Here are 100 books that The Ship of Dreams fans have personally recommended if you like
The Ship of Dreams.
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I came of age in Oklahoma as a gay youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s, keeping myself hidden out of safety and shame. Once I was old enough to leave my small-minded town and be myself, I crashed headlong into the oncoming AIDS epidemic. It set me on a path to understanding the world and my place in it as a homosexual. I turned to reading about the lives and histories of those who came before me, to learn about their deaths and survivals in what could be an ugly, brutal world. These works continue to draw me, haunt me, and inspire me to share my story through my writing.
I’ve always thought of this book as a gay “bodice-ripper,” though a bit on the darker side. And it’s the darkness that haunts me still some two decades after first reading it.
The love story, if one can call it that, verges on and then outright plunges into brutal obsession between the two main male characters, and even though I knew I shouldn’t, I rooted for them.
Beyond the intensity of the relationship between the main characters, the writing, steeped in the history of the English Revolution, is wonderful–strong and brutal and raw and visceral. I’ve returned to this novel repeatedly over the years, and its impact never lessens. Truly a marvel of a novel.
Transplant Othello to the tumult of a country in social and political flux and en route to regicide -- England in the 1640s -- and render him uncertain about his sexuality, and you have the makings of Jacob Cullen, one of the most commanding characters in contemporary writing. As the book opens, Jacob is an educated, vigorous and dauntingly strong manservant in a Royalist household, who has begun to imbibe god-fearing revolutionary pamphlets. He is on the brink of marriage to his virginal sweetheart, but is unsure of his emotional needs, and in possession of a boiling point he reaches…
I am the prize-winning author of sixteen novels, most recently Little Egypt, The Squeeze, and Blasted Things. I teach creative writing at the University of St Andrews. I live in Edinburgh and am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. I’m a novelist and student of human nature. I love to work out what motivates people, how and why they make choices, their coping mechanisms, and how they act under pressure. Before I begin a novel set in the past, I read as much fiction written at the time as I can find, as well as autobiography and history. In this way, I attempt to truffle down into the actions and impulses of individuals, both performative and deeply interior, that characterise the spirit of the era that I’m writing.
Enormously useful to me while researching for Blasted Things, was The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War. Taking us through chapters entitled feelingly with nouns: from Wound and Shock, through Resignation, and finally to Hope, Trust and Acceptance, Nicolson provides a chronological account of the period between the 1918 Armistice and the burial of the Unknown Soldier in 1920. It’s addictively readable, the history enriched by the recounted experiences of ordinary people from all walks of life, giving a rounded sense of the time, filled with detail about culture, music, the movies, fashion, class and so much more. This book provides a marvellously concrete and detailed account of the sensibility of a short and fascinatingly complex period.
Armistice Day 1918 dawns with great joy for victorious Britain, but the nation must confront the carnage war has left in its wake. In The Great Silence, Juliet Nicolson looks through the prism of daily life to narrate the rich but unknown history of the slow healing Britain undergoes in the two years following that day.
The two-year anniversary of the Armistice brings some closure at last: the remains of a nameless soldier, dug up from a French battlefield and escorted to London in a homecoming befitting a king, are laid to rest in glory in the Tomb of the…
I grew up with a graveyard in my backyard: the historic Schenck-Covenhoven Graveyard in Penns Neck, New Jersey, just outside Princeton. This small square plot, filled with the 18th- and 19th-century graves of local families, served as the perfect playground for hide-and-seek and cops-and-robbers with my friends. Working as a tour guide and volunteer at Laurel Hill Cemetery for nearly thirty years, I fell in love with its rich history and its architectural and horticultural beauty. As I grow older, I have come to value cemeteries for their role as both a meeting place and a mediator between the living and the dead.
January 1901: Queen Victoria is dead and her subjects nervously await a new king and a new century. Two families—the aristocratic Colemans and middle-class Waterhouses—meet at their adjoining plots in London’s elegant Highgate Cemetery. Their five-year-old daughters form an immediate bond. The lives of the two families entwine over the next decade as they struggle with social change, betrayal, and grief. Surprisingly, Highgate offers a release from the confining decorum of their everyday lives. The two girls play among the graves with a gravedigger’s son, while adult members of their households indulge in forbidden liaisons there. Chevalier’s crisp prose creates rich character portraits and vivid historical scenes with only a few strokes. This slim novel resonated in my mind long after I finished it.
'Sex and death meet again in [a] marvellous evocation of Edwardian England' Daily Mail
The girl reminded me of my favourite chocolates, whipped hazelnut creams, and I knew just from looking at her that I wanted her for my best friend.
