100 books like Flight Behavior

What’s not to love about a book structured as a tree? This is a vast, episodic novel that takes traditional storytelling and turns it on its head.

A cast of characters connect through stories that grow from seed to trunk to limb. I finished this long read and immediately wanted to start again. It’s the kind of book that rewards a second or third pass. Complex, rife with science and faith and desperate longing, this book is a celebration of the tree, a clarion call to return our attention to our roots before it is too late.

One of Powers’ characters asks, “What do all good stories do?” He answers, “They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.” I think that’s true of all of these books, and most definitely this one.

Nature’s Metropolis is a rare work that transforms scholarship, yet whose easy flow and engaging tone make it approachable for non-specialists.

Its main arguments —how humans and cities are embedded in nature, the interwoven, strained ties between rural and urban, and how technologies transformed our connection to nature— are guiding themes of my own work. 

Reading the passage in this book about a sack’s journey, on how grain moved from farm to market before and after the appearance of the train in the West, was the spark that lit my imagination on how packaging transformed modern foodways.

I read this novel when I was about three-quarters finished with my novel, and was just blown away by the attention to detail, possibilities, and hope between the pages.

This is another hopeful near-future novel, in which humanity is trying its best to overcome the worst of climate change. Unlike my novel, however, which is told from the perspective of one family, Ministry for the Future is a truly global story, with dozens and dozens of narrators, many unnamed, who give us snapshots everywhere from the Arizona border to Antarctica to Switzerland to India, all coalescing into what becomes a global movement to try to save the planet.

This novel is a little lighter on plot, but fascinating as a menu of hopeful options and possibilities for what could be done if humanity really got its act together. 

I love this book because, as someone from a working-class background, this book really spoke to me as young person – I was born two years after it was published in 1965. It is profoundly wrong and romanticizes its subject, but it remains a classic, because Thompson was a brilliant writer and because henceforth no one could ignore those previously excluded from the historical narrative.

Growing up, Marlene learned about the Holocaust through stories about members of her mother’s family who died in the Holocaust. As a Lutheran growing up in Minnesota, Fern learned little about the Holocaust. As whites, neither of us learned much about the Jim Crow era in the US or the northern migration of southern African Americans during that era.

Isabelle Wilkerson grew up knowing the stories of her parents’ migration north to Washington, DC. Those stories shaped her desire to chronicle the Great Migration (1915-1970), in which millions of African Americans left the Jim Crow South for better lives in northern cities. Although many achieved success that would not have been possible, they experienced the same interpersonal and institutional racism in the North that they thought they were escaping from.

Wilkerson, a journalist, gives us the sweep of history grounded by the stories of four African Americans. 

This book was a significant inspiration for my own book, and remains one of the best and deepest accounts of how climate change is affecting the United States, in any medium.

Moving from the wetlands of the Eastern Seaboard to an eroding village in coastal Louisiana to a Pensacola neighborhood burdened by high flood insurance costs, Rush shows in intimate detail how sea-level rise alters individual lives and transforms small communities, displaying a patience and compassion that too few journalists have.

Set in Japan in the period just before World War II, this is the story of Sachiko and her three sisters.

Yukiko is in need of a husband, but she is stiff in her old-fashioned habits. Taeko, by contrast, is a rebel who sleeps with men and becomes pregnant. Sachiko, modeled by Tanizaki on his pretty and spirited wife, loves all of her sisters and feels responsible for them.

I found the picture of the sisters’ daily life, which was by turns cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern, fascinating in its detail. One thing follows another, open-ended, surprising, and completely authentic in feel. I cannot recommend this book enough!

If Desert Solitaire is an American classic, The Monkey Wrench Gang is the blockbuster that everyone knows and loves for its humor, and sex, all wrapped up in an environmental action thriller.

While this book might not be quite as literary as Desert Solitaire, it changed environmentalism in America. This book blended anarchism and environmentalism. It also helped inspire the environmental organization, Earth First. And it created the term “to monkey wrench.”

Read the book because it changed American environmentalism. Love it for its action and thrills in the Desert Southwest. I know I did.

And while I always wanted to be like the brash main character, George Washington Hayduke, in all truth I was and am more like Seldom Seen.

This is the first in the Nell Ward Mystery Series where, unusually, the main character and amateur sleuth is an ecologist.

What I enjoy about this book is how the author cleverly uses the skills of an ecologist to solve the mystery and thereby draws a parallel with CSI techniques. We also learn a great deal of fascinating ecological detail (particularly about bats and badgers) and environmentalism tangentially to the storyline, which certainly adds another layer to the reading experience and this is what has stayed with me.

Alexievich is equal parts therapist, poet, and historian. She elicits deeply personal memories through oral histories that she artfully weaves into a portrait of vast events. The accounts gathered in this history of the Soviet Union’s ten-year war against Afghanistan give voice to soldiers’ memories of the country they were asked to defeat, which defeated them instead, and parents’ memories of sons killed or otherwise destroyed in battle. I read this book after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which initiated an equally brutal, mindless, and losing war, and I find sad new relevance in this book as I learn of Russian soldiers being shipped home from Ukraine in the same kinds of zinc coffins that gives this book its title.