Here are 100 books that Samurai William fans have personally recommended if you like
Samurai William.
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As a kid, I had a tough time finding books with characters who looked like me after moving from Taiwan to America. That’s usually bad for most kids. However, I was a hideously self-absorbed kid. Having to read about characters who didn’t look or live like me made my childhood infinitely richer. Since becoming an author, I’ve written books that draw from my heritage and lectured about East Asian storytelling at various universities and writing programs. I do this as a love letter to my own heritage but also as a thank you letter to America for sharing its culture with me. Here’s a bit of mine in return.
This book, the first in the rollicking The Tales of the Otori series, has been called “Shogun meets The Lord of the Rings.” The first book centers on a young man with some special abilities who is groomed to become an assassin due to one special talent — the ability to walk silently across a special floor composed of boards that chitter like birds when stepped on, which warlords sleep in the middle of as an alarm system. The series is one of the most gripping, wildly entertaining, and moving fantasies I’ve ever read. It is proof that it is possible for an artist to come to understand a culture deeply enough to honor its spirit, even if they weren’t born into that culture.
'The most compelling novel to have been published this year' - Amanda Craig, "Observer". In his palace at Inuyama, Lord Iida Sadamu, warlord of the Tohan clan, surveys his famous nightingale floor. Its surface sings at the tread of every human foot, and no assassin can cross it. But 16-year-old Otori Takeo, his family murdered by Iida's warriors, has the magical skills of the Tribe - preternatural hearing, invisibility, a second self - that enable him to enter the lair of the Tohan. He has love in his heart and death at his fingertips...The stunningly powerful bestseller, "Across the Nightingale…
I am a black belt martial artist and top ten bestselling children’s author with a life goal of ‘getting kids reading’. As an author, I practise what I term ‘method writing’. For my Young Samurai series, I trained in samurai swordsmanship, karate, ninjutsu, and earned my black belt in Zen Kyu Shin Taijutsu. This ensures my books are not only authentic but have the impact of a flying front kick. Hopefully, my stories will knock you out!
A classic of the ages and essential reading for any martial artist, The Book of Five Rings is a guide to self-discipline and learning. But you have to read between the lines, listen to the silences, and practice the way of the warrior yourself in order to get the most from it. The legendary swordmaster Miyamoto Musashi is the blueprint for Jack’s sensei and guardian Masamoto in my Young Samurai book.
The complete and official edition of the original Japanese text. Translated by Prof. Nabiki Imagawa and Prof. James Ashcroft in 2019 to fix all the previous mistakes present in the old public editions. This is the recommended edition for university specialists and experts in Japanese history who want the full uncensored version of The Book of 5 Rings as the samurai Miyamoto Musashi wrote it in 1645.
I am a black belt martial artist and top ten bestselling children’s author with a life goal of ‘getting kids reading’. As an author, I practise what I term ‘method writing’. For my Young Samurai series, I trained in samurai swordsmanship, karate, ninjutsu, and earned my black belt in Zen Kyu Shin Taijutsu. This ensures my books are not only authentic but have the impact of a flying front kick. Hopefully, my stories will knock you out!
The 34th grandmaster of ninjutsu, Dr. Masaaki Hatsumi has written many books on the art of the ninja. This is one of his best and examines over 1,000 years of the history and legends of the shadow warriors. A seminal book that provided the foundation to my own ninjutsu practise under one of Hatsumi’s students, Sensei Peter Brown. The secrets I learnt proved crucial to writing book 4 of the Young Samurai series, The Ring of Earth when Jack is taken in by a ninja clan.
Looking back almost 1,000 years, the mists of Japan's chaotic past shroud the development of a way of life, an ancient struggle waged against fierce feudal lords who ruled the island nation with swords of steel and a code of death before dishonor. The people of the mountainous regions of what is now Iga prefecture wanted to live in peace, but their lords had other plans-so the people learned the martial arts of self-defense and used their meager farm tools as weapons against the samurai blades of their oppressors. Nine traditions of the ninja arts grew out of this seemingly…
I am a black belt martial artist and top ten bestselling children’s author with a life goal of ‘getting kids reading’. As an author, I practise what I term ‘method writing’. For my Young Samurai series, I trained in samurai swordsmanship, karate, ninjutsu, and earned my black belt in Zen Kyu Shin Taijutsu. This ensures my books are not only authentic but have the impact of a flying front kick. Hopefully, my stories will knock you out!
