Here are 100 books that The Men Who Swallowed the Sun fans have personally recommended if you like
The Men Who Swallowed the Sun.
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Long before I became a filmmaker and many years before I knew what pre-history meant, I was a restless traveler. I was an adventurer and a hiker, fascinated by maps and mountain peaks and constantly searching for the best place for a coffee break. In my list, I have tried to combine my passion for traveling with what is really important in life: people, friends, and travel companions.
My recent literary quest across the Levant ends around 6000 years ago. A few years later, at the end of the 19th century, Twain made his journey in the same region. Surprisingly, not much has changed.
His book is a witty, arrogant, and very funny look at a land full of history…and annoying flying insects.
'Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?'
So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. He was making his first responses to the Old World - to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem.
For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the 'Old Masters'.…
I love humorous tales with quirky characters who find themselves in bizarre situations, especially in foreign countries. This mirrors my own experience of the world! After Brown University, I found myself teaching rowdy Egyptian girls; I resided in a converted classroom in Istanbul; and I was tamed by an eighty-year-old Spanish nun at a girls’ school in Tokyo. In my late thirties, I dropped my anchor in Lattakia, Syria, only to be tailed by the Syrian secret police. Like the character in my novel, Confessions of a Knight Errant, I returned to Cairo from Almeria, Spain where I was on a writers’ residency on January 28th, the Friday of Rage, of the Egyptian uprising, 2011.
This summer I visited Fort Davis, Texas and learned about the “buffalo” soldiers who were stationed there in the 1860s.
This was the nickname for African-American soldiers, who were separate regiments in the U.S. Army. McBride’s novel deals with a “buffalo” regiment but is set in World War II in Italy. I did not know anything about the experiences of African-American soldiers in World War II.
What I really loved about this book was the unlikely situations that a small group of African-American soldiers find themselves in a tiny village in Italy, under siege from the Germans. Despite the differences in culture and language, the soldiers find refuge and friendship with an Italian peasant, who is raising rabbits under the floorboards of his ramshackle cabin.
One of their pals saves a disturbed Italian orphan and the small group of soldiers, separated from their regiment, get sidetracked by this humanitarian mission…
Now a Spike Lee film, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, Deacon King Kong, Five-Carat Soul, and Kill 'Em and Leave
James McBride’s powerful memoir, The Color of Water, was a groundbreaking literary phenomenon that transcended racial and religious boundaries, garnering unprecedented acclaim and topping bestseller lists for more than two years. Now McBride turns his extraordinary gift for storytelling to fiction—in a universal tale of courage and redemption inspired by a little-known historic event. In Miracle at St. Anna, toward the end of World…
I’m primarily a music composer for film and TV, but I’ve also ventured into filmmaking, with one of my films being featured at an international film festival, so my journey in storytelling spans many years, and comedy has always been at its heart. Growing up, my father worked as a pit musician, which gave me exposure to the comedy acts of the time. Humor was a constant in our home, so when I started writing fiction, it felt only natural my writing would find a home in comedy.
The story literally begins with a 100-year-old man climbing out of his window and disappearing into the night. But this is no ordinary man. No, this is Allan Karlsson, a Swedish man who has lived a long and incredibly eventful life. With only a suitcase in hand, he heads to the local bus station, where, much like in Tom Sharpe’s Wilt, he inadvertently becomes involved in a series of absurd and unpredictable events with equally absurd and unpredictable characters.
Unlike the darker tones of Palahnuik or Amis, Jonas's humor is gentle and charming, making for a much lighter read. On the surface, the story might sound rather humdrum, but as we learn more about Allan and his past, the book quickly becomes a glorious page-turner. The narrative alternates between present-day escapades and flashbacks to Allan's involvement in major historical events, including encounters with famous leaders at pivotal moments in…
A larger-than-life old man with a fondness for vodka goes on an unexpected adventure in this whimsical novel -- perfect for fans of Forrest Gump and A Man Called Ove.
The international publishing sensation -- more than six million copies sold worldwide!
A reluctant centenarian much like Forrest Gump (if Gump were an explosives expert) decides it's not too late to start over . . .
After a long and eventful life, Allan Karlsson ends up in a nursing home, believing it to be his last stop. The only problem is that he's still in good health, and in one…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I love humorous tales with quirky characters who find themselves in bizarre situations, especially in foreign countries. This mirrors my own experience of the world! After Brown University, I found myself teaching rowdy Egyptian girls; I resided in a converted classroom in Istanbul; and I was tamed by an eighty-year-old Spanish nun at a girls’ school in Tokyo. In my late thirties, I dropped my anchor in Lattakia, Syria, only to be tailed by the Syrian secret police. Like the character in my novel, Confessions of a Knight Errant, I returned to Cairo from Almeria, Spain where I was on a writers’ residency on January 28th, the Friday of Rage, of the Egyptian uprising, 2011.