Queen Victoria is dead. In January 1901, the day after her passing, two very different families visit neighbouring graves in a London cemetery. The traditional Waterhouses revere the late Queen where the Colemans have a more modern outlook, but both families are appalled by the friendship that springs up between their respective daughters.
I’m a writer addicted to reading and writing about spunky female characters of all ages. Even though I’m an introvert (who’s no stranger to depression and anxiety), when I have a goal that I’m really passionate about, no matter how hard or how long it takes, I’m stubbornly persistent to make it happen. I believe that books, especially those from my childhood like Ramona Quimby, helped foster this trait. Spunky characters taught me that it’s okay to feel, express, and learn from my emotions, that no matter what life throws at us we can survive it, and to follow your own path with courage and determination.
The title alone intrigued me. Once I learned the premise of this middle-grade novel, I was hooked: a group of students supporting one another through the ups and downs of navigating their periods is shut down by the school administration after receiving complaints.
As the investigative reporter of her middle school’s newspaper, Riley’s no stranger at going the distance to uncover a story. Using her fact-finding skills, Riley hunts for the truth on who put an end to their club and why. Filled with humor and heart, this book had me up all night to finish in one sitting, cheering Riley and her friends on as they fight to save their club and stand up for their rights.
A tween reporter discovers an important and beloved club at school is being shut down-and uses the power of the pen to try and activate some much-needed social change in this period-positive and empowering middle grade novel about the importance of standing up for what you believe in.
Riley Dunne loves being a member of the Red Club. It's more than a group of girls supporting each other through Aunt Flo's ups and downs; it's a Hawking Middle School tradition. The club's secret locker has an emergency stash of supplies, and the girls are always willing to lend an ear,…
Driving cars through Europe and the Sahara Desert to sell them in Niger and exploring China and Russia on the Trans-Siberia Express (1992) as a student, I quickly realised that what we think we know about the world is very superficial, cliché, and stereotype. This made me embark on a PhD supervised by Erasmus University Rotterdam professor Frank M. Go (may he rest in peace), to whom I am forever grateful for suggesting the classic literature on this page. Now I advise governments, I am founding chairman of the International Place Branding Association, co-editor of the journal of Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, and a passionate visiting scholar in Beijing, London, Milan, Rotterdam, and Turin.
My dear colleague Simon Anholt is the founding father of the idea of the city, region or nation as brand.
He created the Anholt Ipsos Nation Brands Index and the Good Country Index; has written extensively on the subject; and has inspired me throughout my career. In his latest book The Good Country Equationhe clearly proves – through the data that he’s collected – that for places to be admired, they have to be admirable.
In other words, places are respected for what they contribute to humanity and the planet, not for their propaganda. This is obviously an important discovery that forces governments and their stakeholders to focus on meaningful strategy, policy and cooperation as opposed to image promotion.
I also enjoyed reading Simon’s book as he shares his personal experiences as a government advisor.
"Not only does Anholt explain the challenges facing the world with unique clarity, he also provides genuinely new, informative, practical, innovative solutions. . . . The book is a must-read for anyone who cares about humanity's shared future." --H. E. Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (Farmaajo), President of the Federal Republic of Somalia
Why doesn't the world work? Why, despite all the power, technology, money and knowledge that humanity has accumulated, are we are still unable to defeat global challenges like climate change, war, poverty, migration, extremism, and inequality?
Simon Anholt has spent decades helping countries from Austria to Zambia to improve…
Do you know you will spend 80,000 hours at work in your lifetime? And yet we get so little guidance on how to make choices about the work we do. I am fascinated by the world of work and how we navigate it, and thrive in it. I’ve always wondered how people made decisions about how to live and how to approach finding the right kind of livelihood that fits their skills and interests. I’ve made it my job to design a method to help people get specific and clear and help them not only find the work that best utilises their skills and passions but also identifies the environment that works best for us.
This is a brilliant book for any life transitions, not just careers. Simple yet mind-blowingly effective, this is a process I have applied many times throughout my life, from starting businesses to closing them, getting new jobs as well as personal difficulties. We aren’t really taught how to manage change and yet it is a constant in our lives. This book helps you gain practical insight for when you are moving from one life experience to another. Life is all about changes and this book will help you manage them in a more effective and hopeful way.
First published in 1980, Transitions was the first book to explore the underlying and universal pattern of transition. Named one of the fifty most important self-help books of all time, Transitions remains the essential guide for coping with the inevitable changes in life.
