100 books like Out Island Doctor

When I was fifteen, I stayed up reading the end of this book under the covers with a flashlight because I could not put it down.

A scandalous bestseller in 1847, this was the first romance to feature an antihero. Mr. Rochester is far from pure and kind. He mocks Jane, who describes herself as small and plain and stands up to him. He has an immoral secret and when Jane learns of it, she leaves him. I doubt I would have.

This macabre classic offers a glimpse into the darker realms of man and the depravities made capable. This is a book which pits man against his most dangerous foe, himself.

There are no Hollywood endings here. Just the real bloody nature of expansion into the wild Congo by a single ruthless man who infuses the mystical with the divine to maintain a brutal domination. 

This is the single greatest work of fiction ever written, reaching heights close to perfection. A life-changing read with utterly fascinating plots and caricatures that swallows hours with joyous ease.

This book is the book I set all other books against as the ultimate judge to decide its ultimate rating, thus making the Count of Monte Cristo the perfect ten.

This book is the penultimate adventure story set on the high seas during the Napoleonic Wars. The characters are expertly made and presented around a plot line that takes every pain to stay true to the truth of past events while still offering the reader a series of novels that will keep even the greenest of landlubbers glued to their seats.

I mentioned that I love a well-crafted update of a classic tale. Twisted Fate is Shakespeare’s The Tempest in modern dress, moved across the Atlantic to Staten Island with a brief stop in the Bahamas. I was hooked immediately when protagonist Laina, a bookshop owner grieving the death of her beloved brother, is a last-minute fill-in at her cousin’s Bridezilla wedding (wearing the gown of the absent pregnant bridesmaid, which keeps falling down). Laina over-imbibes at the reception and (briefly) even sets herself on fire. Hey, we’ve all been there...as events progress, there’s fate, mistaken identity, misplaced love, and of course the requisite tempest. Only great character development can immerse me in a story. This author’s dry humor is a deft foil for that. Which isn’t always the case; comic romances can suffer from cliches and worn caricatures. Not this book; it’s a gem.    

Ever since I watched ‘the Goonies’ with my boys when they were young, I have loved reading a good pirate adventure. From the minute I read the title, I knew this book was for me. This story has all the elements that add up to one crazy fun-packed treasure hunt. With a mysterious treasure map, intriguing characters including a typically despicable villain and an exotic location in the Bahamas, Jock’s adventure is irresistible. It’s a fast-paced, easy-to-read story that has kids laughing at all the incredible scenarios. I love the opportunity to travel the world, but it’s not possible to go everywhere. Having read this adventure, I can now say I have enjoyed my visit to the Bahamas, if only in my imagination. 

Greg Donahue uses a trove of archival audio to dive into how David Hardy, a Pulitzer-Prize-nominated reporter who was instrumental in integrating newsrooms, struck up an unlikely friendship with his most mysterious source, David Friedland—a lawyer, fraudster, and government witness whose pastimes include chess and hand-feeding sharks. After faking his own death in the Bahamas to avoid arrest, Friedland also became one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives. The dynamism of these two real-life characters kept drawing me in. As did the revealing, decades-old recordings and the author’s impressive framing of history.

Laymon provides the perfect mix of psychological horror and serial killer madness in this cult novel that is part murder mystery and part survival horror. In Island, a family boat trip to a remote island goes horribly awry when someone starts offing family members one by one. It will leave you shocked and satisfied with its overwhelming tension and disturbing ending.

A poet, playwright, essayist, teacher, and activist, Jordan had more than 25 published works, including seven books of essays. 

As a feminist and women’s studies teacher and scholar who was focused on bringing race into the center of my activism and analysis, I learned so much from June Jordan. 
On Call, includes essays that explored intersectionality years before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term and theorized the overlapping social constructions of race, class, and gender. 

The topics of the 18 essays are wide-ranging, from patriarchy, to Black English, to the enslaved 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley, and a hilarious short essay on the election of Ronald Reagan written in Black English.  I taught “Report from the Bahamas” in almost all of my courses. 

Like all of her essays, it is written with a poet’s sensibility. Every word matters.  

How can travel help us find the good life? The Art of Travel asks this question of artists such as Edward Hopper and Vincent van Gogh, with profound and amusing results. Why can anticipating travel be more pleasant than actually going away? What is the lure of the Bahamas, of the ‘exotic’, of open deserts? Throughout, De Botton invites us to pay better attention to the world around us. I especially enjoy his musings on the profundities of travel—on waiting at Heathrow airport, circling ring-roads, and dried ketchup of motorway service stations.