Fans pick 100 books like I Crawl Through It

Although The Scar is the second book in the Bas Lag series, I prefer it to Perdido Street Station (which is also glorious.) The Scar takes to the seas, a place I always prefer to be, in the form of the floating, roving city of Armada.

We come aboard (as it were) and experience life on Armada—its precincts, villages, towns, secrets, and its people—swordsmen and librarians and vampires and the mysterious pair who run the place—The Lovers (that’s the only name we get) through the eyes of Bellis Coldwine, a prickly, difficult, but fascinating woman who would literally rather be anywhere else.

I get where she’s coming from but I would absolutely book a cruise on Armada!

Of Bees and Mist is a mix between fable and fairy-tale. It tells the story of Meridia, whose home is infested with perpetual mist, and her marriage to a young man that puts her in the sights of Eva, her new mother-in-law, who whispers to bees and is quite evil.

The juxtaposition between the two women is what makes this book so fascinating. I love books about family secrets, and the setting of crumbling houses and collapsing dynasties is what drew me into this story, but what kept me reading was the delicious conflict between Meridia and Eva. I had no idea where this story was going to take me, but I loved every second of it.

Pixel Juice is a collection of short stories, all set in the near future. Some of the stories are linked and have a continuing thread and some are standalone, but all of them are enthralling.

Jeff Noon belongs primarily to the “cyberpunk” subgenre of science fiction, and an ironic prescience runs through these stories in the manner of Dark Mirror, testing your acceptance of the advances of technology, consumer culture, and mass media.

I came away from reading this book the first time feeling quite emotional about how well he evoked the uncanny weirdness we take for granted living in a world dominated by data and screens. 

As a fantasy reader, you will often come across the same ideas regurgitated in a slightly different form. Not that I have anything against that – some of them are still amazing stories – but when there is a slightly different voice to the storytelling, it is very refreshing. That’s what I found with Dragon Queen, the first in The Silver Kings series.

Some have argued that this series is chaotic and focuses on too many characters, but I found it delightfully action-packed with dark plots, political scheming, and incredible world-building and scenery that played out through my imagination as I read. 

The first story alone has enough jampacked into it to be more thrilling and entertaining than many novels.

A team of Confederate rejects man a rudimentary submarine on a  mission near the end of the Civil War. From there we are taken across eras and across the globe to stories of near-future whaling missions that are hastening climate catastrophe, imperial Russian ships stuck on ice, a camp counselor taking his charges on ever-zanier adventures.

Though largely unified in their explorations of people plugging away in spite of ill-fated circumstances, the range of this author’s characters dazzles. As much as this is a master course on authentically capturing voices of all ages, places, and periods, Rutherford convincingly captures location as well using it as a character as much as setting.

The book introduced me to time travel, hyperspace, superstitious rats, psychic horses, conspiracy theories, and UFOs. Watzlawick, a psychologist by trade, explores the many facets of communication: how it occurs, how it fails, and how we can be misled by it.

One of the first people to explore the psychology of conspiracy theories and disinformation, he alerts us to the perils and pitfalls of all sorts of communication—both verbal and nonverbal-- through amusing anecdotes and erudite examples.

Every mystery hunter needs a guide to symbols and this profusely illustrated book is the best I have found so far. Symbols, by definition, point directly to the non-obvious aspects of a greater reality. In religious buildings they are a way to escape the material and approach the numinous, which is beyond the scope of words. Sometimes the meaning of a symbol is clear but in other cases the explanation has been forgotten and you need suggestions as how to interpret it. This is where this book comes in.  

The most important source of conflict is the unwarranted idea that language maps on to “reality” – and that we can test the degree to which it does by the correspondence between our ideas and the organization of the “real world.” In that frame, differences in perception devolve to who is right and who is wrong, and intellectual or actual fighting is not far away. But this idea about “truth” is unjustified and wrong. What Donald Hoffman has done in this book is to show that our common sense understanding that our sensory and perceptual systems evolved to correspond to the world is a delusion. And when you appreciate that evolutionary epistemology does not support delusion, then you are much more able to cut yourself loose from unnecessary ontological assumptions and can instead focus on how to use your life to interact with this one world in ways that are… show more.

This book was the beginning of my spiritual journey. 

Accepting that we are responsible for every aspect of our lives was a hard pill to swallow. Life happens for us, not to us. What is the purpose? The purpose (I believe) is to learn unconditional love and acceptance. 

Does that mean we have to be around people that hurt us? No. It means to accept people for who they are and move on.  

This book challenged me and my way of thinking. “Your thoughts create your reality” is explained in detail in this book. I’m grateful that this book was written.

In between other projects, I have been conducting research for a non-fiction book about the particular kinds of parallel universe that every story world creates. And that's how I came across Reality+.

The question as to whether we are living in a simulation is beloved of moviegoers, stoners, and undergraduates (quite a large intersection in that Venn diagram). It's also worthy of serious philosophical and scientific inquiry. David J Chalmers is a philosopher, and his book treats the question with entertaining rigour.

The book goes beyond the simulation hypothesis, though, to examine the philosophical implications of our inevitable colonisation of the virtual realm. At the heart of Chalmers' argument is a rejection of the opposition between the real and the simulated.

Lived experience, Chalmers claims, is real experience, as freighted with value and possibility in the virtual world as it is out here in the probably real, possibly simulated universe.