100 books like The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

McLemore’s prose is basically poetry, and this YA novel is a gorgeous combination of magical realism and Latine folklore. It is a modern fairy tale about forbidden romance, poisonous jealousy, family secrets, and the power of truth.

I fell in love with the lush atmosphere, complex characters, and exquisite storytelling. This one stayed with me for a long time after I’d closed the book. 

As a fellow genderqueer/non-binary Asian writer, I’m happy to champion the first in Neon Yang’s Tensorate series. A YA novella set in a non-Western fantasy landscape, this book tackles issues of gender identity and choice head-on, introducing us to a society where children are referred to individually using they/them pronouns, and can select one of the binary genders when they come of age or chose to remain non-binary. We see the world through the eyes of twins Mokoya and Akeha as they come into their gender expressions and their powers in a feudal, monastic society largely reminiscent of those found in Asian history.

I hate Ikea stores. To me, they are hellish landscapes and this book—set in a fictional store modelled after Ikea—just gets me! This novella is a hilarious romp through the multiverse, balancing swashbuckling adventure with quiet yet razor-sharp insight into the ebb and flow of romantic relationships. This story shows that navigating love can be even more complicated than navigating interdimensional wormholes!

I left this book for last because it is, perhaps, the heaviest and most gut-wrenching. In this book, Emezi crafts an exceptional paranormal story showing the true-life difficulties (that is the life-threatening and openly hostile discrimination) faced by LGBT+ people in Nigeria. A fact that’s sadly true in many other African countries too. This book has so many layers, every scene dripping with nuance and a clear tenderness for the subject matter. It would have been easy for this story to remain steeped in tragedy, but Emezi manages to elevate their characters and narrative above that, providing an ultimately heartwarming story that leaves the reader with a sense of wonder and hope while never dismissing the severity of the reality so many LGBT+ people face on the African continent.

Before getting to radio, alternative scenes came together in the 1970s and 1980s through informal networks of shared tapes, backyard concerts, and zines. These scenes had politics all to themselves, which revolved around concepts of “authenticity.”

Duncombe’s book not only captures the range and meaning of zines in all their forms, but it unravels the deeper meaning of these DIY publications. As he writes, “Zinesters believe that authenticity can be found only in a person unshackled by the contrivances of society.” Zines thus offered the purest expressions of self, in theory, but soon, the zine scene developed its own codes of conduct and traditions – practices though that would inform the sound and practice of college radio.

What I love about this book is that it delves into theory (zinesters were like Rousseau? Who knew?!) but remains accessible, using the theory only to enlighten underappreciated aspects of zine culture.

I admit that Huxley’s final novel is a rather difficult one to read. It’s long, it goes on too long in some places, it’s kind of fiction and philosophy together, and it includes a book within a book. However, The Island is a work of genius.

There’s the utopian island of Pala (not dystopian), and all through the book, there’s the threat of the invading Rendang kingdom. It includes some Buddhist ideas with the birds on the island that say karuna (meaning compassion) and "attention" to remind islanders of the now, yet ultimately, in the end, the island is invaded, and the utopia becomes exposed as a fake.

I’ll admit that I only read this book in high school because it was assigned reading in my English class, but even as a disinterested teenager, the story has stuck with me for decades. It showed me that regular people are usually much scarier and more sinister than any kind of paranormal force.

I remember reading this book and feeling an overwhelming sense of dread. I wondered how anarchy could spread so quickly and was horrified by the idea that it could happen in the real world. I love that this book didn’t rely on traditional horror tropes to be scary.

Honestly, I’m not even sure horror is what Golding was going for, but he definitely mastered it, even if unintentionally. There’s nothing scarier than seeing how quickly human nature breaks down into something unrecognizable in the absence of order.

This is modern China’s only full-fledged utopia (mostly written about 1900)—explaining how humanity gradually evolves to get rid of the “boundaries” dividing us by nation, class, race, and gender. It may take thousands of years, but history will create a truly democratic and equal society. Children will be raised in public nurseries, couples, including homosexuals, will enter into one-year (renewable) contracts. In thousands of years, the boundaries separating the species and even the gods will dissolve as well.

I love this book on many levels. Utopia is always just out of reach but with the scale of time, one could argue that we’re currently living in a utopia.

Even if we don’t have flying cars, more people have opportunities and access to resources than ever before in recorded history.

This book is for optimists and pessimists alike, as the author does a great job addressing the current issues we face and outlining a future worth building. A future of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and no national borders, where opportunities are shared more equitably.

If everyone read this book I know we’d be one step closer to reaching utopia.

The key to understanding our lives is to enlarge our perspectives, and human behavior hasn’t changed much in 2000 years.

Plato gives several suggestions for maintaining stability in organized society, including guarding against the influence of Sophists, who manipulate language to manipulate their listeners, reminding me of our salesmen today.

Especially valuable is his allegory of the cave, where educators present images to an audience chained in place since early childhood. The glare of the sun awaits anyone who manages to leave the cave, and coming back in won’t be easy, but those who leave and find genuine truth need to come back and serve those still in the cave. Make the world a better place.