Here are 100 books that Sarah Canary fans have personally recommended if you like
Sarah Canary.
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During a lonely stretch of primary school, I recall discussing my predicament with my mother. “You only need one friend,” she said by way of encouragement. Some part of me agreed. I’ve been fortunate to have had (and to have) several friends in my life, never more than a few at a time, more men than women, and each has prompted me to be and become more vital and spacious than I was prior to knowing them. The books I’m recommending—and the one I wrote—feature these types of catalyzing, life-changing relationships. Each involves some kind of adventure. Each evokes male friendship that is gravitational, not merely influential, but life-defining.
It centers on and celebrates becoming—molting from one skin to another. For Ishmael this is a transition from a tired and limiting worldview to something fresh and alive.
The “bosom buddies” at the heart of the novel, Ishmael and Queequeg, seem comprised of opposites, but Ishmael’s etherealizing is grounded by Queequeg’s pragmatic ingenuity in ways that quiet and expand the young pagan-Presbyterian’s buzzing, anxious mind. Theirs is a friendship of succor, probably sex, and survival—all of it shadowed by the delusional obsessions of their mad captain.
Melville's tale of the whaling industry, and one captain's obsession with revenge against the Great White Whale that took his leg. Classics Illustrated tells this wonderful tale in colourful comic strip form, offering an excellent introduction for younger readers. This edition also includes a biography of Herman Melville and study questions, which can be used both in the classroom or at home to further engage the reader in the work at hand.
I’ve always been attracted to strange things. When I was a kid, I loved to picnic in graveyards and make up stories about the people buried there. I think I gravitate toward the strange because it’s an escape from the gray every day. The best horror writing fills readers with wonder, opens the door to that magical question, ‘what if?’ But being truly engaged depends on caring about what happens to the characters in a book. That’s why I chose Horror with A Heart as my theme. I like horror with well-developed characters, people that matter to me. People who I could imagine as my friends.
I was already writing stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft but I wasn’t sure I had a place in the genre. Then Victor LaValle took one of Lovecraft’s most racist works, The Horror At Red Hook, and produced an alternate version.
Black Tomtouches on the events of Lovecraft’s original story but tells the tale from the point of view of a black musician named Tommy Tester. LaValle’s reimagining of Lovecraft is a revelation.
He showed me that I didn’t have to be like Lovecraft to write in his world. And LaValle perfectly captures the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a world that Lovecraft’s racism prevented him from seeing, even though he lived in New York City at the time.
People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.
Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic…
As a transplant to California, albeit more than 50 years ago, I am still fascinated by what makes this place at the edge of the Pacific so unique. It has accepted so many people, from so many places over a fairly recent period. I always feel I can deduce more history from well rendered characters set in specific times and places. Their wholeness and their meaning, as well as that of their culture, are to be found in literature.
Susan Ward joins her husband, a mining engineer, at a mercury mine near San Jose, California, coming west from New York.
She is an illustrator and writer and, as her grandson tells it, never completely adjusts to life in the West. We get much description of California, however, in the layered times in which her story is told. She and her husband settle in Grass Valley, where her husband works for quartz and gold mines.
Wallace Stegner’s use of Mary Hallock Foote’s memoir and diaries as the basis for this story is still controversial. Foote lived from 1847 to 1938 and wrote beautifully, illuminating life during this time. The controversy makes the story even more intriguing.
The novel tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks nonetheless on a search to rediscover his grandmother, no long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier.
Neuroscience PhD student Frankie Conner has finally gotten her life together—she’s determined to discover the cause of her depression and find a cure for herself and everyone like her. But the first day of her program, she meets a group of talking animals who have an urgent message they refuse to share. And while the animals may not have Frankie’s exalted human brain, they know things she doesn’t, like what happened before she was adopted.
To prove she’s sane, Frankie investigates her forgotten past and conducts clandestine experiments. But just when she uncovers the truth, she has to make an impossible choice: betray the animals she’s fallen in love with—or give up her last chance at success and everything she thought she knew.
Frankie Conner, first-year graduate student at UC Berkeley, is finally getting her life together. After multiple failures and several false starts, she's found her calling: become a neuroscientist, discover the cause of her depression and anxiety, and hopefully find a cure for herself and everyone like her.
But her first day of the program, Frankie meets a mysterious group of talking animals who claim to have an urgent message for her. The problem is, they're not willing to share it. Not yet. Not until she's ready.
