Fans pick 100 books like The Naming

Three worlds in one book! There’s the not-so-important world of the Ancelstierre, roughly Edwardian or early-20th-Century-ish, and there’s the Old Kingdom, basically medieval, where Charter Magic wars with Free Magic (and how well Nix thinks through the workings of his forms of magic).

But the third world is the one that takes the cake! An underworld of the dead, with its different levels, gates, and sills. Sabriel discovers her own special inheritance and powers—OK, that’s standard fantasy fare, except that Sabriel’s powers are those of an abhorsen. It’s the Abhorsen’s role to make sure that the dead stay dead, and journey on down into the deeper levels of death. Of course, the dead who keep coming back are the ones who drive the narrative!

Echo North combined several familiar-to-me folk tales, and introduced me to the tale of Tam Lin. I loved the blending of known and original—especially the mirror room, where stories layered upon stories and acquaintances took on completely new qualities. The sewing together of a fracturing magical house also fascinated me. I was never sure about the intentions of certain people until the end, and despite guessing wrong, I was delighted by what really was happening.

I loved this book since before it was published.

I gave a quote for the cover of the first printing of it, in fact. Fifteen years later, it still remains a book that can carry me away to a world where magic is not a gift but a challenge to overcome.

Kristen had a fresh idea here, but it still folded into my love of adventure and magic and finding out who we are inside.

That’s a story that will always get my attention, and the writing in this one is also lush enough to make me want to pause and re-read lines.

Anna writes cozy romantic fantasies that feel like getting a hug from your best friend.

A Cinderella retelling (we love a retelling!) in which our main character, Selah, has to travel the world to find a husband to save her family’s legacy, this book will have you giggling and gasping all the way to the end. And don’t worry – there is a sequel, The Boundless, and it’s just as good.

If you can read only one book on Lincoln, this is the one I would choose. In my opinion—as well as that of many professional historians—it is the best book ever written to examine why Lincoln waited two years after becoming president to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In this brilliant and elegantly written book, a Pulitzer Prize historian argues, entirely convincingly, that the need to keep together his pro-union coalition required Lincon to proceed very cautiously.

To be sure, Foner writes that while Lincoln’s long-held anti-slavery convictions were not in doubt, he also initially shared the racist attitudes that black people were not ready for full freedom. However, Foner emphasizes that as Lincoln grew in office, his beliefs increasingly moved towards those of Frederick Douglass—whom Lincoln came to greatly admire—and other full-fledged abolitionists.

This book opened my eyes to the effectiveness and consistency of the Republicans elected to Congress in 1860 in advancing their antislavery agenda, for example, by immediately abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia and requiring any new states to prohibit slavery in their Constitutions.

This book describes the earnestness with which these members of the Senate and House pursued their antislavery agenda over the vehement objections of the Democrats from states that had remained in the Union. At the same time, they were quite sensitive to the defects in the original Constitution that had permitted slavery within any of the original 13 states that had retained it. So, they amended the Constitution not once but three times to put an end to slavery and establish political equality in the United States. 

The Confederacy was consistent throughout most of the war that Black men could not be recruited to serve in the army as soldiers. This was a war to preserve slavery and white supremacy and Black enlisted men would have undermined the very justification for secession and the creation of a new nation. As the war entered its fourth year, however, more and more people realized that this policy was no longer tenable. Historian Bruce Levine offers a thorough analysis of the very public and bitterly divisive debate that took place throughout the Confederacy in 1864 over whether slaves could be recruited as soldiers. Confederates debated this subject in the capital of Richmond, in the army, and in countless newspapers. The question was clear: Should the Confederacy recruit Black men as a way to avoid defeat? That it took the Confederate government until mid-March 1865 to finally approve slave enlistment—much too… show more.

Russell Hoban’s slim (c. 250 pp) novel is a unique futuristic dystopian science fiction political satire fantasy about the re-discovery of gunpowder in a post-nuclear Holocaust England, where disaster has regressed to the Stone Age.

I know no other book like it, and as a reading experience, it can’t be beaten. There are discoveries on every page. Its characters are hunter-gatherers controlled by a shadow government of Punch and Judy puppeteers who are trying to promote another nuclear war. Its hero is Riddley Walker, a 12-year-old 22nd-century Huck Finn. Its hook is language as miscommunication.

The art of writing has been lost and re-invented. Riddley’s phonetic misspellings of ordinary words in his journal/diary produce unintended puns and ominous misspellings and thus misreadings) of words like Parment (“Parliament”) and Hi Mincery  (“High Ministry”) that portend ill for the current society’s ignorant misuse of them.  

Lea VanderVelde’s biography of Mrs. Dred Scott captures the environments in which Harriet Scott lived her life and filed her suit for freedom in 1846 (it took 11 years before the Scotts’ legal case was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court). Harriet Scott filed separately from her husband because she believed she could establish her freedom, thereby ensuring the freedom of her two daughters, whose condition followed that of the mother. An illiterate enslaved woman, Harriet Scott left virtually no documents. VanderVelde provides rich context in which to situate and explain Scott’s life and freedom struggle, vividly recreating her world. This informative book is well worth reading.

Voices of the Enslaved is a beautifully written and masterfully researched book (also award-winning) on the French period in colonial Louisiana. White traces the fleeting appearances of enslaved Africans in Louisiana court records to illuminate how they were able to achieve legal recognition where their enslavers tried to give them none. Out of the many fragments of legal documents, White creates a collage of Black lives in French Louisiana that really illuminates the Black contributions to the region.