Fans pick 100 books like The Final Call

This is a book that someone gifted me for college graduation, and although I had no aspirations of becoming a children’s book author at the time, I loved the inspirational message of the story. 

What will I do? Where will I live? Who will I become? These are questions that most young people ask themselves, especially at a milestone moment in their lives, like graduation. In this book—with its lyrically wonderful rhyming words and otherworldly illustrations—Dr. Seuss reminded me that I am in control of my destiny.

The book does a good job of blending the realities of life with the possibilities of what life can become. It taught me that, although there will be ups and downs, twists and turns, and a few dead ends, ultimately, I can choose which way to go in life. What an empowering message to read at any age or stage in life!

When I first held my daughter, I was filled with dread. I had no idea what to do and felt like everyone gave me conflicting advice. I had traveled a lot and wanted to travel with my daughter but was unsure if I could still travel the same way. After reading Barbara Coloroso’s book, it gave me the confidence that it was my choice how I raised my daughter but it was also my responsibility. I needed to give her choices but I also needed to give her guidelines and rules and set expectations. So many of the lessons about child raising I also applied to traveling with children. Now my daughter has been on hundreds of trips with me and to 13 countries. She has turned into a resilient, capable kid (so far!). 

I found Raising Girls to be a wonderful insight into what my daughter needed at different ages. The book has good examples and has been a useful guide as she has grown up. It is full of ideas about how children of different ages need different levels of support. For example, it explains that it is especially key to provide a nurturing, safe environment for kids through 5 and under.

I laughed out loud when I read this book. The author has a way of describing cultural differences and how we approach our work and day-to-day life in such an amusing way. It made me think a lot about how we interpret others' culture and, ultimately, our need for sensitivity and the need to look at life through a different lens rather than just work.

This book introduces a problem of cultural overtourism, too many people visiting museums and historical sites to the point they are extremely overcrowded and often damaging to the sites. Frey suggests, instead of limiting people coming to these sites, expand the demand side by providing more sites that are exact replicas of them through “Revised Originals.” This book helps readers rethink the status quo of cultural heritage tourism and how it can be reimagined to preserve important historical sites all over the world and generate user experiences that are not crowded but transformative. It’s a completely different way to think about what is authentic and what it means to experience it.

P.J. O’Rourke, a former war correspondent cum travel author of Holidays in Hell, informs us that there are rules about travelling for fun. One of those rules is that tourists must find the most crowded airplane and be treated as self-loading freight! However, O’Rourke does not travel for fun. Yet, I discovered in this book that his travels to places associated with the odd or macabre are fun – and indeed funny. O’Rourke travels with his wife and young family and we accompany them as he reveals witty and irrelevant perspectives on the places he visits. In his concluding thoughts, when he asks what is the point of the Washington Memorial, it was then I realised I had chuckled all the way through this droll travelogue as a backseat passenger.  

This was one of the first books that got me thinking critically about ‘dark tourism’. Harrison inspired me to look at how the dead maintain their relations with the living. In turn, the book galvanized my thinking of the many touristic places where the dead cohabit the world of the living. These range from graves, monuments, and memorials, and made me think about how we give the dead a memorialized afterlife. Drawing upon philosophy, history, and poetry, Harrison teaches us that as we follow in the footsteps of the dead, we are not self-authored. Instead, the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. Within the ‘Dominion of the Dead’, the dead become our guardians where we give them a future so that they may give us a past. 

This book enlightened me by learning that people have long travelled to visit the dead. With ‘dark tourism’ initially portrayed as an imitation of postmodernity, Westover dispelled that perspective. Instead, I learnt that travelling to meet the dead had long been a feature of the literary tourism landscape. A provocative play on the word ‘necro’ with visiting deceased authors’ homes, haunts and graves during the Romantic period, Westover offers an inspired contribution to understanding Romanticism within the context of death studies and travel history. I argue that in an age of antiquarian revival and a love of books, the emergent ‘Necromantic’ culture that created touristic habits continues to the present day. To that end, Necomanticism exposes a nexus of book love and memorial ritual that has deeply influenced (Western) literary culture. 

The author gets ahold of his mother’s copy of Frommer's 1967 Europe on Five Dollars a Day and uses it as his basis for a contemporary visit. Like his mother, I, too, did the tour in 1967. I was curious to see what had happened to Europe and to my view of it. Of course, most of the restaurants no longer exist, and $5 dollars a day was more like $50 dollars a day, but this travel memoir is full of funny, disastrous, and touching adventures. I admit to a fondness for funny disasters.

I was sad and happy to have read this book during the pandemic for these reasons: I loved this book because Roberts’ went to many of the same places I visited a decade later, and I found her stories refreshing, funny, and interesting.

And like Suzanne, I’ve had to sort through feelings of guilt regarding my privileged place in the world, have tried to be mindful of reducing my carbon footprint, treating sentient beings better, and simply the moral dilemmas one often faces in “developing” countries.

The sad part about reading this during COVID was that I found out that Suzanne lived in my area, and I missed all her talks and workshops and classes, and nothing was planned again until the pandemic was over. Thankfully, I have been able to take a couple of classes with her since and have become a much better writer for it. I believe… show more.