Fans pick 100 books like Northern Lights

It took me a while to get to this part of Orwell’s oeuvre, but once I did, I was engrossed. The crispness of the writing and the precision of his observations are unmatched. Admittedly, due to Orwell’s own political persuasions, you should not base your views of the Spanish Civil War on this book alone, but as a piece of honest journalistic writing with a clear point of view, it deserves its status as a classic. 

I found this book in college, and at the time, I thought it was the most unique book I had ever read.

Thompson’s “Gonzo Journalism” was fresh, funny, and thought-provoking, with a subtext of modern poetry, political activism, and a sense of humor I have never seen replicated.

In A Year in the Merde, Stephen Clarke walks the line perfectly between berating the country he's in and making it clear he is, in truth, really enjoying himself. When I discovered the book, I (a Brit) was living in Grenoble in France so it was particularly relevant. At the time, I was desperately trying to complete my Masters - in engineering! - but Clarke's book opened my eyes to a world where you can earn a living by documenting your travel experiences. 

Within six months, I had completed my Masters (by the skin of my teeth), turned my back on engineering, and enrolled in a post-graduate course in journalism. 11 years later, I've worked on books of my own, including guides to Malaysia, India, Spain, and France - returning to Grenoble, the place where it all began.

Back in the early ‘90s in Melbourne, I talked my way into a temporary job typesetting Explore Australia, a mammoth full-colour guidebook. I ended up staying several years, undertaking desk-based research, managing the photo library, and editing text and maps. I spent my days poring over cartographic proofs, sifting through glorious photos of rust-red mountain ranges, cobalt-blue skies, and dense tropical rainforest abutting white-sand beaches. I spoke to those manning the tourist information offices around the country: at Coral Bay, where the Ningaloo Reef is just a metre from the beach, at Healesville, when the cackle of a kookaburra interrupted my call, and at Cossack, a gold-rush-era ghost town with a population of one man and one dog. Some years later I sold my home, bought a 4x4, and set off to see all those places that I had visited vicariously…

Full disclosure: Anne is a dear friend and was an MFA workshop-mate of mine.

But even if she wasn’t, I’m confident this would still be one of my favorite collections. There is so much magic in Valente’s writing, in the gorgeous prose but also in the content of the stories: ghosts, pink dolphins, tiny librarians, Northern Lights.

Much of the magic is not supernatural, but just the magic of the natural world, and Valente is a master of place; I’ve always admired her use of setting. Many of the stories deal with loss, grief, and pain, but the magic acts as a way to transcend these things, which is what I aim to do in my stories as well.

I write in the speculative fiction genre where an overwhelming event, seemingly beyond the control of the main characters, underpins what happens to those characters. This particular drama uses such an event which literally paints a canvas for a murder mystery. The typical resources available to law enforcement are stripped away leaving people to depend upon themselves. All the human emotions and prejudices are on display. You might find yourself rooting for one character before moving on to another as the plot twists. A bit distracting was that much of the dialogue and description about what someone was feeling was clichéd. The cataclysmic event itself was almost a sidebar in this volume, the first of the series, to the point where the murder mystery could stand on its own. That said, this story is a thought-provoker on a societal and individual level.

Taking place in northern Sweden, where the cold and snowy environment plays its own part, this story focuses on a cult-like church where the founder has been brutally murdered. A lawyer and friend of the victim’s sister, Rebecka Martinsson, travels up from Stockholm to help solve the case. It’s dark and gritty and suspenseful – it’s also the first of 6 books. 

Over the last 10 years or so, the rapid advances in digital photography have created a whole new genre of photography: landscape photography at night. I became fascinated with the genre when I saw a slide show given by night photographer and author Grant Collier.

In an effort to master the subject, I picked up Grant Collier’s book. Grant is deeply knowledgeable on the topic and conveys his knowledge in readily understandable ways. My own photography benefited greatly as a result.

This fantastic Desmond Bagley novel has a gripping opening line and never lets up the pace.

It’s one of the first Bagleys I read, and I was hooked as a fan from page one. I love every one of his 17 novels and keep going back to them; he really is the master at what he does: action-adventure, with "everyman"-type heroes thrust into dangerous and deadly situations.

For some reason, he’s fallen out of fashion, but I’m on a mission to change all that–alongside his publishers, HarperCollins, who have commendably kept his books constantly in print.

I don’t think it is overly ambitious to claim that you can learn a lot about a country from its crime novels. I certainly did, devouring novels by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, Lilja Sigurdardóttir, Ragnar Jónasson, and the Englishman Quentin Bates. A good crime novel describes not only a place and its people but what makes them tick, what they fear, and what they desire. It’s very hard to pick just one crome novel from so many great ones, but Arnaldur Indridason’s Silence of the Grave won the British Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger in 2005 and also features the British occupation of the country during the war. Plus, it’s a damned good story.