loudly declared I was part of an agenda to turn people to homosexuality and Satan with my evil dragons. To be clear, I am not and will never be affiliated with Satan. I made a vow that every book I wrote from that point forward would have at least one LGBTQ+ romance with a happy ending to annoy people like that man.
When it comes to fantasy books, it’s hard to narrow things down to only one book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.
He was a master of satire and the use of asides to parody the tropes of fantasy while also telling compelling stories and building a world you could imagine visiting. If we’re going to annoy the people trying to ban LGBTQ+ books, though, I’d have to recommend starting with The Fifth Elephant.
As the kingdom of dwarves is in disarray over the disappearance of the Scone necessary to crown their king, a group of Night Watch detectives from a distant land must work together to solve the crime while dodging evil werewolves.
One of the detectives on the case is Cheery, a dwarf who causes waves for openly identifying as female (the dwarves follow logic similar to J.R.R. Tolkien’s dwarves in that every dwarf has a beard and gender…
They say that diplomacy is a gentle art. That its finest practitioners are subtle, sophisticated individuals for whom nuance and subtext are meat and drink. And that mastering it is a lifetime's work. But you do need a certain inclination in that direction. It's not something you can just pick up on the job. Which is a shame if you find yourself dropped unaccountably into a position of some significant diplomatic responsibility. If you don't really do diplomacy or haven't been to school with the right foreign bigwigs or aren't even sure whether a nod is as good as a…
I love fantasy, particularly comic fantasy. But there's an art to making something that is mind-meltingly silly feel real and meaningful, at the same time. To make it feel solid. If something is too chaotic, too randomly silly, then the narrative integrity disintegrates. You're left feeling, ‘yes, I know that the troll has now mysteriously turned into a chicken; but really, what’s the point?’ On the other hand, if the story isn’t silly enough…well, then it becomes straight fantasy, which is wonderful when it’s done well, but can feel mundane and derivative when it is not. I've deliberately limited this list to include only two Discworld books. To include any more would seem, well—silly.
I said I would limit myself to two Discworld books, so here we have my other favourite. This is quite an early one, before the world is fully formed, but the portrayal of the wizards and their University is beginning to emerge, full of chaos and joy and demented energy. But again, this madcap, surreal mania is corralled masterfully, the characters feeling like real people with real agency, moving through a world that—while full of vivid colours and impossible, surreal things—is also somehow solid and real. It is a testament to Pratchett’s incredible storytelling powers that Ankh Morpork is more real to me than several cities I have actually, physically visited. It is unreal and yet hyper-real at the same time. You should go visit. It is wonderful.
'May well be considered his masterpiece . . . Humour such as his is an endangered species' The Times
The Discworld is very much like our own - if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle, that is . . .
All this books and stuff, that isn't what it should all be about. What we need is real wizardry.
Once there was an eighth son of an eighth son, a wizard squared, a source of magic. A Sourcerer.
