10 books like Frankenstein

By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,

Here are 10 books that authors have personally recommended if you like Frankenstein. Shepherd is a community of 7,000+ authors sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Timescape

By Gregory Benford,

Book cover of Timescape

If you think about it, communication back in time from the present triggers the same kind of paradoxes as physically traveling to the past. If I send information to the past about which horse will win in what upcoming race, how come I didn’t already know that in the present to begin with? Timescape offers a great, scientifically knowledgeable account about how something like that might play out.

Timescape

By Gregory Benford,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Timescape as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The year is 1998, the world is a growing nightmare of desperation, of uncontrollable pollution and increasing social unrest. In Cambridge, two scientists experiment with tachyons - subatomic particles that travel faster than the speed of light and, therefore, according to the Theory of Relativity, may move backwards in time. Their plan is to signal a warning to the previous generation.

In 1962, a young Californian scientist, Gordon Bernstein, finds his experiments are being spoiled by unknown interference. As he begins to suspect something near the truth it becomes a race against time - the world is collapsing and will…


The Once and Future King

By T. H. White,

Book cover of The Once and Future King

The best-known legendary character in Britain is, of course, Arthur. I have read dozens of versions of the Arthur story, starting with Thomas Mallory’s Death of Arthur, and when all is said and done, the very best still has to be The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Here are the characters we know from the Disney film The Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot: Wart, Merlyn, Sir Ector and Sir Kay. Replete with 14th-century knights and jousts, magic and mirth, this saga covers Arthur’s life from boyhood to kingship to betrayal and demise. Written with humor and pathos, it sparked my ongoing interest in Arthur and made me want to know more about the real man who inspired such a lasting mythology.

The Once and Future King

By T. H. White,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked The Once and Future King as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Voyager Classics - timeless masterworks of science fiction and fantasy.

A beautiful clothbound edition of The Once and Future King, White's masterful retelling of the Arthurian legend.

T.H. White's masterful retelling of the Arthurian legend is an abiding classic. Here all five volumes that make up the story are published together in a single volume, as White himself always wished.

Here is King Arthur and his shining Camelot, beasts who talk and men who fly; knights, wizardry and war. It is the book of all things lost and wonderful and sad; the masterpiece of fantasy by which all others are…


Grendel

By John Gardner,

Book cover of Grendel

“And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war.” Gardner packs a lot into this slim beautiful volume about a monster’s quest for the point of it all. Grendel’s consciousness starts evolving the moment he realizes that he is a thing apart from the rollicking Danes and the Geatish hero, Beowulf. But what? He tries to discover a purpose to his otherness. (“My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it,” is the rather unhelpful advice of the all-knowing dragon.) Poignant, funny, brutal, and poetic, this was my first introduction to stories told by a monster and remains the gold standard.

Grendel

By John Gardner,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Grendel as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic.

"An extraordinary achievement."—New York Times

The first and most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great early epic Beowulf, tells his own side of the story in this frequently banned book. This is the novel William Gass called "one of the finest of our contemporary fictions."


True Grit

By Charles Portis,

Book cover of True Grit

I discovered True Grit in my twenties, three years after my father’s death. I’d been living on my own for a year and was recovering from depression. Life was forcing me to learn resourcefulness, and this book came to me at the right time. I remember reading it with delight, wishing I’d known about it before. Mattie Ross’ pragmatic voice as she describes her father’s murder and her quest to avenge his blood resonated with me, not because we are alike, but because I needed a lesson in toughness. But beyond all this, I needed a good laugh, and True Grit is funny. The characters are colourful, the story suspenseful, and Portis’ research is so thorough you’d swear his book was written in the 19th century. 

True Grit

By Charles Portis,

Why should I read it?

12 authors picked True Grit as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down…


World War Z

By Max Brooks,

Book cover of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

A globe-spanning story of a zombie apocalypse.

One journalist travels the world in the aftermath and interviews the heroes, villains, and ordinary people who survived. It was made into a film with Brad Pitt, which is quite different, but I love anything with a fast zombie. The whole book makes you glad to live in a non-apocalypse.

(If the apocalypse has broken out between me writing this and you reading it, I’m not surprised, but I am sorry. Seriously, find a copy of WWZ as it’s full of good tips for your current predicament.) 

World War Z

By Max Brooks,

Why should I read it?

