43 books like Imaginary Friends

A gruesome story of murder and desire that also happens to have the most vivid olfactory descriptions of any genre.

Suskind’s preternatural ability to summon odor from the page makes you feel as if you are there beside him, walking through the flowered hillsides of Provence, or in the back room of a perfume shop on the Pont au Change. His twisted use of classic perfume techniques is as accurate as it is chilling.

This is the story of Jack Crabbe. Jack was reared by both white and Cheyenne folks.

His story is a masterpiece and describes the destruction of Native Americans along with their way of life (including the bison they relied on). According to Jack, he even participated in the Battle of Little Big Horn and was the only white man who survived.

I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in American history and who wants to read about it in an entertaining way. There’s no way to disguise the hateful way European settlers wiped out native tribes and/or enslaved Natives and Blacks, but at least this is an engaging account thereof.

Angela Carter is famous for her sumptuous language, structural playfulness, genre-bending, and seductive, logic-defying plots – and if you like gorgeous lyricism, unforgettable characters, and magical realism (emphasis on the magical), you’ll fall in love with Nights at the Circus. In 1899, journalist Jack Walser meets six-foot-two circus aerialist Fevvers, “the Cockney Venus”. Raised in a brothel and a graduate of freak shows, she’s now a star of the Victorian stage – but are her wings real, as she claims? Walser becomes part of the circus in body and spirit, as, disguised as a clown, he follows Fevvers to St Petersburg and into the wilds of Siberia, where Fevvers must draw on all her cunning and strength to survive – let alone save Walser, too. 

This book is a striking novella, persisting in my memory and making it ideal to squeeze into a rucksack. It’s perfect for a walking trip, whether close to home or far away, because, in many ways, you are a voyeur–an outsider–of how other people live.

The book has philosophical heft and rewards careful reading and reflection, making it a perfect accompaniment to the gentle pastime of journeying in foreign lands.

This book provides an early history of the modern UFO era by a credible U.S. Military Officer. Read this book or another book you can find by Donald E. Keyhoe.

I recommend Major Donald E. Keyhoe’s book on flying saucers because of the personal passion he has exhibited for the subject, especially for the reality and importance of it. I recall viewing in a video showing how he was on TV telling viewers how important the subject of flying saucers was, while at the same time his TV broadcast was right then and there being censored off the air. Someone like Keyhoe… right in the act of being censored, well, I think, it doesn’t get more emotionally moving than that!

Major Kehoe investigated many of the earliest encounters allegedly between U.S. Air Force pilots and UFOs (so-called “flying saucers”). Keyhoe believed the Air Force was actively investigating these close encounters,… show more.

A clear and well-argued account of how the planet became obsessed with stories of alien encounters and what they might mean to us.

An essential read for anyone curious about the subject largely because it considers the whole planet, not just the truly UFO-obsessed United States. It frequently presents the best and most challenging UFO cases with a clarity that gets to the heart of each claim, and never forgets that one thing driving the enduring popularity of the subject is that – whatever the truth behind each claim – we’re dealing with incredible claims that make for great stories.

The standout hook for me is the presence of Roberta Lincoln from the episode, "Assignment: Earth"; I wish the inimitable Terri Garr had reprised the role in an episode of The Next Generation, where she could have demonstrated the same growth of character from clueless receptionist to temporal secret agent that’s on display in this action-packed novel.

Time travel has often resulted in some of my favorite Trek stories, and From History’s Shadow dives deep into the many temporal twists and turns the franchise has introduced over the decades. There’s also a healthy helping of the space race, alien invasions, and flying saucer coverups, all very much in my geeky wheelhouse. And I love period settings—here we get scenes spread across the 1950s and 1960s in addition to being on the Enterprise during Kirk’s classic five-year mission.

Every nerd’s dream is to one day be swept away into adventure, and in this book it actually happens for Zack Lightman. Video game mechanics are used as the basis for interstellar combat, and the main protagonist gets to use his epic skills to save the world. How can any self-respecting gamer hate that?

It’s written by the author of Ready Player One, but instead of that, I chose this because this is much more singularly inspired by gaming. You learn that video games were specifically created in order to prepare humanity for a potential threat, and the better you are at gaming the better humanity’s chances are at winning. I know I’ve had that fantasy at least dozens of times growing up. It’s epic, funny, and has great music. What’s not to love?

This book is another great classic full of scary characters dreamed up by a young girl to explain her hurt knee. On the way home, she bumps into one friend after another and to each of them she provides an even more dramatic description of what happened. Did a wolf try to snatch her for his tea? Did a crocodile knock her over? Was it the witch, the snake, the dragon, the flying saucer that was responsible for her injury? This is such a great story for encouraging children to fire up their own imaginations – and to think about description. It encapsulates how they sometimes exaggerate events to make them appear more impressive or to feel better about what has happened to them. Finally, when the young girl gets home to Mum we discover how she actually hurt her knee, and Mum supplies the all-important plaster to make everything… show more.