100 books like The Humans

To empathize with a demon is not something I ever thought I would do, yet while looking at the world through the eyes of a junior one in training I truly felt his pain.

One would think it would be easy to trick a simple human into making mistakes, but with God on their side it would seem not. As hilarious as it is profound, while being deeply enlightened into the ways humans are so vulnerable to their darker nature, I laughed my way through this one, finding it as funny to see the particular faults of others as it was to recognize the many predictable faults in myself.

The story of people living in an underground Silo who don’t know why they're there, and only that the outside world is toxic and they must survive.

The characters in this story are heroic and relatable. I just wanted this book to keep going, and luckily there are two more in the series – Shift and Dust. The TV series is also a great addition and keeps a similar tone to the book.

I fell in love with Murderbot in the first paragraph. Every book afterward in the series just made me love it more.

The hero of the Murderbot Diaries is part robot, part humanoid, and all done-with-everyone’s-crap. Everyone seemed to think that if a construct like it gained its freedom, it would rampage around killing everyone. Instead, it just wanted to be left alone to watch some good shows, and read a book or ten. Been there.

I cracked up at the sarcasm, got pulled in by the action, and felt the compassion that drove Murderbot to jump into the mouth of a deadly creature to save a human’s life. I went through the angst of Murderbot learning how to connect with people without compromising itself, and identified all too well.

This book was just fun. (And informative!) As my editor, Lisa Poisso, put it (paraphrased), “I’ve never seen an author manage to build so much narrative tension around something so simple as, ‘And now I have to push this button.’”

So yes, Weir continues to be awesome at making hard sci-fi fun and thrilling. What really stuck with me most, though, was the relationship the main character, Ryland Grace, forms with his unexpected interstellar buddy, the Eridian he dubs Rocky. The care and thought Weir puts into every aspect of their interactions… Those were the moments that got me. Never have I ever had so much fun watching a character think about how to solve problems. And who couldn’t use a bit more laughter and problem-solving in their life?

Okay, this might seem like a bit of a strange choice to be included in a list of best “ripped from the headlines” crime novels, but it really isn’t. I mean, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, is probably the most famous big news headline of our times. 

I was totally blown away by King’s brilliant concept of using that legendary date in history to write this fascinating thriller about what “might have been” if someone could somehow go back in time and stop it from ever happening.

Like the other four books on my list, King takes a major real-life news story and uses it to create a fascinating work of fiction. I just love books like this!  

I hadn’t read this as a child, but upon reading it the first time, it made me feel like a child. The deep introspection, written with the imagination and voice of a young child, was calming, and I felt as if he knew how I thought as a child and adult.

I was living in France at the time, and the story had a foreign mood but was familiar. The book reached into personal childhood daydreams and fantasies. The prince’s way of thinking and expressing himself was definitely not from the modern day and it inspired me to write “up” to younger audiences. The immediacy and freshness of the illustrations motivated me to think less and feel more when creating.

One of my favorite things in the world is listening to a good audiobook, start to finish, on a long road trip. Having moved back and forth across the country more times than I care to count, I’ve done this a fair number of times, and my favorite memory by far is the experience I had when listening to this book for the first time.

I’ve enjoyed most of Blake Crouch’s books for their tight pacing and titillating, mind-candy premises (in Dark Matter, it’s a neat mechanic for hopping alternate realities), but what really hit me with this one in particular was how monumentally hard this book drove home this feeling of losing (like literally losing) the one you love the most, and what you might do, what life you might choose, to find them again. It’s hardly ground that no one’s covered before, but without spoiling anything, I’ll just… show more.

His physicality transformed, Gregor awakes no longer a man, but instead, a giant grotesque creature.

As I read this masterpiece, I too understood how it is, to appear not how I desire. To sound different, to look different, to appear different than the paragon of myself I have created in my mind. And to strive to be more than this body I inhabit can give. But is this not the condition of us all?

A truly brilliant Kafka, this book created a world that is my own, yet unreal, and my reality yet a waking dream.

Leaving me equally tickled as it did in awe, Flatland is easily one of my favorite books of all time.

Delving into concepts quite difficult to think about, let alone explain in such a delightful way, it expanded my mind into not only a better understanding of ‘dimensions’ but also the possibility, and even, the probability, that there is much more in existence than our rather limited little human brains can comprehend.

As weird as it is wonderful, I found myself stopping at various points to either laugh or to try to explain to someone else (to their annoyance I’m sure!) the profound details it explained to me. And when it was all over I was left humbled, and pondered what greater beings there may be all around me, that I simply cannot see.

A mix of coming of age in the first half of the twentieth century, and Bradbury’s peculiar brand of very earthly oddness and sci-fi strangeness, Dandelion Wine is full of all sorts of magic. It reminds you of what it is to be a small human again, when everything seems possible, and aliens and monsters are as likely (and as important) as long summer days spent outside, barefoot and sunburnt and a little feral. Even when we don’t recognise the details of the childhood described, we remember the feeling, and it reawakens a sense of wonder that’s incredibly precious.