Here are 100 books that Number9dream fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve always loved stories that rearrange reality in some simple, allusive way, including movies like Groundhog Day or The Truman Show. They remind me of a quote about Italo Calvino that I first read when I was a teenager and have loved ever since: ‘He holds a mirror up to life, then writes about the mirror.’ I tend not to be attracted to stories that simply depict reality and even less so to stories that completely abandon reality for an invented fantasy world. All my favorite fictions take place somewhere in between, in the blending of the real and the impossible.
It always seemed unfair to me that not only do we get just one life, but we only get to live it once. So I fell in love with this novel from the moment I read its premise: Ursula Todd is born and dies and is born again… and again… and again.
I love that she doesn’t remember her previous lives except as vague intuitions that help her avoid making the same mistakes twice–and I also love that avoiding those mistakes often means she makes other (often fatal) mistakes. I found this book funny, moving, and thought-provoking, but what I love most about it is the way its down-to-earth, realistic style allowed me to fully inhabit the impossible conceit at its heart.
What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
I grew up as a closeted homosexual in a fundamentalist Christian home, enduring nearly two decades in a crisis of faith. Sermons frequently warned of damnation for my natural inclinations, pushing me to fast, pray, and achieve to resist temptation. This crisis gradually resolved over the eight years I spent writing Playing by the Book, the first coming-out novel to win a National IPPY Medal in religious fiction. Although I don’t consider myself a spiritual writer, I am drawn to stories that explore existential struggles and triumphs, including those related to a crisis of faith—much like the characters in the novels on this list.
I loved Margaret Atwood’s book, a cautionary story that shows how the extreme distortion of religious ideologies can lead to devastating outcomes. Offred endures unimaginable hardship under the guise of religious piety, but the reality is much more twisted.
Her determination to survive in such harrowing circumstances is inspiring and challenges us to reflect on our views and norms.
** THE SUNDAY TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER ** **A BBC BETWEEN COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ**
Go back to where it all began with the dystopian novel behind the award-winning TV series.
'As relevant today as it was when Atwood wrote it' Guardian
I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state in what was formerly known as the United States. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford -…
I grew up as a closeted homosexual in a fundamentalist Christian home, enduring nearly two decades in a crisis of faith. Sermons frequently warned of damnation for my natural inclinations, pushing me to fast, pray, and achieve to resist temptation. This crisis gradually resolved over the eight years I spent writing Playing by the Book, the first coming-out novel to win a National IPPY Medal in religious fiction. Although I don’t consider myself a spiritual writer, I am drawn to stories that explore existential struggles and triumphs, including those related to a crisis of faith—much like the characters in the novels on this list.
I loved this book for its fantastical portrayal of a Pacific voyage that mirrors the internal conflicts many of us face. Like Pi, who embraced multiple faiths during his ordeal, I searched for answers to reconcile my faith and sexuality across various denominations, religions, and philosophies.
Pi’s story as he journeys across the Pacific, a tiger in tow, allowed me to reflect on the moments when I felt alone, wrestling with my faith in the face of an overwhelming challenge, given my fundamentalist upbringing.
After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.
Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi Patel, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger, Richard Parker, for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his…
Edge of the Known World is a near-future love and adventure story about a brilliant young refugee caught in era when genetic screening tests like 23AndMe make it impossible to hide a secret identity. The novel is distributed by Simon & Schuster. It is a USA Today Bestseller and 2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction: General.
Alexandra is a gifted student, adoring daughter, and exuberant prankster. She is also hiding in the open. After a blissful childhood, Alex learned she’s an illegal refugee from a brutal regime, smuggled into…
Fans of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake will be swept away by this riveting speculative fiction adventure and love story about family, genetic privacy, and the onrushing future of surveillance technology.
2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction
Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, she learns the truth: She is a refusé, an illegal refugee smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birth region carries a harmless but detectable bit of…
Everyone dreams, even if you don’t remember them, you dream. I have researched dreams and stories concerning dreams for decades. There are more than a handful of dream fiction books I admire and would recommend, but here are five that I think should be singled out. I am a member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams to try to keep my finger on the pulse of peer-reviewed papers concerning the ‘yet-to-be-explained’ purpose of dreaming. I wrote this story because I can see a future where dreams become mainstream entertainment, it is just a matter of time and technology.
