Here are 100 books that The Raven Tower fans have personally recommended if you like
The Raven Tower.
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I firmly believe that literature exists to do more than entertain us. It has an incredible power to expand our perspective about the world and the lives of the people around us. Fantasy, in particular, can stretch the mind’s boundaries by asking us to empathize with compelling characters and wrap our heads around strange and wondrous worlds. I try to achieve that in my books, presenting thrilling stories, fantastic worlds, and emotionally charged moments, but always through the eyes of real-feeling people. I hope the books on this list will feel as mind-expanding and empathy-building to you as they did to me!
This book is both a fascinating vision of a tumultuous world and a deep dive into the mind of a troubled and compelling protagonist.
The character work in this book is incredibly impressive, with the long arc of the protagonist’s development drawn in convincing and gripping detail that left me feeling like I had known this person for years through all their triumphs, tragedies, and mistakes, which is to say nothing of its creative and plausible magic, its socio-political commentary, and its meditation on family and grief. Rightfully recognized as a modern classic, it is a book all fans of fantasy should read.
At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times)
This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time.
It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.
I’m a writer and musician with a background in mathematics, which is what originally led to my intrigue in cosmology. For writing speculative fiction, I’ve dug into a range of topics from quantum mechanics to cognitive theory, but spacetime had the opposite causality: my interest later spawned my writing. When I first learned about special relativity, many aspects seemed counterintuitive but were mathematically sound, leading me to obsessively read books, watch videos, and perform hours of calculations to get a feel for it. And what draws my adoration most to the cosmos is the quality it shares with dinosaurs—the more I learn, the more majestic it becomes.
I’m a big fan of genre-bending and trope manipulation, and I was completely blown away by this rare creation of a book. It’s a carefully crafted plot of time manipulation, blending science fiction, fantasy, espionage, and romance, told through letters between two rival agents in a style more akin to a war drama.
Those contrasting styles notably elevated the story for me, accenting the cybernetic future by experiencing the naturalistic one and enhancing the love story through the suspense of corporate espionage.
At no point did I feel as if either empire was the “good” or “bad” one, only that I wanted both of the protagonists to succeed, and that made my first read of this book nothing short of a page-turner.
WINNER OF The Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella, the Reddit Stabby Award for Best Novella AND The British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novella
SHORTLISTED FOR 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award The Ray Bradbury Prize Kitschies Red Tentacle Award Kitschies Inky Tentacle Brave New Words Award
'A fireworks display from two very talented storytellers' Madeline Miller, author of Circe
Co-written by two award-winning writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It…
My PhD work was in developmental robotics, which is about how a robot could wake up and learn about the world the way a human child does. The robot in my thesis work does this by building models, and, more generally, society as a whole advances when science builds ever better causal models about how the world works. The books in this collection are about what could happen when we are 5, 10, and 100 years ahead in the causal model-building process, and they look at what happens when those models are built by robots instead of humans.
Don’t be fooled by the silly title; this book shows how I want to spend eternity. A guy has his consciousness uploaded to computers and then explores the universe. I want to see what is out there, but exploring such a vast space isn’t possible given the short time span of human life, so we need a technology like this.
This book is the first in a series where he meets aliens and serves as a god-like mentor for one relatable developing culture. He also interacts with different versions of himself as he copies his consciousness to better explore the universe.
Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.
Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first…
My love of unusual narration probably stems from my rabid consumption of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books in my youth. Why read a book about someone else when the story could be yours? While I’m glad to say that my library has since expanded, I still appreciate the unusual and bizarre viewpoint when I read. Perhaps a self-portrait? In any case, I’ve also used some unique narrative tools in my own writing through the point of view of my fictional WHISPs and also through cryptic journal entries. If you’re looking for something different by way of narration, I’m confident you’ll enjoy these five best books.
A fan of Raymond Chandler and all things noir? How about the strangest angel noir novel I’ve ever read, told from the point of view of a “fallen” angel? I could not put this book down and I cannot stop recommending it. The succulent, noir flavor of the book blends surprisingly well with its heavenly narrator, but be forewarned, not all angels are winged humanoids and not all angelic narrators are reliable.
