100 books like Sands of Time Volume 1

Besides having one of the best book titles ever, this novel immediately draws readers in and is hard to put down; the action is matched by its intelligence. In it, freedom-seekers create a fast-growing, virtual society on the Internet that grows so fast it terrifies governments and their “security.” With no possibility of oversight and control, the System fights to co-opt this cyber-society before it undermines and overwhelms the dominance of corruptocrat governing elites. The free souls in this novel lead us through a clever plot wherein principles of economic freedom, individuality, and justice lead to a free market uncontrolled by tax-hungry government lackeys. Profiled here are a group of individuals determined to transcend paradigms that the human psyche often forms for us, almost autonomically, as a reaction to fear.

Mass formation psychosis causes people to lose contact with reality. Case-in-point: the apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln. The author presents a cogent case against the 16th president’s policies of “internal improvements,” high tariffs, and a national central bank (the failed and rejected Hamiltonian policies of the Whig party and Henry Clay). Lincoln insisted upon instituting mercantilism—a strong central government that dispenses special privileges to wealthy and influential corporations, who then support the central government, contravening the Constitution. In a reality stranger than fiction, he killed an estimated 620,000-750,000 Americans in a war upon the Southern states and their right to secede against tariff tyranny; disabled the sovereignty of the states; and did away with habeas corpus by arresting any who objected to his policies, setting precedents that have gutted an intimidated America ever since.

This is Mark Emery’s personal account of his challenging journey into the legal, political and financial brambles of USA, Inc. His courage and convictions outweigh unthinking acceptance of the System and its enslavement of citizen-serfs. Emery stands up for his status as a free man and asserts his God-given rights against all the odds, often winning and sometimes losing. It is a case study in freeing oneself from a Leviathan of centralized government power that seeks to subject people to its array of rules, regulations and statutes that only keeps us from knowing our true selves. Since publication Mark Emery has allied himself with Anna Maria Riezinger and her extensive research into corporate “government” and allied systems that have been engineered to transplant the constitutional republic of our Founding Fathers.   

An open mind and creative imagination are needed to explore reality. In making sense of the most significant science fiction writer of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick, we might refer to the dying words of his Berkeley buddy, Jack Spicer: “My vocabulary did this to me.” Like a Zen stone mason in a hall of mirrors, Dick often seems to depart from the most inscrutable of semantic pebbles. Exegesis offers us a lexical labyrinth infused with the most profound heuristic paranoia, to yield a vast shifting matrix of uncountable speculative origins. Anyone who reads this book and does not write at least one of their own, even as a prophylactic, is indeed “duller than the fattest weed on the wharf of Lethe.” (Paraphrased from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)

On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found… Who could resist that?

I was glad I found this book and its author Evie Woods. She seduced me with her lovely writing and compelling characters. I loved the magical moments when a tree takes over a bedroom just to supply the occupant with books the tree thinks will help her.

I like the idea that no matter what baggage we carry—betrayal, abuse, lost love—we can grow, face our personal truth, and step into a wondrous world.

A list like this cannot be complete without Kingston, who uses in her book a literary technique called “perhapsing”—defined by Lisa Knopp as “the use of speculation in creative nonfiction”—in which Kingston uses myth and the question “what if” to imagine what might’ve happened in the stories she half-knows about her family. 

Though not technically an island, perhaps, the world depicted in this mystifying novel is unlike any I’ve experienced before, a maze of chambers and thunderous tides where secrets are hidden out in the open.

The reader is dropped into this disorienting world with only its titular protagonist as a guide. What follows is a beguiling journey of philosophy, magic, and wide-eyed innocence—a triumph of the imagination. 

This was one of the books (along with Anthony Doerr’s The Shell Collector) that inspired me to pursue fiction writing rather than poetry.

For the longest time, poetry was my preferred genre, and while I had dabbled in writing fiction, I struggled. It wasn’t until reading The Girl in the Flammable Skirt near the end of my undergrad that I realized fiction doesn’t have to be straight realism—it can be magical, strange, symbolic, weird, fabulist, dreamlike.

Two of Bender’s stories that had the most impact on me were “The Rememberer,” where the narrator’s lover experiences reverse evolution,” and “Drunken Mimi,” a love story between an imp and a mermaid. Maybe not coincidentally, my book also contains a story about a mermaid. 

I love reading novels and stories that make me wish I’d written them, and this collection by Kelly Link made me wish that time and time again. This book also introduced me to the concept of fabulism, a form of magical realism where elements of the fantastic occur in everyday settings, which is something I find compelling both as a reader and as a writer. Link combines humor, fantasy, magical realism, and more than a touch of horror to create a collection of stories that is unique, weird, and wonderful. 

This book is a collection of small, powerful but sentimental stories around serious and personal themes that will tug at your heartstrings. Each story left me wanting more as the characters are forced to wrap up their quick journey into the past before their coffee gets cold. The sense of longing, loss, nostalgia, and community are central themes of this book, and it certainly made me reminisce about people and memories dear to my heart.