100 books like The War of the Flowers

No book has had a bigger influence on me as a person or a writer than this one. I suppose a lot of hoopy froods could say the same. It’s an adventure on a galactic scale, and yet, at its core, it’s just about a guy who wants to go home and have a cup of tea.

It’s a brilliantly funny satire and full of jokes and moments I’ll never forget. All four books in the series are amazing, and I’ve re-read them countless times. The fifth and final book is a downer worth skipping. 

My copies of this series are so worn by reading and re-reading that they are falling apart. There’s no higher praise from me as a reader. 

This is my comfort read, which is odd because it’s about the fall of a civilization—and The Dark, in particular, is terrifying. We never really see them. That’s partly because they aren’t entirely corporeal and can change size and shape at will. It’s also because anyone we know in the story who encounters them is almost certainly fighting for their life.

Are The Dark one character or many? Certainly, what one of them knows, they all know. The key to this conundrum is what motivates them to do as they do, and alien as they are; their motivations are as unexpected as they are profound. 

This is beautifully written classic fantasy in all its glory. If you only read one book of these five,… show more.

Remember A-ha’s video for Take on Me? In it, a man in a comic book pulls a woman into that two-dimensional world, and in a moment of desperation, he sends her back to save her. But true love prevails, and she pulls him into a three-dimensional life. I loved this video far more than the song, and I think I know why.

I have long been fascinated by interdimensional travel, and Donaldson’s book might be the root of the reason. A young woman, dissatisfied and disillusioned with everyday life, is offered an opportunity to escape and she takes it by following a man who crashed through her mirror. She becomes the unlikeliest of heroes as she navigates enemies and intrigue in a world she knows nothing about. The escapist in me relished the thought of finding another world and slipping away. Not knowing if the return was possibly teased out… show more.

Yes, I’m back with another Hambly recommendation. The Windrose Chronicles is my next favorite that makes it onto this list. A programmer pulled out of her cube by the spells of a wizard… as much as I like programming, I can’t think of a day I wish that wouldn’t happen. While I enjoy the world-building, it is once again the relationships that make Hambly’s stories my favorites. The powerful and presumably mad wizard, Antryg Windrose, is one of my all-time favorite characters.

I absolutely love reading this book to my son. No matter how many times we read it, he keeps asking for us to read it again! He went through a phase (pun intended!) where he was obsessed with the moon and wanted to learn all about it.

This book is educational and teaches kids about the moon, but it is still a fun and engaging read with adorable illustrations. 

I love this book for its deep dive into the music and time period of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a wonderful discovery of the bands that made this era of music so wonderful and how Laurel Canyon was in the center of it.

There are great behind-the-scenes stories and interviews with the people who were there, in the industry and making the music. It’s a great glimpse into the vision, values, and freedom of the time and how it all got funneled into that fantastic music I so love.

City Come A-Walkin’ is it, the beginning, the first true cyberpunk novel. 

As William Gibson famously said in the forward to the 15-year anniversary edition, “John Shirley is cyberpunk’s patient zero.” Debuting in 1980, City follows Stu Cole, a streetwise nightclub owner who angered San Francisco’s political and criminal elite, bringing down the full weight of their power; his only hope, the enigmatic construct known only as, “City.” 

A proto-AI, City was a conglomeration of the computer, surveillance, and data infrastructure that took on a life of its own, becoming sapient and dangerous. To ten-year-old me, it was the coolest book I had ever read (and it didn’t hurt that the school library refused to order it for me) and really put the punk in cyberpunk.

No one combines the business of indie scenes – from production to labels to distribution – better than Holly Kruse. In this accessible yet rich book, she details the complicated structure of the alternative system that Azerrad nods to in his history of the bands that occupied the airwaves and whose products circulated through these systems.

To say that these independent music labels and distributors operated completely absent of the corporate music industry from the beginning is a canard, as Kruse demonstrates, but she also reveals the personal and particular practices that shaped these emerging commercial relationships and consumption patterns that undergirded music fans’ ability to participate in music scenes locally, as well as to access sounds from across the nation, and indeed the world. 

I found this book riveting from page one and studied the ease with which Booth alternates chapters of straight biography and his own personal experiences with the band.

This included a drug-fueled slide that contributed to the book, largely chronicling the Stones’ 1969 tour of America, to take 15 years to complete. He writes about this with honesty and without romance, looking the devil in the eye with candor while also offering deep insights into bit characters like BB King and providing the definitive story of the Altamont fiasco.

I think that this book unveils Jerry Garcia’s essential, elusive personality better than anything I’ve read, even given the excellent work of David Browne, Blair Jackson, Dennis McNally, and other terrific Grateful Dead biographers.

I learned a lot about how seemingly secondary characters are often particularly honest and illuminating. Robert Greenfield also collaborated with promoter Bill Graham on Bill Graham Presents, the excellent autobiography in oral history format.