Transitions takes readers step-by-step through the three perilous stages of any transition, explaining how each stage can be understood and embraced. The book offers an elegant, simple, yet profoundly insightful road map to navigate change and move into a hopeful future: Endings: Every transition begins with one. Too often we misunderstand them, confuse them with finality-that's it,…
I grew up in an immigrant household where success was defined by how much money you made and your individual progress. But I’ve always been fascinated by social change as the measure of collective success. As a former business journalist, I was most inspired by leaders who were creating opportunities for overlooked communities. I now advise organization leaders on how to create more inclusive and diverse organizations by rethinking the measure of success purely from the profit perspective. That’s why I wrote Inclusion on Purpose. These books have helped me transform my definition of success. I hope you’re catalyzed to action by these books!
At a time when so many of us feel helpless while navigating various social crises, Ijeoma’s latest book highlights amazing leaders who are literally creating revolutionary social change. She interviews leaders tackling issues from the prison industrial complex to how we spend money more intentionally.
After reading this book, I felt like I, too, could “be” a change. I felt inspired to believe that my success, and the success of the world, depends on the everyday revolutionary acts of anti-racism we can (and should) all commit to.
While I loved the interviews with each changemaker, it was reading how Ijeoma’s approach from pain and trauma to action evolved throughout the book that really drove the message home.
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre, an eye-opening and galvanizing look at the current state of anti-racist activism across America.
In the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offered a vital guide for how to talk about important issues of race and racism in society. In Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, she discussed the ways in which white male supremacy has had an impact on our systems, our culture, and our lives throughout American history. But…
I’ve researched and taught on contemporary social problems for over a decade. Much of this work focused on violence and, especially, torture. Not surprisingly, it often left me overwhelmed about the human condition and about the possibility of creating a better world. The students I taught often felt similarly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when hope seemed in short supply, I began rethinking how I talk about, teach about, and study politics, problems, and the possibilities of change. As an antidote to despair, helplessness, and denial, hope became a defining feature of my work on violence and now, as I’ve pivoted toward studying the environment, climate change.
This book forever changed how I think. After languishing on my bookshelves for several months, I turned to Rebecca Solnit’s brief but transformative book during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book had its intended effect: it made me realize that hope, even in the most difficult moments, is still possible.
As a self-identified pessimist, I long assumed hope wasn’t for me. It seemed too idealistic. But for Solnit (and now for me), hope is something entirely different from the naïve belief that the future will inevitably be better. It is faith that the future is not yet determined. And in the openness of the future is the possibility that our efforts to make a better world can make a real difference.
At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope.
This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq. Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. Tracing the footsteps of the last century's thinkers - including Woolf, Gandhi, Borges, Benjamin and Havel - Solnit conjures a timeless vision of cause and effect that…
As Iago says in Shakespeare’s Othello, “I am nothing if not critical,” and regardless of what he meant, it applies to me - my intelligence works best at scrutinizing things for their significance. I studied science, worked in the financial sector, read fiction, watched cinema, and developed a sense of the interconnectedness of things. If the connections existed, I thought, there could be no one way of approaching anything; all intellectual paths were valid and the only criterion of value was that it must be intelligent. My book tries to stick to this since a writer may hold any opinions, but he or she must show intelligence.
My adult life can be characterized as a quest to make sense of the larger ecosystem around me, chiefly society, politics, and culture, within a single framework since knowledge is power; knowing and relating is what makes me strong.
I was stunned by the connections that Wallerstein makes across so many disciplines, and how his book empowered me in interactions with the culturally educated and politically knowledgeable.
In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.
Art, technology, and science…I have been seamlessly traversing domains all my life. I grew up with twin interests in physical sciences and visual arts, finding beauty in math and art and seeing creativity as being one thing rather than something living in compartments. Art influenced my research in chaos and complexity, and blurring boundaries characterized my work as dean of engineering when creating educational/research initiatives in design, art, entrepreneurship, energy, and sustainability. I also received visible external recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This book will inspire you, make you see possibilities, and widen your thinking.
The back cover’s proclamation, “It is not about the world of design, it is about the design of world”, says it all. The design of this book itself opened new frontiers; text and images interspersed as they had never been seen before, intertwining technologies, inventions, and pivotal events that are affecting humanity worldwide.
Massive Change is a modern, illustrated primer on the new inventions, technologies, and events that are affecting the human race worldwide. This book is part of a broader research project by Bruce Mau Design, intended to provoke debate and discussion about the future of design culture - defined generally as the 'familiar objects and techniques that are transforming our lives'.
Through an original selection of essays, interviews and provocative imagery aimed at a broad audience, Massive Change explores the changing forces of design in the contemporary world and, from this angle, expands the definition of design to include the built…