18 authors picked World War Z as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginning of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse.

Faced with a future of mindless man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and key players in the ten-year fight against the horde, World War Z brings the finest traditions of journalism to bear on what is…


Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury,

Book cover of Fahrenheit 451

Firemen… who burn books? The premise of a censorship society grabbed me right away. Ray Bradbury’s wonderfully imaginative writing has stuck with me since I first read this novel in high school. While the book was written in the 1950s, these are issues that we continue to grapple with to this day. What makes this imagined future so frightening is how possible it seems.

Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury,

Why should I read it?

11 authors picked Fahrenheit 451 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.

Over 1 million copies sold in the UK.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.

The classic…


Dracula

By Bram Stoker,

Book cover of Dracula

I know what you’re thinking. Dracula isn’t unconventional. Well, at the time it was released, it was. Stoker did an excellent job of incorporating many genres into his vampire novel, including gothic horror and dark fantasy. Dracula is one of the reasons I write dark fantasy. The genre has changed so much over the years that if Dracula were released today, it would be unconventional once more, with Dracula being a true predator.

Dracula

By Bram Stoker,

Why should I read it?

15 authors picked Dracula as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'The very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years' Arthur Conan Doyle

A masterpiece of the horror genre, Dracula also probes identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire. It begins when Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, and makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England - an unmanned ship is wrecked; strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck; a lunatic asylum inmate raves about the imminent arrival of his 'Master' - and a determined group of adversaries…


Slaughterhouse-Five

By Kurt Vonnegut,

Book cover of Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five was the first book I read that showed me that science fiction and fantasy can truly go to unexpected places. I was head-over-heals charmed by Vonnegut’s voice and his unassuming protagonist bouncing around through time and space and nutty adventures—but what an amazing thing: the way Vonnegut worked his sci-fi premise into a masterpiece of satire that, at the bottom of it all, was about the very real firebombing of Dresden in World War II, something he had witnessed first-hand. One of my favorite books of all time.

Slaughterhouse-Five

By Kurt Vonnegut,

Why should I read it?

18 authors picked Slaughterhouse-Five as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time), featuring a new introduction by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds
 
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
 
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had…


The Tale of Genji

By Murasaki Shikibu, Edward G. Seidensticker (translator),

Book cover of The Tale of Genji

Jump ahead four hundred years, spin the globe a quarter turn, and we come to what most literary taxonomists will call the first ‘novel,’ The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, who was herself a lady of court during the Heian period. While not as jaw-dropping as the Procopius, Murasaki’s tale likewise functions as a window into a world so distant and exoticfrom both a moral and aesthetic perspectivethat its abiding and underlying familiarity consoles. And isn’t that the point? The supernatural influence is more subtle, but definitely there; witness the several instances of Mononokei.e., evil spirits given to possessing innocent minds. Murasaki provides two notable twists on the idea; first that such invasive spirits can originate either from this life or the afterlife (one of the prince’s courtesans does both). Relatedly, when the evil spirit travels from a living person into the psyche…

The Tale of Genji

By Murasaki Shikibu, Edward G. Seidensticker (translator),

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Tale of Genji as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

 

In the early eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote what many consider to be the world’s first novel, more than three centuries before Chaucer. The Heian era (794—1185) is recognized as one of the very greatest periods in Japanese literature, and The Tale of Genji is not only the unquestioned prose masterpiece of that period but also the most lively and absorbing account we have of the intricate, exquisite, highly ordered court culture that made such a masterpiece possible.

 

Genji is the favorite son of the emperor but also a man of dangerously…


On Writing

By Stephen King,

Book cover of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

This, unlike my other picks, is a work of nonfiction. It’s a treatise on the craft of writing, actually, and one of my favorites.

I’m including it because if you’re a fan of reading books with strong elements of escapism and world-building, there’s a good chance that one day you will want to write books with strong elements of escapism and worldbuilding! And what better way than to learn from a master himself?

Not only does King offer general advice (like, don’t watch tv), he weaves a surprising amount of practical advice into this enjoyable read, too (stay away from adverbs and long paragraphs). If you think one day you’d like to write books, read this one!

On Writing

By Stephen King,

Why should I read it?

15 authors picked On Writing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Twentieth Anniversary Edition with Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S TOP 100 NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME

Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King’s critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work.

“Long live the King” hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the…


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