90 books like The Wreck of the Zephyr

Don’t worry; this gripping 534-page tale of mystery can sweep you through its pages in a single day, especially since its gritty-but-stunning brown and white artwork acts like a movie as it speeds you and a young orphaned boy through an underground train station and across the streets of Paris and up a clock tower in 1931. Why was the boy’s dead father obsessed with repairing a broken clock? And who is the mysterious angry old man anyway?

To learn about the Holocaust, I read personal remembrances, eyewitness accounts, and detailed descriptions of ghettos, camps, and transports, but this graphic novel based on Spiegelman’s father captured me like none of the others. Its words tell its terrible story masterfully and its drawings fill in what words can’t say, both as his father lived it and as his son learns about it. Banning it from U.S. schools would be completely wrongheaded. It should be required reading.

Persepolis is the book that made me fall in love with graphic memoirs.

I’ve typically been more of a word person than a picture person, but Satrapi’s stark black-and-white images make such creative use of the space on the page that I was converted. I learned so much about the history of Iranian conflict from this book—through the young girl eyes of its narrator—but my favorite part is the way Satrapi visually depicts her conversations with God.

After I read this book, I started drawing images of my conversations with God into my own prayer journal.  

Destitute Jasper Ankle will pay any price to attend his beloved opera. But when its most famous diva chokes to death on an admirer’s candied violet, a hitherto unknown beauty named Ortenzia Caviglia takes her place, and as her star rises, everyone who might stand in her way conveniently drops dead. But as her fame and fortune increase, Jasper Ankle becomes more and more impoverished, and if you are familiar with Edward Gorey’s dreadfully terrifying tales and his delicate, elegantly devilish black and white penmanship, perhaps you can imagine what is happening herein. (By the way, Gorey is also dead but you can still get hold of his evil little books.)

Captain Liz Clark is who I would have wanted to be when I grew up, had I found her story in my teens.

There were almost no strong female role models that I could point to as a girl who inspired me, and illuminated a path of an adventurous woman. Captain Liz Clark built her own sailboat and decided to take on the entire Pacific Ocean on her adventures to find love, connection, and a relationship to nature and her own pure heart.

I clutched this book to my heart and took it with me everywhere for a month. Then I wrote Captain Liz to option it, so we can make a TV show about her life, because we need her story on screen!

Gaige’s writing is terrific, insightful, fresh, and fast-paced. As I read about the fictional couple and their conflicts at sea, I was struck by the similarities to our real-life sailing experience. In a fabulous first scene, the wife hides in a closet, unable to deal with reality. She reluctantly goes on a voyage with her husband and their lives change, much as ours did. I never hid in a closet, but before the voyage, I was someone who if I didn’t like reality, ignored it. At sea, that’s not possible. 

I recommend the sequel to Pirsig’s more famous bestseller because I’ve never owned a motorcycle (and I find bicycle maintenance hard enough), but now I own a sailboat—where his second story is set—so when he describes hearing people walking on the cabin roof, or checking the knots on the mooring ropes, I know exactly what he means because I’ve experienced this. Some of his fans felt this sequel was a betrayal of the magical mysticism of undefined Quality he described in the first book. For me, although problematic, it was a necessary clarification and one I not only used for my academic work on a range of controversies from abortion to transgender but also in my life-coaching practice: to inspire holistic transformation on all levels of wellbeing. 

When a man sets sail on an extended ocean voyage, there is usually purpose, determination, and a goal to reach. Donald Crowhurst likely held these objectives when he embarked upon his round-the-world sailing adventure…but somewhere along the way, he lost sight of those goals, and seemingly with the basic truth of reality. Crowhurst’s story is a  sometimes dark and disturbing account of what the voyage was all about, and what may have actually taken place on this strange and bizarre odyssey. As a man who has felt the pangs, insecurities, and unknowns when on the ocean, miles from land, scared, and facing the challenges that both nature and humanity tossed our way, I can somewhat understand how a man at sea can become so lost, so confused, and so vulnerable.

The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst helped me to understand some of the odd feelings and thoughts that I have… show more.

The waves were high, and the wind gusting, but it was nothing Steven Callahan’s little 21-foot sailboat hadn’t seen before. He had sailed her across the Atlantic once before and was aiming for the Caribbean when he bedded down for the night. He awoke to a cabin full of raging seawater and had only minutes to escape before the boat he had designed and built went to the bottom. He had an inflatable raft, a small amount of food and water, and a soaking-wet sleeping bag. Not much else. This raw first-person account of surviving alone in the middle of the ocean on a life raft reads like the transcript of the nightmare every sailor who heads out to sea has the night before leaving port. 

Dove chronicles the story of a 16-year-old who sets off around the world on a tiny sailboat. For 5 years, while also covered by National Geographic, Robin tells his story of fighting storms, discovering new lands, and finding love. It’s an ultimate coming-of-age manifesto, full of inspiration and guts.