On a recent visit to Ireland, A Thousand Moons was recommended by an Irish writer.
I did not know that there were Irish soldiers who fought in the Civil War. Since my family was originally from Ireland, (although they immigrated around the time of the Revolutionary War), this interested me. Thomas McNulty, one of the main characters in the novel, is an Irishman who fought in the Civil War and then later in the Indian War.
Winona, an orphan from the Lakota tribe, who used to Ojinjintka tells this tale. She was rescued by Thomas McNulty from being massacred. McNulty might be a tough guy, but he is also a cross-dresser! McNulty and his fellow soldier and partner, Cole adopt Winona as their own. When they are attacked by lawless militias, they must flee for their lives.
This novel really gives the reader a clear picture of the lawlessness of…
Old God's Time (March 2023), Sebastian Barry's stunning new novel, available to pre-order now
From the Costa Book of the Year-winning author of Days Without End
Even when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live.
Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit,…
I’m the child of immigrants and my role in the family was to be my parents’ American expert and translator. I learned my expertise by living, of course, but my understanding of the interior life and thoughts of Americans often came from reading American novels. Immigration-themed novels are catnip to me because they remind me, often with warmth, of my own childhood and parents.
This book is a true labor of love, an oral history about a community of Eastern European Jewish chicken ranchers that lived in Petaluma, California for decades. The voices ring with the cadence and language of my own childhood although the era is older and the political leanings of those interviewed are different than those in my own neighborhood. What distinguishes this book from many is that the community has no wish to assimilate.
Given its tumultuous history, one would hardly have expected Petaluma, California, to become transformed into the San Francisco bedroom suburb that it is today. It had been a small-town agricultural community, where Jewish chicken ranchers and radicals enjoyed a vigorous Yiddish cultural life, maintained intense political commitments, and took part in sharp conflicts among themselves and with the society beyond.
In this unique work of oral history, Kenneth Kann has ingeniously arranged and edited interviews with more than two hundred people, some of them telling their life stories in their own Yiddishized English. We meet an array of striking characters…
I'm a woman of four and seventy years who thankfully doesn’t yet resemble that person to those who haven’t met me. I'm a mother of two who both have their own businesses in the fields of their natural talents, I've been Deputy Treasurer to the State of Kansas, written 22 books but think younger than I did at 20, and am enjoying the best sex life to date! Life is precious and should not be limited to us based on our age, but on our interests, knowledge, and what we have to offer. Writing about that which I've experienced and the recorded history of family are my passions and hopefully for my readers as well.
I personally enjoyed this book for the courage found by the Heroine in a world where women were considered 2nd class citizens, but she, through strength of character and love of a sister she loses due to illness and no monies to save her, gives her that impetus to forge ahead through unconventional, but effective ways and new friends of wealth in America. It could be called a Cinderella story with illegal immigrants as heroines.
A book of 1902, about a young woman who had been abused by her father to the point that a nun suggested she find refuge elsewhere. From Italy, she proceeds to save enough money to book passage with a ship for both herself and her younger sister who is already ill from similar abuse. She looks forward to Ellis Island, knowing she then will be on the safe harbor of America, until she learns that…
Ellis Island, 1902: Two women band together to hold America to its promise: "Give me your tired, your poor ... your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." A young Italian woman arrives on the shores of America, her sights set on a better life. That same day, a young American woman reports to her first day of work at the immigration center. But Ellis Island isn't a refuge for Francesca or Alma, not when ships depart every day with those who are refused entry to the country and when corruption ripples through every corridor. While Francesca resorts to desperate measures…
Confessions of a Knight Errant
by
Gretchen McCullough,
Confessions of a Knight Errant is a comedic, picaresque novel in the tradition of Don Quixote with a flamboyant cast of characters.
Dr. Gary Watson is the picaro, a radical environmentalist and wannabe novelist who has been accused of masterminding a computer hack that wiped out the files of a…
By Laura Hooton, Paul Spickard, and Francisco BeltránAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
Paul Spickard wrote the first edition of Almost All Aliens. He invited Francisco Beltrán and Laura Hooton, who worked under Dr. Spickard at UC Santa Barbara, to co-author the second edition after working as research assistants and providing suggestions for the second edition. We are all historians of race, ethnicity, immigration, colonialism, and identity, and in our other works and teaching we each think about these topics in different ways. We did the same for this list—this is a list of five books that talk about topics that are important to Almost All Aliens and approaches that have been influential in how we think about the topic.