Stephen Turnbull is one of the foremost authorities on the samurai and this book covers all of their military history. Beautifully illustrated and full of intriguing facts about the samurai and their world, this was my go-to book when writing the Young Samurai series. A fascinating read, this makes a beautiful gift for anyone with an interest in samurai or Japan.
The world of the samurai, the legendary elite warrior cult of old Japan, has long been associated solely with military history and has remained a mystery to the general reader. In this paperback edition, Stephen Turnbull, the world's leading authority on the samurai, goes beyond the battlefield to paint a picture of the samurai as they really were. This book explores the samurai within the context of an all-encompassing warrior culture that was expressed through art and poetry as much as through violence. Using themed chapters, Turnbull illuminates the samurai through their historical development and their relationship to the world…
I’m an autistic unapologetic writing nerd who has spent most of their life using fiction and pop culture to connect better with the world. It has always been the tool, escape, and comfort for me when I feel overwhelmed. As I bite my tongue to keep from monologuing, I always strive to share, introduce, or connect with my passions. Now I use that and my degree in psychology to try to craft worlds that people can feel emotional about in my writing and poetry.
Another Litrpg, Seth enters a Virtual Reality game set in a fantasy feudal Japan as the technology allows him to function better while recovering from an injury taken during a martial arts tournament. For me, the setting got me worked up. I spent a decade of my gaming life playing Legend of the Five Rings, a similarly feudal Japan-inspired game world. Clans, factions, betrayals, and samurai. It brought me back to my youth in a way that few pieces of media do.
How Often Do You Get a Second Chance in Life? Seth Kinnaman’s dream has always been to become the best fighter the world has ever seen. After spending his entire life training, he’s finally ready to test his skills in the biggest tournament on Earth where hundreds of the fiercest competitors vie for the supreme title.
In the semi-finals, Seth is getting the upper hand when his opponent uses an illegal blow to take him out. Upon waking up from a coma, Seth finds out he’s lost his sight. He’s become blind and he’s completely devastated. All his dreams are…
My 15 seasons at Grand Canyon inspired me to understand its story of revelation, which led to a fascination with the history of exploration overall. This has resulted in a series of books about explorers, places explored, and a conceptual scaffolding by which to understand it all: a geologist of the American West (Grove Karl Gilbert); Antarctica (The Ice); revisiting the Rim with better conceptual gear, How the Canyon Became Grand; and using its mission as a narrative spine, Voyager: Exploration, Space, and Third Great Age of Discovery. The grand sweep deserved a grand summary, so I’ve ended with The Great Ages of Discovery.
A few days out of high school, I found myself on a forest fire crew at the North Rim of Grand Canyon, and returned for 15 seasons. The more I pondered the Canyon, the more I wanted to learn about why this strange landscape was valued, which led me to William Goetzmann, who became my grad school advisor.
New Lands, New Men is the third and final volume of a trilogy Goetzmann wrote on the theme. (His second book, Exploration and Empire, won a Pulitzer.) It’s a bit looser, willing to play with the material, and full of the quirky as well as the renown. Its organizing concept that exploration rekindled in the 18th century (with a significant input from modern science) is a major innovation in a field usually devoted to stirring tales of individual adventure and discovery.
In New Lands, New Men, the third volume in his award-winning Exploration Trilogy, one of America’s leading historians tells the dramatic story of three centuries of exploration that witnessed Europeans exploring the Pacific and Northwest, Americans setting out across their own immense continent, and finally, Americans exploring new worlds: the oceans, Japan, the polar regions.
Spanning the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Second Great Age of Discovery was marked by the Enlightenment’s ideals of science and progress. Explorers from James Cook to George Catlin, from Charles Wilkes to Matthew Maury, trained as scientists intent on precise observation and gathered…
Meaningful communications with people through life, books, and films have always given me a certain kind of mental nirvana of being transported to a place of delight. I see fine writing as an informative and entertaining conversation with a stranger I just met on a plane who has interesting things to say about the world. Books of narrative merit in mathematics and science are my strangers eager to be met. For me, the best narratives are those that bring me to places I have never been, to tell me things I have not known, and to keep me reading with the feeling of being alive in a human experience.