Cliff Jones Jr. has threaded together an impressive anthology with Mirrormaze: A Dreampunk Anthology. I think the structure of the book with prompts to guide you through the maze makes this anthology distinctive. The stories cover a variety of genres but are always tied to that central topic, dreams.
There are many outstanding stories that I found interesting in their structure and content, but I won’t give anything away to influence your choices, you have to determine your own gems. The stories are well written, enjoyable, they make you reflect and with almost 30 stories, there are many viewpoints of what constitutes a ‘dream’.
It took me several weeks to meander my way through the maze, I’d jump in every time I had free time. I love short story anthologies, you can read a couple, be carried away to an imagined time and place, fall back to reality, until…
We find ourselves in a very strange place.Technology is embedded so deeply in our lives that it no longer feels separate. It's taken for granted, like breathing. Whatever can be imagined can be experienced, if not in the "real" world then somewhere else. Somewhere better. This is our new reality. We live inside our heads, in our dreams. Come navigate a labyrinth of visions, illusions, nightmares, and fantasies. Explore the nascent genre of dreampunk with 22 of its finest authors as they examine and transform the dreamscapes that we call our lives. Get lost among the twists and turns, ascending…
Everyone dreams, even if you don’t remember them, you dream. I have researched dreams and stories concerning dreams for decades. There are more than a handful of dream fiction books I admire and would recommend, but here are five that I think should be singled out. I am a member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams to try to keep my finger on the pulse of peer-reviewed papers concerning the ‘yet-to-be-explained’ purpose of dreaming. I wrote this story because I can see a future where dreams become mainstream entertainment, it is just a matter of time and technology.
The Dream Master was originally published in Amazing (Jan/Feb 1965) titled, He Who Shapes. The novella won Roger Zelazny a Nebula Award in 1966. I have re-read this novel several times over the years, and subconsciously I think it influenced the premise for Dream Phaze. Some of the tech is a little outdated by today’s terms, but the overall idea is still fresh.
His name is Charles Render, and he is a psychoanalyst, and a mechanic of dreams. A Shaper. In a warm womb of metal, his patients dream their neuroses, while Render, intricately connected to their brains, dreams with them, makes delicate adjustments, and ultimately explains and heals. Her name is Eileen Shallot, a resident in psychiatry. She wants desperately to become a Shaper, though she has been blind from birth. Together, they will explore the depths of the human mind -- and the terrors that lurk therein
How do we decide what is true and untrue, what is real and what isn’t? It’s something I’ve tried to understand since I was a child. In each book I chose, a character has to face a universe completely unlike what they’d believed—in some cases, what they’d spent their entire lives devoted to. How someone would react in such a situation is deeply fascinating to me, and each of these books has not only stayed with me for years but has profoundly influenced my own writing and worldview.
I love Ursula LeGuin’s fiction, and for me, this is the best book—a brilliant examination of how power can corrupt, even when one’s motives start out good. An unscrupulous psychologist uses his patient’s extraordinary skill to reshape the world with dreadful consequences.
The author takes a fascinating concept and subtly weaves it with deep questions about morality and the nature of good and evil. LeGuin was a masterful writer, and in this book, she created a story that I still reread once a year without fail.
'Her worlds have a magic sheen . . . She moulds them into dimensions we can only just sense. She is unique. She is legend' THE TIMES
'Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power' OBSERVER
George Orr is a mild and unremarkable man who finds the world a less than pleasant place to live: seven billion people jostle for living space and food. But George dreams dreams which do in fact change reality - and he has no means of controlling this extraordinary power.
Psychiatrist Dr William Haber offers to help. At first sceptical of George's powers, he comes…
I’m a nerd who fights. Started my professional life as a programmer, then switched to telling stories in advertising and entertainment. But my passion for technology and martial arts have always played a role in my life. Influenced by my father’s stories about judo, I studied a lot of styles of fighting, including kung fu, karate, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and also dabbled with boxing, Muay Thai, capoeira, taichi, bagua, Silat, and judo. Along that journey, one of my favorite ways to learn was by watching my female training partners, and how they had to develop a much more nuanced and sophisticated technique. An experience that would later inspire the birth of The Girl from Wudang.
A little confession: fighting awakens a beast inside of me.
Sometimes when I’m in a crowded place, I walk by someone, usually a bigger person, and wonder: “Can I take him down?” Other times, especially in situations of conflict and mostly in the business world, I catch myself looking at my opposition and think “I can totally crush you if I want.”