Why did Laura, Paul, and Francisco love this book?
This book offers a great introduction to readers on the connection between race and immigration in the United States. Erika Lee shows how race has shaped understandings of identity, citizenship, and belonging from the colonial era to the present. She argues there is an often racialized definition of America and Americanness, which has led to the marginalization and exclusion of immigrants from all corners of the globe throughout United States history.
This definitive history of American xenophobia is "essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist).
The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into…
I was Site Supervisor at the Jamestown Rediscovery Project in the late 1990s and early 2000s. My fondness for the people involved with the archaeological excavations is only rivaled by my love for the subject matter that involves the collision of cultures as Chesapeake Algonquians, Spanish Jesuits, and English colonists first encountered one another during the 16th and 17th centuries. Though I have been fortunate to write many books, my first book was on Jamestown, and this topic will always hold a special place in my scholarly heart (there is such a thing, I swear!).
Ilan Stavans’s edited volume, Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing demonstrates how immigration is central to the origin story of the United States. In compiling selections from over 400 years of first-generation immigrant accounts, Stavans is able to shed light on the immigration experience—starting at Jamestown—from the perspective of the immigrant, as opposed to those already living in the destination country.
Immigration is the essential American story. From London or Lvov, Bombay or Beijing, Dublin or Dusseldorf, people have come to America to remake themselves, their lives, and their identities. Despite political obstacles, popular indifference, or hostility, they put down roots here, and their social, cultural, and entrepreneurial energies helped forge the open and diverse society we live in. The history of American immigration has often been told by those already here. Becoming Americans tells this epic story from the inside, gathering for the first time over 400 years of writing—from seventeenth-century Jamestown to contemporary Brooklyn and Los Angeles—by first-generation immigrants…
I love wordless books immoderately, and I also love books that have meta, surreal, or magical realism elements. This list combines these two features! I was personally so happy that The Red Book was described in a review as “a wordless mind trip for tots,” and I think all the books on this list would perfectly fit that description (and much, much more!) too.
I will remain forever astonished at the epic feat of world-building in The Arrival. It thoroughly pulls me into an immersive experience where I am learning along with the main character how to navigate the new world into which he has immigrated. As he learns, we learn. I find myself so emotionally involved with his success in his hopeful new reality. The art is amazingly detailed and conveys the complex and richly visual world, yet also sets a strong emotional tone that brings us into the action.
What drives so many to leave everything behind and journey alone to a mysterious country, a place without family or friends, where everything is nameless and the future is unknown. This silent graphic novel is the story of every migrant, every refugee, every displaced person, and a tribute to all those who have made the journey.
THE ARRIVAL has become one of the most critically acclaimed books of recent years, a wordless masterpiece that describes a world beyond any familiar time or place.
Sited as No 35 in The Times 100 Best Books of all time. It has sold over…
Dressed to kill and ready to make rent, best friends Lisa and Jamie work as “paid to party” girls at the Rose City Ripe for Disruption gala, a gathering of Portland's elite.
Their evening is derailed when Lisa stumbles across Ellen, a ruthless politician and Lisa’s estranged mother. And to…
Two books that I read as a young child were very important to me. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss made me think about riches, poverty, and the power that rich people have to make stupid rules; and poor people have no choice but to obey them. The Japanese Twins from Lucy Fitch Perkins' series on twins from different cultures gave me a life-long interest in cultural differences. Not only did they think differently, depending on their culture, they also had different skin colours. Later I learned about racism when I worked with unhappy displaced children and interpreted for asylum-seekers. I write from a child's perspective, making books accessible to all ages.
I learned from this story why families make the difficult decision to split up and send a father and a child on a dangerous journey for a better life. This family lives in Mexico, facing hunger and destitution. The father and his son became migrants. They walked to America, knowing that they could be split up or one of them die.
In this book, I learned about the Mexican-American War, and the atrocious US policy of splitting migrant children from their parents.
Join a young boy and his father on a daring journey from Mexico to Texas to find a new life. They'll need all the resilience and courage they can muster to safely cross the border - la frontera - and to make a home for themselves in a new land. AGES: 8 to 10 AUTHORS: Alfredo Alva is a stonemason from La Ceja, Mexico. He and his family live in Texas, where he designs architectural details from stone for local architects. He met Deborah Mills while working on a local architecture project, and they worked together to write his story…