While Frankie's new friends may not have her highly evolved, state-of-the-art, exalted human brain,…
I am a Wiltshire-based writer with a passion for historical and literary fiction and a fascination for the role of “memory” in the autumn of our lives. My own novel was inspired by conversations with my late grandfather in his final years. But as a journalist for more than 20 years, I had many rich opportunities to talk to the elderly members of our communities–most memorably, taking a pair of D-Day veterans back to the beaches of Normandy. In many ways, memories are the only things we can take with us throughout our lives, carrying both the burden of regrets and the consolation of those we have loved.
Set amid the final days of the Second World Way in an abandoned Italian village, it tells the story of Hana, a nurse tending to her sole remaining patient. Rescued from a burning plane, the anonymous Englishman is something of a mystery. But with the help of a copy of Herodotus' The Histories, which the airman had on his person when rescued, Hana begins to piece together his life.
I felt the writing twists from moments of great beauty and clarity to whole sections that are almost impenetrable in their poetic depth. Switches of narrative viewpoint make the reader work hard at times, but it’s well worth the effort for this poignant tale that remains with you long after you have read the last page.
Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in different ways by the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. His extraordinary knowledge and morphine-induced memories - of the North African desert, of explorers and tribes, of history and cartography; and also of forbidden love, suffering and betrayal - illuminate the story, and leave all the characters for ever changed.
As an American Southerner, I know things that can be the most nurturing ever, but there's always a cost—emotional, physical, or other. The landscape and nature are where I can always go when I feel heartbroken. And my heart is renewed. Always. Being in tandem with nature calls me. It might be time to look a little closer. If we don't, we might lose more habitat and humanity. This topic or theme haunts me every day. This won't be all I write about, and I hope to have at least another five decades to see more. How amazing to have a sense of history while looking to the future? That walkabout is such a blessing.
What can pain be when you are trying to be free? Who is safe from that when you are trying to be a compassionate person? This book will quell your questions. A girl with scares and scars. Do not be faint of heart on this one. And especially stay away from wells. Really. But also know there is that light that might free us all.
George and Serena Pemberton arrive in the wilds of the North Carolina mountains to build a life together in a rural logging town. But Serena Pemberton is unlike any woman this town has ever seen: overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes and even saving her husband in the wilderness. So when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she is determined that her intensely passionate marriage will not unravel. A course of events unfolds that will change the lives of everyone in their rural community and bring this riveting tale of love and revenge to its shocking reckoning.
Author Greil Marcus’ phrase “the old, weird America” gave me exactly the right words for something I’ve always felt: that there is a specific weirdness to the American landscape, an uncontrollable current of strange that runs beneath the carefully cultivated surface of heroes and neighbors and shared, stable dreams. Of course, as William Faulkner observed, the past isn’t past, and America is as weird as it’s ever been. Maybe weirder. Look at the news. Look out your window. No surprise, then, that I’m drawn to such a perspective when I read other people’s stories, and seldom get completely away from it when I write my own.
A stunning assembly of archival photographs and newspaper clippings from Jackson County, Wisconsin, in the last decade and a half of the 19th century, and the definitive explanation of why nobody in old-time photographs is ever smiling—and, I choose to believe, the real reason the parts of The Wizard of Oz set in Kansas were filmed in black and white. Economic privation, unceasing bereavement, disease both physical and mental—in other words, Tuesday. Was there any joy in Jackson County? Somewhere, I’m sure. What’s documented here is a stark, powerful beauty. The most real book I’ve ever encountered, and one of two on face-out display on my bookshelves.
This book is about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910. Against these are juxtaposed excerpts from the Badger State Banner, from the Mendota State (asylum) Record Book, and occasionally quotations from the writings of Hamlin Garland and Glenway Wescott.
Author Greil Marcus’ phrase “the old, weird America” gave me exactly the right words for something I’ve always felt: that there is a specific weirdness to the American landscape, an uncontrollable current of strange that runs beneath the carefully cultivated surface of heroes and neighbors and shared, stable dreams. Of course, as William Faulkner observed, the past isn’t past, and America is as weird as it’s ever been. Maybe weirder. Look at the news. Look out your window. No surprise, then, that I’m drawn to such a perspective when I read other people’s stories, and seldom get completely away from it when I write my own.