Ian Tregillis's Something More Than Night is a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired murder mystery set in Thomas Aquinas's vision of Heaven. It's a noir detective story starring fallen angels, the heavenly choir, nightclub stigmatics, a priest with a dirty secret, a femme fatale, and the Voice of God.
Somebody has murdered the angel Gabriel. Worse, the Jericho Trumpet has gone missing, putting Heaven on the brink of a truly cosmic crisis. But the twisty plot that unfolds from the murder investigation leads to something much bigger: a con job one billion years in the making.
Truth time. I’ve never been a sporty person. Have I tried sports? Yes. Was I good at them? Goodness gracious no. However, I’ve always had a soft spot for some of the more non-traditional ones. In middle school, I created my own New Kids on the Block tribute dance crew. In high school, I joined a street hockey team. In college, I was a competitive Scottish Highland Games athlete. Just like the characters I write, I enjoy the quirkier side of most things. Does that make me an expert at them? Nope. But I definitely enjoy the occasional venture into the world of wild and weird sports.
If you thought competitive wrestling was just for boys, then think again, because this book is bound to suplex that idea into submission for you. There’s so much to love about Takedown. Laura Shovan gives us two stories in one with a dual-POV narration by Mikayla and Lev. Both are packed with tension, humor, and their own unique voice. Combine that with the added bonus of a gender-stereotype-busting story and you’ve got all the makings of an amazing book with a very powerful message.
Discover what happens when one girl wants to break barriers in a sport dominated by boys in this exciting and thoughtful novel by the author of The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary.
Mikayla is a wrestler; when you grow up in a house full of brothers who wrestle, it's inevitable. It's also a way to stay connected to her brothers and her dad. Some people object to having a girl on the team. But that's not stopping Mikayla. She's going to work hard, and win.
Lev is determined to make it to the state championships this year. He's used…
I'm fascinated with material culture – studying the things we make and use – and what they tell us about our history. My particular passion is for nineteenth-century Black material culture, often the only tangible history of enslaved and newly-emancipated Black lives. The books on my list educated me of the historical realities for African Americans, from emancipation to Jim Crow – providing critical context for deciphering the stories embedded in historical artifacts. Overall, the gendered (and harrowing) history these books provide on the contributions of African-American women to civil rights and social justice should be required reading for everyone.
The period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction has long been overlooked by historians and educators; even less has been written about this period from a gendered perspective.
Laura Edwards provides an excellent analysis of the experiences of newly-emancipated women in shaping and surviving the political, social, and economic landscape of Reconstruction. She studies their history through first-hand narratives of how they established households, pursued their legal rights, and claimed their new roles as free women.
The book is not only a fascinating read about Reconstruction, it helped contextualize Edmonia Lewis’s and Meta Fuller’s emancipation sculptures, and their message about the freedwoman’s new identity.
Exploring the gendered dimension of political conflicts, Laura Edwards links transformations in private and public life in the era following the Civil War. Ideas about men's and women's roles within households shaped the ways groups of southerners-elite and poor, whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans-envisioned the public arena and their own places in it. By using those on the margins to define the center, Edwards demonstrates that Reconstruction was a complicated process of conflict and negotiation that lasted long beyond 1877 and involved all southerners and every aspect of life.
I’ve been meditating since I’m 10 years old, constantly inquiring about why humans are suffering. This led me on a very introspective journey into tantra. After travelling the world for over two decades to study tantric lineages and spiritual traditions, I founded The New Tantra in 2010 and developed a range of workshops with ground-breaking sexual practices. Through this crazy, wild, and genderfluid exploration, I’ve taught thousands of people how to improve their sex lives and experience sexuality in a totally different way. I believe that by dealing with our sexual conditioning, we can live more playful, innocent, and happier lives for ourselves and the future generations to come.
Professor Paglia’s books are a tad academic for most people’s taste, but I find it important to feature her here. In this book, she stirs up important questions around gender and sex. It seems that we are steadily moving towards a growing acceptance of diversity to the point in which androgyny is even becoming a desirable trait. Being genderfluid myself, I’ve sometimes asked myself these questions daily. In order to have more spiritual sex, it’s important that we accept and acknowledge our desires, and I’m all for supporting the full expression of feminine and masculine in both women and men. On top of this, Paglia is a real provocateur, which I like and can relate to. Truly one of the bright minds of our time.
