100 books like Milk and Honey

Frankl’s concept of finding meaning in suffering and the idea that our primary drive in life is not pleasure but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful deeply resonates with me.

The book underscores the belief that even in the most difficult of circumstances, we have the freedom to choose our attitudes and responses, a concept that is central to high-performance psychology.

Angelou’s words sat me in a comfy chair as if in a favorite movie theater as the lights dimmed.

The world unrolling before me enveloped me from the red dirt of Arkansas in the 1930s all the way to the California sun. Her prose read like poetry and led me into each space she inhabited, including the ones in her mind. She slowed down the moment and let me ponder—no sideways judgments or explanations.

Her experience of childhood sexual assault ripped through me as my own had. She didn’t shy away from the horrors or beauty of life as a young Black woman finding her place in the world but projected them onto the screen in my mind. They’ve lingered there a long time.

This fascinating and charming book was written by a French magazine editor after he suffered a massive stroke and was locked inside his own body, unable to speak or move. Incredibly, he wrote this book in his mind throughout the day and then each letter was slowly transcribed by blinking his eyes. I kept thinking about this book long after I read it. It’s a nightmare scenario, but he leads us all the way through it. We’re with him as he survives and even finds meaning when almost everything else is lost.

This book was chosen because of the deep, profound love that is displayed throughout the book. It speaks to how vulnerable a person makes themselves when they love deeply and how scary that can be. It also speaks to how you can feel so totally lost in loving another person that you forget to love yourself. I could identify with loving so intensely also and having my heart broken. I also identified with the journey of coming to loving oneself again and with that being open to finding someone better. 

I’ve read several of Christina Henry’s books. I enjoyed them all, but this one is my absolute favorite. Mattie lives in the mountains with her abusive husband, and she has no memory beyond the last few years, and she lives in fear of her husband’s wrath. An unknown, large creature appears and makes things more complicated. Mattie has to escape her husband and a monster in the woods and try to remember her past. This novel is one of the best horror stories I’ve ever read. It’s suspenseful and you never know what will happen next. One of my favorite things about this novel is, despite the supernatural creature, it’s not over-the-top and everything feels real including the actions and choices of the characters. This is definitely a must-read.

I read this novel when I was hungry for books with strong female characters.

The main character, the unnamed midwife, didn’t disappoint. Her journey emphasizes the importance of choice and agency when it comes to reproductive decisions. She works to empower women to make choices about their own bodies and reproductive futures, even in a world where such choices are limited.

England, in the near future, walking blindly into totalitarianism, everything falling apart. Eve has grown up in a happy family, with loving parents, but not even they can protect her from the world collapsing around them. Eve sets out on a journey, alone, across the wild Yorkshire moors, in search of new ways of living. This is a powerful, beautiful graphic novel from Una. 

If you love books that tie themselves to movie genre tropes, you’ll not only love my novel, but also this one by Riley Sager, his first novel that launched a huge career and made him a household name.

Set around Quincy, a young woman who survives a horrible massacre in which all her friends are killed, she becomes what’s known in horror movies as Final Girl meaning she’s the only one who made it out alive. Linked to 2 other Final Girls by the media, Quincy leads a pretty normal life until someone starts killing Final Girls.

A fun read that’s inspired countless knockoffs that would make a killer movie. 

This book is tense! Jess is alone in the Canadian wilderness, still injured from the car accident that killed her mom, and now her dad has been murdered and his cabin burned down. Jess must figure out how to survive in the cold with no shelter and no way out when nobody knows where she is. This is part survival story and part thriller. Jess is driven by her desire to survive as much as her desire for revenge. The survival aspect here is enough to keep you reading, but I also loved trying to piece together the mystery of why her dad was killed. 

Smale is a fantastic award-winning writer of alternate history, and in Hot Moon we get to see that skill combined with his day job as astrophysicist for NASA. But above all this is an action story of the Cold War turning “hot” on the moon.

There are other alternate Apollo tales (e.g., For All Mankind), but I don’t know of any that have this level of space combat. Smale’s sprezzatura with the scientific details is such that I was never pushed out of the story by their complexity or by doubt in their correctness.

And like all of Smale’s work, Hot Moon never loses track of the importance of the “who” experiences technological change versus the change itself.

I’m looking forward to the next book in this series!