100 books like Quantum Night

This book is written by two dear friends who are the reason I am a published author myself. However, I don’t recommend it just because they are close to me, but because it is a wonderful book that kicked off the entire Outward Odyssey series, of which my book is a part. This magnificent book set a new standard for historical work on space exploration by focusing on the people instead of the hardware. The stories you’ll read here will show you why we are who we are and why humans will always strive for the unknown.

Crossfield wrote one of the first books about what it means to be a test pilot of a powerful rocket plane, and I consider it the best. This book is an autobiography that delves into the nature of the personality of someone who can climb into the cockpit of an experimental aircraft, light off the engines, and climb high into the desert sky at multiples of the speed of sound. It also is the book that began my deeply personal 30-year journey to write my own book on the North American X-15. Scotty was one of the first pilots I spoke to in order to get insights into how these people think and react. I know you’ll enjoy meeting him through his book as much as I did sitting with him in person.

Those who know me, understand that Arthur C. Clarke has been my favorite author for as long as I can remember, and they would probably be surprised at my pick of this novel over his most well-known book 2001: A Space Odyssey or even Childhood’s End. Let me put it this way, I’ll recommend anything written by Clarke, but this book stands out for me because of its profound look at the far future of humanity, which has fallen nearly to the point of extinction. It is a work that serves as a warning to us all, but also shows how one person can change the trajectory of an entire society, bringing it back from the brink in order to move once again among the stars.

If you only ever read two books penned by astronauts, this should be the second. Gene Cernan flew on Gemini 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 17; on this final mission in 1972 he was the last man to walk on the Moon as part of the Apollo Program. Like Collins, Cernan sheds the astronaut tough-guy image to show us the human cost of the Apollo Program, as well as the bravery and glory of the enterprise. He’s unflinchingly honest, but also thoughtful and sometimes lyrical about his space experiences, and always entertaining. Of all the astronauts, Cernan might have been my first choice as a dinner companion; I’d have loved to talk with him about his three EVAs covering 22 hours of lunar exploration. That would have been terrific.

What I adore about this book—which Carol Shields wrote a few years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries—is how it mingles the quotidian and the fanciful and the fantastic.

The quotidian takes the form of the very ordinary details in the life of the titular protagonist’s middle-aged life: The small things that Larry frets about, his ordinary conversations in Winnipeg coffee shops, his very relatable miscommunications, and even his fairly typical penis (there’s an entire chapter called “Larry’s Penis”).

Then there are the fanciful touches—for example, Larry makes garden labyrinths for a living (not a run-of-the-mill profession), and streets that don’t intersect in the real Winnipeg do intersect in the novel.

As for the fantastic, the novel ends with Larry having a vision of how his life might have gone in a happier alternative reality. 

I love books that make me feel like I’m living in another time period—and this book, set in Winnipeg in 1913—does that in spades. In fact, speaking of “spades,” Sam Spade, the protagonist of Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, is surely one of the inspirations for this mystery novel’s protagonist, Sam Klein, a hard-nosed detective.

The novel’s author, Allan Levine, is a historian, and the vivid details he pulls into the plot target all of our senses (including smell—Winnipeg’s streets weren’t paved in 1913, and horses were still more common than cars!). Levine also draws upon the prejudices of the era—Sam Klein isn’t accepted by the city’s elite because he’s Jewish—and he paints a compelling portrait of the city’s gritty neighborhoods and corrupt city politics. 

I love history—not just historical fiction but actual history books—and this book skillfully weaves together an abundance of intriguing facts and true stories from that city’s history.

Why 1912? Because in that year, Winnipeg was one of the most important cities in North America, largely because it was (and is) located in the very center of the continent, which led to it developing the biggest rail yard in the world.

As we learn from this book, luminaries such as Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Charles Dickens, Harry Houdini, and many more passed through this thriving city. But that changed in 1914 when the Panama Canal opened, and suddenly, goods were shipped from one ocean to another through that waterway instead of through Winnipeg. In terms of commerce, Winnipeg never fully recovered. 

This is a book of poetry written by one of Winnipeg’s many Indigenous authors.

I love the poems—their economical lines and vivid imagery—but the poems also don’t shy away from some ugly truths about Winnipeg: Namely, the centuries of racism that have devastated the Indigenous people who gathered for thousands of years where the city’s two rivers meet—the Red and the Assiniboine. The same racism that contributed to the death of the poet’s brother and led the police to dismiss his disappearance for months as simply being due to drunkenness.

Vermette’s poems tackle these hard truths and challenge the reader not to look away. This book of poetry helped me see that not everything about Winnipeg is the way we’d like it to be. 

Be prepared to plunge into the Louisiana swamp and discover the dark side of Baton Rouge. Chloe Davis may have escaped her convicted killer father’s horrific legacy, but when young women start to go missing in the city where she now lives, Chloe is dragged back to the hometown that haunts her. The Louisiana setting feels wholly authentic and adds an eeriness to this dark story. A Flicker in the Dark is a must-read for fans of unpredictable page-turners and tense, high-stakes serial killer thrillers.

Harkening back to the well-established trope of inviting several seemingly unrelated guests to a secluded location (I’m thinking of the movie for the board game Clue right now) and wrapping them up in a creepy mystery, Kiersten Modglin has delivered a secluded thriller with originality, delectable darkness, and a series of great twists.

I was enthralled by the constant sense of danger and did not see the ending coming. I’ll admit that as a writer myself, the premise of authors invited to a writing retreat intrigued me from the start, but I was so pulled in by this thriller that I finished reading it in no time. Great work.