For me, this book was an adventure. I felt as if I was on an expedition to Virginia with Harriot teaching me astronomy and navigation. There I was, infatuated with rainbows and imagining myself scrutinizing scientific wonders of elliptical planetary motion, atomic theory of matter, and how cannonballs could be stacked to fill space. I found myself with Harriot back in 1591 searching for a sphere-packing formula, an old problem questioning the most stable way to stack cannonballs on ships. Thomas Harriot is a fast-moving biography packed with the world- and mind-changing curiosities.
Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) was a pioneer in both the figurative and literal sense. Navigational adviser and loyal friend to Sir Walter Ralegh, Harriot took part in the first expedition to colonize Virginia. Not only was he responsible for getting Ralegh's ships safely to harbor in the New World, once there he became the first European to acquire a working knowledge of an indigenous language (he also began a lifelong love of tobacco, which may have been his undoing). Harriot's abilities were seemingly unlimited and nearly awe-inspiring. He was the first to use a telescope to map the moon's craters, and,…
As a former Division 1 basketball player at Marquette University and current ecommerce executive, I’m always looking for new sources of inspiration. Please enjoy my list and send me any comments on what you find inspiring!
This is a different type of inspiration, one rooted in exploration and going to places that no man has gone before. The author himself goes on a journey to find a lost city in the Honduran rainforest, and while sexy on the outside, discovers the stark challenges that exist in the world’s densest jungle. If you’re an adventure seeker, you’ll really enjoy this book.
The #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe and National Geographic: acclaimed journalist Douglas Preston takes readers on a true adventure deep into the Honduran rainforest in this riveting narrative about the discovery of a lost civilization -- culminating in a stunning medical mystery.
Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who…
I am an experienced entrepreneur and venture capitalist and a voracious reader. My reading, particularly of non-business books, is motivated not just by a natural curiosity, but is also driven by a continuous search for metaphors and lessons from outside the traditional business genre that I can apply to situations and decisions in the business arena. My appreciation of the crossover benefit of non-business narratives to business contexts has motivated me to write my own Business Fiction works to “enlighten and entertain.”
If you read this book about the early cross-Atlantic explorers and substitute today’s technology entrepreneurs, the metaphors fit cleanly.
They sold exuberant, sometimes-fulfilled, and often-failed stories to profit-seeking backers, took inordinate risks, and results were often winner-take-all.
As Mark Twain, another famous explorer, once said, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
The late Samuel Eliot Morison, a former U.S. Navy admiral, was also one of America's premier historians. Combining a first-hand knowledge of the sea and transatlantic travel with a brilliantly readable narrative style, he produced what has become nothing less than the definitive account of the great age of European exploration. In his riveting and richly illustrated saga, Morison offers a comprehensive account of all the known voyages by Europeans to the New World from 500 A.D. to the seventeenth century. Together, the two volumes of The European Discovery of America tell the compelling stories of the many intrepid explorers…
Throughout my career as a historian I’ve been interested in the expansion of the Iberian world and its consequences for societies and cultures in Spain as well as Spanish America, especially Mexico. I knew that the Caribbean, the first site of European activity in the Americas, played an important role in that story, yet paradoxically it didn’t seem to receive much attention from historians, at least in the U.S. When I finally decided to focus my research on the period immediately following Columbus’s first voyages, I entered into a complex and dynamic world of danger, ambition, exploitation, and novelty. I hope to open that world to others in my book.
This slim volume features six documents relating to the early years following Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean, including two by Columbus himself. The core of the volume is anthropologist Neil Whitehead’s translation of the account written by Román Pané, the Jeronymite friar sent by Columbus to live among an Indigenous group in the northern part of Hispaniola. There Pané tried, with very limited success, to spread Christianity. He also set down in writing the origin myths and beliefs described by his Native informants, a unique reflection of the Indigenous world that existed when Europeans arrived on the islands. I like this collection both for the range of documents included and Whitehead’s insights from his scholarly and ethnographic work in the Caribbean.
Of Cannibals and Kings collects the very earliest accounts of the native peoples of the Americas, including selections from the descriptions of Columbus's first two voyages; documents reflecting the initial colonial occupation in Haiti, Venezuela, and Guyana; and the first ethnographic account of the Tainos by the missionary Ramon Pane. This primal anthropology directly guided a rapacious discovery of the lands of both wild cannibals and golden kings.