The other book face-out on my bookshelves, in some ways almost too obvious—what’s weirder than UFO culture? This photo-laden account of the material expressions of faith that Something Is Out There (including a house shaped like a flying saucer I used to drive by regularly when visiting Pensacola Beach) seems almost innocent after the toxic eruptions of conspiracy paranoia of recent times. With its rich Kodachrome record of how a sideshow can become the main event, a perfect complement to Wisconsin Death Trip. Whenever I look at either book, I find it hard to look away.
Since it was first published in 1985, Douglas Curran's photographic exploration of the strange world of UFO "true believers" has established itself as a classic work not only within the New Age/UFO community, but among sociologists, psychologists, and in the art and photography communities. This new edition, with an expanded text revisiting the Roswell, New Mexico, incident of 1947, brings back this essential work in a handsome new edition. As Tom Wolfe explains in his foreword: "Douglas Curran is not only a photographer but also a reporter, and an extremely gifted one. I am tempted to suggest that he also…
I’m an award-winning and bestselling novelist known for writing in a wide variety of genres. My most popular work to date is Lovecraft Country, a supernatural horror novel that served as the basis for the acclaimed HBO series of the same name.
I love books that refuse to fit neatly into genre categories. This underappreciated novel by the author of "The Lottery"and The Haunting of Hill House reads like a Seinfeld episode set on the eve of the apocalypse.
The Sundial’s combination of social satire and horror got lackluster reviews when it was published in 1958, but that’s just because it was way ahead of its time.
Before there was Hill House, there was the Halloran mansion of Jackson’s stunningly creepy fourth novel, The Sundial
When the Halloran clan gathers at the family home for a funeral, no one is surprised when the somewhat peculiar Aunt Fanny wanders off into the secret garden. But then she returns to report an astonishing vision of an apocalypse from which only the Hallorans and their hangers-on will be spared, and the family finds itself engulfed in growing madness, fear, and violence as they prepare for a terrible new world.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher…
I have always been a history lover, but often find myself thinking about the untold stories. The people who were not writing the history books or commanding armies or ruling countries. I’ve always been more inspired by everyday people, especially women, who fought daily battles we know very little about. I find myself seeking out their stories. I love to imagine these women’s lives. What motivated them, what frightened them, what angered them. That’s what I’m most passionate about. Finding and telling their stories.
Amy Tan is a master at telling stories that explore the complex dynamics of family relationships.
I’ve read a lot of her books, but The Hundred Secret Senses is my favorite because I adore Kwan, the main character’s half-sister from China. Kwan has a special secret that she can see and speak to ghosts, but Olivia always dismisses her as a little crazy and only pretends to believe her stories.
I love this book because it made me laugh out loud on multiple occasions and because it was so relatable.
We all have family members that we both love and can’t stand at the same time. This book goes back and forth between the 1990s and the 1800s.
If you love books about sisters, you need to read this one!
Stunning reissue of an international bestseller, from the author of 'The Joy Luck Club' and 'The Bonesetter's Daughter'.
Olivia Yee is only five years old when Kwan, her older sister from China, comes to live with the family and turns her life upside down, bombarding her day and night with ghostly stories of strange ancestors from the world of Yin. Olivia just wants to lead a normal American life.
For the next thirty years, Olivia endures visits from Kwan and her ghosts, who appear in the living world to offer advice on everything from restaurants to Olivia's failed marriage. But…
I have always been fascinated by how the world works. What gives gravity so much power? Why is it easier to lift things with levers and pulleys? Why do we have electricity inside of our own bodies?! The world is amazing. My job editing nonfiction books for kids puts me on the front lines of some of the smartest science writing out there. While I had no hand in the making of the following five picture books about physics, they are still some of my favorites because of the way they peel back the mysterious layers of the world to show us the science hidden in our daily lives.
A book that encompasses both the study of science and the role of women in the world, this beautiful picture book explores the life of Wu Chien Shiung, a Chinese American scientist who worked in particle and nuclear physics during a time when women weren’t encouraged to have scientific careers.
When Wu Chien Shiung was born in China 100 years ago, girls did not attend school; no one considered them as smart as boys. But her parents felt differently. Naming their daughter "Courageous Hero," they encouraged her love of learning and science. This engaging biography follows Wu Chien Shiung as she battles sexism at home and racism in the United States to become what Newsweek magazine called the "Queen of Physics" for her work on how atoms split. Along the way, she earned the admiration of famous scientists like Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer and became the first woman hired…