I’m not sure Palahniuk has ever traded punches with another human being. But one thing he got right: learning to fight, especially at a place that makes you spar at every session, often creates this maddening sense of power, that can be dangerous, but is a little fun too.
Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation's most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is a gloriously original work that exposes the darkness at the core of our modern world.
As someone who spent his days working as a journalist and his nights writing novels and short stories, I've always been fascinated by the fine line separating fact and fiction. We live our lives conforming to the rules of our universe, yet sometimes feel brave enough to ask what’s that?and watch with delight as reality transforms into fantasy. What, exactly, is that brilliant sunset? Billions of bits of light being processed by our survival-evolved brain as a reminder to seek shelter before the perilous darkness descends? The wondrous work of God’s hand? A pleasing distraction from the brutality of our brief existence? Something else we may never comprehend? Great stories help us decide.
When Toronto bookstore owner Jean Mason hears she may have a doppelganger, it sets off a strange series of events that show how fragile our grip on reality really is. Equal parts psychological horror, ghost story, warm family drama, and literary look at mental illness, this dizzying and at times difficult novel asks if we genuinely know ourselves and the nature of our existence. It may leave you like its bewildered main character: full of questions about identity and struggling to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t.
A darkly comic literary thriller about a woman who fears for her sanity—and then her life—when she learns that her doppelganger has appeared in a local park.
Jean Mason has a doppelganger. She's never seen her, but others swear they have. Apparently, her identical twin hangs out in Kensington Market, where she sometimes buys churros and drags an empty shopping cart down the streets, like she's looking for something to put in it. Jean's a grown woman with a husband and two kids, as well as a thriving bookstore in downtown Toronto, and…
I like to think I’m the smart female protagonist of my own life. Each of the women I’ve described in this book calls out to me in some way. They’re misunderstood or devalued by the people around them. They know more than they’re given credit for. I think most women feel that to some degree. I think its understood now that representation matters. We all want to see ourselves in the media we take in. I saw myself in these protagonists, or I saw a need that these books would fill in my life if I lived in their worlds.
I was utterly charmed by this book. Although the woman who is smart doesn’t get a lot of page time in the book, she is its core. Sayuri Komachi is a librarian in a neighborhood library who is literally larger than life. This book has five overlapping stories, and Ms Komachi is at the center of all of them. When they come to her reference desk for help, she gives them three things: 1) what they ask for, 2) a ‘bonus’ gift, and 3) what they need.
What they need is a book they never would have chosen on their own but which contains information that will help them decide which direction to go at a crossroads in their lives. I want a Ms Komachi in my life—someone slightly mysterious, always there, always interesting, and who doesn’t give answers but who gives you the tools to answer questions yourself.
THE TWO-MILLION-COPY BESTSELLING INTERNATIONAL NOVEL
The Top Ten Times bestseller A Time Magazine Book of the Year 'An undeniable page-turner' New York Times
'I ADORED this uplifting, hopeful novel ' Daily Mail 'It made me laugh and cry and feel comforted' 5***** Reader review 'A tribute to the transformative power of books and libraries' Irish Times
An inspirational tale of the love, comfort and growth you can find in the pages of a good book. _________________ What are you looking for?
So asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi.
I’m a combat veteran and longtime soldier trying to figure out my own wartime experiences by learning about what others did. Soldiers may join up for mom and apple pie and the grand old flag. But they fight for each other, and they follow leaders they trust. I tried to be one of those solid combat leaders. Since I had never been under fire before that day came, I endeavored to learn from—and write about—the lives of others who led soldiers in war. I’m still reading and still writing about battlefield leadership.
Old ground soldiers like me tend to think the airmen have it good—three hot meals a day, clean sheets at night, and only a few hours of war a day. James M. Scott’sBlack Snow sure taught me otherwise. The 1945 American firebombing of Japan proved horrific for both the bombers and the bombed, and Scott tells the full awful story from both the American and Japanese sides. Major General Curtis LeMay was not some cigar-chewing caricature fromDr. Strangelove, but a young commander trying to break the will of a brave, stalwart people who had never lost a war in their country’s centuries of history. LeMay’s bomber crews won, but at a terrible price that resonates to this day.
Seven minutes past midnight on 9 March 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a more than 1,800-degree firestorm that liquefied asphalt and vaporised thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women and children were killed. Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: "If we lose, we'll be tried as war criminals".
James M. Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the…
