100 books like Slaughterhouse-Five

Carl Sagan is still one of the most well-known astronomers, renowned for his ability to create wonder and awe in his descriptions of the Universe.

In this book, he’s at his finest form, a science fiction tale of the discovery of an intelligent alien signal coming from space, and how the world reacts to it. It’s a wonderful treatise on religion, science, belief, and evidence.

If you’ve seen the movie, read the book: It’s far superior, and the very last page will give you chills and leave you questioning what you think reality is.

I begin my recommendations with a science fiction novel that first got me thinking about the difficulty of understanding other minds when I was a teenager.

Among many other profound philosophical and psychological questions, it’s about the exploration of an intelligent alien mind (and the alien trying to comprehend our minds) and the many things that can go disastrously wrong in the process.

In trying to explore what is going on the cockpit of an insect, I probably continue to make similar errors, though my research is unlikely to result in the doom of spaceship crews, as in this novel. 

This classic novel about struggling for redemption after a horrific crime affected me deeply. Raskolnikov’s poverty and radical ideology drive him to robbery and murder.

As a lapsed Catholic, I was gripped by Dostoevsky’s rich exploration of why Raskolnikov did it, examining altruistic Christian ideals alongside new and dangerous notions about the prerogatives of “exceptional” men. The novel virtually invented the crime drama, with the original troubled killer pursued by the original wily detective.

The cast of characters, from the sympathetic Sonya, whose religious faith moves Raskolnikov, to the unscrupulous Svidrigaylov, who embodies irredeemable depravity, is as rich as the play of ideas and the dramatic tension. Powerful on every level. 

David Halberstam documents how fools go to war. This book is about the whiz kids that got us into the Vietnam war and ran it under the JFK and the Johnson administrations. The same ones who got us into the Iraq War, the Spanish American War, and so on. There is a quote that I love from this book that effectively says, "they used brilliant policies that defied common sense." And, that sums this all up. These whiz kids ran a war as if it was part of American politics and from thousands of miles away with memos and meetings in DC. They completely screwed it up.

David Halberstam was a correspondent in Saigon and knew these insiders. He wrote about the decision-making that was happening behind closed doors that led to one of our greatest follies. He is a master storyteller and I strongly recommend this book. 

Graves’s account of his World War I experiences stands alongside Augustine’s Confessions and the Baburnama as one of the all-time great memoirs—except everyone who was in the war with Graves agrees that most of it is fake.

Sure, Graves fought in WWI, and the experience was unpleasant, so he captured that part accurately. But all his delightful anecdotes tend to be exaggerations, prevarications, fabrications.

Graves would become in later years best known as a historical novelist, and maybe its best to take Good-Bye as his first novel, a novel of life in the trenches of the Great War. Much like his novels of ancient Rome, this book is most fun if you can suspend your disbelief completely, and persuade yourself that this must have been exactly the way things went down.

(Maybe forget I told you it was fake until after you read it.)

In the dystopian future that Bradbury creates, technology has eliminated the need for books.

We are not smarter in this future without history or literature, in fact, we are dumber, relying on meaningless entertainment to fill the intellectual void created by the written word’s eradication. Many successful science fiction authors are masters of the craft of writing, but Bradbury is on another level.

His stark vision of the future is propelled by ordinary characters living in extraordinary times, with each setting painted with beautiful prose that is both prophetic and thought provoking. The Dewey Decimal System has no hold on where one can find literature in a bookstore, nor do the critics.

This is the book that got me into Science Fiction in the first place and it remains, perhaps, my favorite novel. The setting is a near-future dystopian society where a subculture of young, roving gangs control the streets through extraordinarily violent antics (ultra-violence). This violent behavior is enhanced by “milk plus,” a drink laced with synthetic drugs available at the Korova Milk Bar, which is where we first encounter our main character, Alex, a 15-year-old gang leader.

When Alex is arrested for murder, he is selected to undergo an experimental therapy (The Ludovico Technique) designed to wean him off violent behavior forever, after which his sentence will be commuted. During these treatments, he is injected with (yet another) drug called Serum 114. This drug induces extreme nausea while he is made to watch horribly violent films. Utterly changed, Alex is released back onto the streets to a world in which… show more.

Grossman is a former Army Ranger who digs deep into the psychological impact of taking human life through countless interviews with fellow soldiers of all kinds. Combining these accounts with thorough psychological research, Grossman comments on society's collective aversion to killing while helping us understand its complicated acceptance—and even encouragement—of wartime killing. What was most surprising to me was that historically, only about 4% of soldiers even fire their weapon during war, and how obviously that skews from the “norm” of combat portrayed in popular media. It’s an honest, eye-opening, and important piece of work that should be required reading for every service member, police officer, or anyone tasked with carrying society’s heaviest burden.

This is the best book on the Pacific campaign in World War 2. Tarawa was a small island the USA wanted to build a landing strip on and the Japanese put 5,000 soldiers in elaborate well built bunkers to defend it. Robert was a war correspondent who was on the beach for the invasion. You are right there with him as he is huddled in fear behind a burned-out tank during the landing. You can feel the bullets pinging near your head and see the dead all around you.

It was a massacre. It started with a rare low tide that prevented the landing craft from reaching the beach. The American troops had to wade through the water while Japanese machine guns raked them. The water turned red with American blood. Robert was there for everything and wrote it all. Even the aftermath as he surveyed the scene with the… show more.