100 books like Kairos

Hayao Miyazaki is rightly renowned as one of the greatest animation directors of all time. But he also created this amazing comic over many years, while also directing films. Nausicaä is a fantasy epic, over 1000+ pages of lush drawings telling a beautiful story. It’s a post-apocalyptic world filled with warring factions, giant insects, and dark secrets. One young woman is trying to find her way through this world and put things right, though the right thing to do isn’t always clear. It’s a great story that I recommend to anyone who loves comics, adventures, or the environment. 

Bone was the first book I ever read on my own as a 5th grader. For the first time, I didn’t use an audiobook or need a parent/teacher to read it to me. For that alone, I’ve put it at the top of the list. Bone follows the story of three wayward brothers as they each find their way to a fantastical valley filled with mythical dragons, bizarre creatures, and a lost princess. What starts off as this fun and goofy comic, spirals into this adventure of epic proportions as the author-illustrator takes young readers into a world they never imagined before. 

This fast-paced saga helped captivate me from the first page to the last and I personally owe a lot to this book for helping me overcome my dislike for reading as a young person. This book helped me on my journey to becoming a reader and it… show more.

This one is a completely wordless story that transports you back to the time when dinosaurs roamed the planet. It follows a pack of deinonychus who steal the eggs of a tyrannosaurus and a hunt ensues. Through lively drawings and colors that pop, you get to know the personalities of all these different dinosaurs and feel the difficult and often vicious life back then. It’s out of print, but if you can find a copy it’s worth it. There are a few more books in this series that are also great, but this was my first and I cherish my copy. 

This is one I just discovered (and have only read once, so far) but I immediately ordered copies for all my nieces and nephews. An important element of the kind of adventure graphic novel I love is art that conveys a carefully observed world, one which reminds us that if we slow down and pay attention marvels will reveal themselves to us. This Was Our Pact does precisely that. It starts off with kids on bikes setting off into the night, following their curiosity, and then swerves into the fairy tale territory of ancient rituals and magical creatures.

Kairos is the story of an affair between a late-middle-aged man and a young woman set in the dying days of the German Democratic Republic. The disappearing nation is almost incidental to the main plot, which charts the peaks and troughs of an unequal and sometimes abusive relationship. For me, this light touch says everything about what it was like to live in East Germany. People were mainly just getting on with their lives, as they do everywhere. The book’s closing chapters explore emotions that were too often overlooked in the rush towards reunification: the dismay and disorientation that afflicted many East Germans, especially older ones, as their institutions were dismantled and they became foreigners in their own land. 

This book is straight-up Fantasy, so it’s notable in my list because I read so little trad fantasy these days. But don’t be fooled, this book is not what you expect. Every trope of fantasy gets turned on its head, kicked over, rearranged, and then the characters just straight up do something other than what you expected. There are no hunky but boring heroes. There are no damsels in distress. Even the Gods in this world are… well that would be spoilers. Super well told gripping fantasy trilogy that you won’t regret picking up. Except you won’t be able to put it down.

Kit Morgan describes the town of Clear Creek, the setting for her Prairie Brides series, as the wackiest town in the West. But it’s her inspired pairing of hunky, honorable British cowboys (yes, you read that right) and the independent, clever women who humble them that makes this book and its sequels so worth the read.

Llana of Gathol is book 10 of the John Cater series and in my opinion, the best. Published in 1948, the story is about an earthling named, John Carter. The reason why I liked this book is because John Carter can transform his mind into another body on Mars. That in itself is a pretty cool concept and the reason why I was drawn to it in the first place. The action is fast-paced as Carter gets captured by the inhabitants of Horz, one of the supposedly “dead” cities of Mars. He is sentenced to death along with his captor Pan Dan Chee for bringing Carter into Horz. They are sent down to the pits under the city where they discover the remnants of a maritime race which had existed hundreds of thousands of years ago, suspended in animation unaware of the changes that happened to the world. 

The forthright honesty and the audacity of Nora Simms, narrator of Erika Mailman’s Woman of Ill Fame, is stunning and nearly as compelling as the murder mystery at the center of the novel. Set in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, the novel takes us into the city’s bordellos, which, like the rest of the state, have been infected by a get rich quick at any cost ethos. The cost for many of Nora’s colleagues is high. Women of ill-fame are being killed, one by one, and only Nora is capable and willing to wade through layers of deception to discover the identity of the killer and to save her own life. 

Nora is not your typical damsel in distress and that might be why I love this book so much. She’s not a “good” woman, by society's standards, but she is one of the most surprising… show more.

This book breaks every rule I was ever taught about popular Westerns. Sure, it has a handsome cowboy and a damsel in distress, but he doesn’t get the bad guy, and she doesn’t want or need him to rescue her.

I was all the more amazed that it was written more than 100 years ago yet takes on modern topics like marital breakdown, alcoholism, and divorce.

Its story of a Western marriage gone bad really resonated with me because I grew up in similar circumstances, and Bower’s characterization hit very close to home.