100 books like The Eyre Affair

An angel and a demon work together to stop the antichrist from destroying the world. Simple enough. But things get off to a rocky start when they spend the first eleven years monitoring the wrong child.

I initially read this book on vacation, and while I don’t remember much about the trip itself, I remember the book! An otherwise-normal pre-teen with the power to shape reality takes this story to appropriate (and absurd) extremes, but at its core, it’s a narrative about good and evil, human nature, and free will—and it approaches these themes with sincerity, nuance, and care.

Come for the laughs, stay for the laughs…and for the profound reflection on humanity.

In Dragaera, the fortunes of the seventeen Great Houses are determined by the Cycle, which elevates royalty, merchants, artisans, wizards, the mob, and even peasants as it turns.

The Cycle takes thousands of years to turn… but Dragaerans live thousands of years. Easterners, like Vlad Taltos, are lucky to see a hundred, and they can’t be members of the Great Houses. Except the House of the Jhereg, which sells titles.

They’re the mob; and Vlad, Baronet of Taltos, is an assassin. JHEREG and its many sequels are constantly exploring the social dynamics underlying this situation; as an Easterner with a bought title, Vlad doesn’t fit in with either Easterners or Dragaeran nobles, and choosing sides can mean destroying relationships or putting his life on the line.

I must have re-read this wonderful book half a dozen times in my youth. I first read it when I was in middle school. Though I had discovered science fiction and fantasy books a few years earlier, most of them had been heavy on action and light on ideas.

This was one of the first books I read that really made me think about how strange and wonderful the universe might really be and see how that might provide a context for telling profoundly moving human stories. It filled my young mind with awe and wonder, as well as a desire to tell my own stories.

I realize this book isn’t one of King’s supernatural thrillers like Kujo or The Shining, both of which petrified my middle-school self into turning the pages late, late into the night. But Misery is the best of King’s work because this “super-psychological” thriller pits two antithetical forces against one another.

The police interview setup seems a straightforward approach to story-telling, but it turns into a deeply emotion, personal journey for Paul, the book’s hero. We learn in subsequent pages that Paul’s “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes, refuses to allow Paul to continue on a journey of self-aggrandizement...to the point she’s willing to brutalize and imprison him…all while claiming to love his mind. Paul’s imagination becomes his only viable tool to escape Annie’s machinations.

Misery is powerful, brilliant work and the reason I now write mysteries and thrillers.

It takes guts to write a protagonist who’s hard to like. Agatha Raisin, a tough businesswoman who retires to the tiny village of Carsley, is so beautifully flawed she’s impossible to ignore. She’s somewhat of a bully, prone to conniving, and deeply competitive, which is why she buys her quiche at a shop and enters it as her own creation. Of course, someone drops dead after eating it. This crusty woman of a certain age just bulldozes her way through the investigation and her flaws are so funny and refreshing that you wind up rooting for her. She’s a breath of fresh air in the cozy mystery world.

The heroine is soulless – the book certainly is not.

An admirably determined and courageous young lady holds her own in a steampunk version of 19th century London where werewolves and vampires play an important part in society – and everyone knows they exist.

They simply belong to the Victorian upper class and try to fit their species typical lifestyles into a world somewhere between Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Werewolves and vampires: what’s not to like?

As a reader, I was on the slow side. I tended to analyze the text too much, I think.

By the time I came across the Magic Kingdom of Landover series, I still shied away from the giant fantasy tomes because I was intimidated that they were too long, and it would take me too long to get through them. I looked for smaller fantasy books and I came across Terry Brooks. I was intrigued by his Sword of Shanara series, but I settled on the Magic Kingdom of Landover instead.

These books are about a lawyer who buys a magic kingdom and is ported away to the kingdom to have an adventure. Talk about wishing you could go to another realm! In this series, the protagonist literary travels to another realm. After I completed this series, I was becoming more confident in my reading, and I was just about… show more.

I almost chose the Sookie Stackhouse series because those are a rollicking treat! C’mon, a vampire detective is pretty fantastic!

But Lizbeth’s story starts with a bang—literally. The novel (and Lizbeth) is grittier than the sweet-as-pie Sookie, which we learn in the first chapter. This dystopian world of the failed United States in the mid to late twentieth century incorporates Russian magicians called grigoris, and a complex gotta-catch-‘em plot with shootouts a la the Old West.

Yup, Charlaine Harris produced another page-turner that’s quite a departure from her Sookie days.

Libriomancer is a very meta urban fantasy where the power of fiction is real and accessible. It delves deeply into the powers of other fictional worlds within the framework of the one created for this story. With more than a little humor and a lot of fun, the literary fantasy and science fiction pop culture becomes active tools rather than cute easter eggs. I felt heart-warmed by the inventive and interesting use of combining old books I love to help form a new book I love. 

The apocalypse has come and it is in the form of an alien takeover that looks like a video-game system.  Less tongue and cheek and more grim and gritty we follow John as he tries to survive in the newly re-made world. This book starts one of my favorite series in the LitRPG genre and holds a special place in my heart as one of the series that inspires me to write in that sub-genre. I consider it one of the best places to start if you are interested in the gaming/science-fantasy mix that is the genre.