From the fiery intellectual provocateur - and one of our most fearless advocates of gender equality - a brilliant, urgent essay collection that both celebrates modern feminism and affirms the power of men and women and what we can accomplish together.
I’ve always searched for personalities – mythological, literary, or real – affirming the highest ethical claims for justice. Sophocles’s Antigone is, without doubt, the preeminent example of this ethical demand, based on ancient unwritten laws and related demands for human dignity. As a woman, Antigone also presents the forgotten and suppressed orders of femininity, which were present in all archaic religions and mythologies, but later repressed and fully replaced with exclusively male Gods. I’m therefore interested in books that guide us in this search for the power of ethics and femininity and hope this list will give you an idea of the rich ethical potentials that we possess.
This book is a fascinating collection of essays on Antigone, written by key contemporary thinkers, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Bracha L. Ettinger, and Adriana Cavarero. Hegel daringly compared Antigone to Socrates and Jesus and this book shows the full range of ethical questions and consequences, related to Antigone and her highest ethical demand. Through this book, the fictitious woman from Sophocles’ drama written 2,500 years ago, incarnates in front of us as a living figure of contemporary feminine ethics.
I began studying women’s lives in college (1960s), but recently realized that I (like others) passed myself off as a gender specialist, but had been ignoring men’s roles, beliefs, and behaviour in gender dynamics. I was put off by the studies that too consistently showed men as always violent and controlling. Many studies emphasized men at war, men abusing women, and gay men with HIV/AIDS; there seemed no recognition of positive masculine traits. Recognizing also that men had different ideals about their own masculinity in different places, I examined men’s lives among international elites and in communities in the US, Sumatra, and Indonesia, where I’d done ethnographic research.
Gridiron Gourmet likewise returns to a world somewhat familiar to me. Having grown up American, with a father and brother seriously enamored of football, I understood a certain amount about American ideas of sports and manhood. Football (and other men’s sports) had also played an important role in the community of Bushler Bay (on the Olympic Peninsula), where I had lived and conducted ethnographic research among loggers in the 1970s. At that time, folks there had seen football as one important avenue for young men to learn teamwork, competition, and discipline – traits considered key in making a livelihood. Gridiron Gourmetbuilds on my own understanding, adding the current emphasis on foods men consider appropriate and ‘manly’ to eat. Although I had some sense of this preference, this book clarifies common perspectives among American men in much more detail.
On football weekends in the United States, thousands of fans gather in the parking lots outside of stadiums, where they park their trucks, let down the gates, and begin a pregame ritual of drinking and grilling.
Tailgating, which began in the early 1900s as a quaint picnic lunch outside of the stadium, has evolved into a massive public social event with complex menus, extravagant creative fare, and state-of-art grilling equipment. Unlike traditional notions of the home kitchen, the blacktop is a highly masculine culinary environment in which men and the food they cook are often the star attractions.
The question “Who are you?” has been central to my practice over the last 30 years. This inquiry led me to live in a silent monastery for eight years. If we aren’t who we have been conditioned to see ourselves to be, then who are we? Who are we truly? This inquiry has led to happiness in my own life, it’s led to happiness in the lives of thousands of teens who have been served through the nonprofit I founded–Peace in Schools, and it’s led to happiness with the adults who have come to my workshops and retreats.
I was deeply moved by this book because it beautifully integrates Zen Buddhism with a powerful focus on compassion and social justice. I am struck by how Manuel combines teachings on mindfulness with insights into racial and gender justice, making the book a profound guide for both personal growth and activism.
The way Manuel encourages cultivating tenderness towards ourselves and others really resonated with me, offering a deeply spiritual yet practical approach to addressing social inequalities. This book has enriched my understanding of both spiritual practice and social awareness, making it a vital read for anyone committed to a compassionate and informed approach to activism.
“What does liberation mean when I have incarnated in a particular body, with a particular shape, color, and sex?”
In The Way of Tenderness, Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel brings Buddhist philosophies of emptiness and appearance to bear on race, sexuality, and gender, using wisdom forged through personal experience and practice to rethink problems of identity and privilege. Manuel brings her own experiences as a lesbian black woman into conversation with Buddhism to square our ultimately empty nature with superficial perspectives of everyday life. Her hard-won insights reveal that dry wisdom alone is not sufficient to heal the wounds of…
