88 books like Climbers

2500 years ago, Pytheas, a clever Greek explorer, figured out latitude.

While there has always been a concept of longitude, it proved impossible to pinpoint, until... Sobel and Andrewes engagingly unravel the cipher of longitude that was cracked by the plucky John Harrison (he created the right tool, a clock that kept accurate time at sea: why is this important? Read the book!).

Convinced that the solution could only be astronomical, the scientific community was not amused. It was a dramatic conflict between the skeptical Board of Longitude (probably also jealous) and the skilled workaday carpenter-turned-clockmaker whose solution to navigation’s oldest puzzle was banausic.

In the end, our hero, the underdog, prevails (even if it took 250 years for Harrison to receive the respect he so richly deserved and earned).

I loved how this book reads like a thriller—a David and Goliath thriller—in which a lowly clockmaker competed against the foremost scientists of his era and won—and even after he had won, he had to fight dastardly efforts by the elites of his day to deprive him of his prize and hard-earned fame.

The book spoke to my fascination with how things get made and why craftsmanship is important. But it also spoke to my concern with class and how those in power can rig things to their benefit, with, in this case, the happy result that good triumphed over evil.

The setting of this masterful story is contemporary London, but one dominated by water: rain, rivers, canal boats, ponds. As the novel progresses, the characters’ only partially successful attempts to connect feel hampered by the decreasing definition of the boundaries between land and water. A sense of hopeless inevitability pervades every page, that in the world of this drowning London something has changed. Something irreversible.

In the depths of the Cotswolds, Andy Caplet is a small-town journalist with a disastrous career (and life). Until, that is, the mysterious Inspector Hobbes offers him a spare room and the chance to follow along on some investigations. The only problem being, none of the cases are exactly the usual sort of crime, and Inspector Hobbes is not a usual inspector. Or a usual human. These stories are just fun, goofy escapism, caught somewhere between cosy mystery and urban fantasy, and they’re pure entertainment. Andy can be a bit annoying, but Inspector Hobbes is delightful.

This is another book written by a journalist. The stories in it are about the working class and destitute life in London at the end of the nineteenth century. Not only do they portray intimate relationships, prostitution, crime, and alcohol abuse, but they also give a sense of the life stories of the people who lived in these communities.

Actually, it is ten books, covering 1855 to 1897 (with a reconstruction of the missing journals of April 1858 to May 1862 – their disappearance being the cause of countless conspiracy theories!). These diaries are the principal source of practically every piece of Lewis Carroll/Alice analysis that has ever been published, and provide a uniquely revealing chronology of the genesis of one of the world’s classic works of literature. These volumes mean that the enigmatic genius of Lewis Carroll is not the sole preserve of academics or historians; through them, he becomes accessible to us all. Transcribed and fully indexed by Edward Wakeling, a renowned world expert, whose extraordinarily detailed and insightful bibliographical and contextual notes provide an unparalleled insight into Victorian Oxford (London, Surrey, Yorkshire, Sussex, and more).

Some of these volumes are hard to get, but there are some remaining copies at the Lewis Carroll Society if interested. 

This book is beautifully written, with a classic feel. It’s set in wartime England and draws on old green magic and folklore, as well as the power of belief. The Midnight Guardians is a quest story, full of enchantment and warmth. Col’s three imaginary friends come to life to help him race across a snowy English landscape to save his sister. It’s a glorious book with excitement and danger as well as humour and heart.

I was born in a fishing village in Yorkshire and although I live in the city now, I always feel the pull of the sea. This book is a memoir set in Orkney and London. It is about the writer’s struggle with addiction and her recovery – partly through reconnecting to the natural landscape again. Amy’s prose is clean and bright. She constructs sentences with no fat on them. Her descriptions are sharply accurate. I really related to her need to get away from London to find her way back to health. London life is intense and although I love it here, it is a constantly demanding city. Reading this novel reinforced my desire to look at things closely, notice them anew, and to remember to go and visit the sea, whenever I can. 

Rebecca Stott sets her adventure story in the Roman ruins of early London around 500 AD, and is included in this collection because Stott is, in a sense, creating the first draft of history where none exists with this admirable tale.

It’s of two sisters, Isla and Blue, whose father dies and they must deliver the Sword he forged to the client, King Osric. Listening to the story transported me to the sister’s side as they overcome one obstacle after another. Found myself listening in a dream state — an extraordinary listen that called me to make the exception to include this book in my list.

On the author's website I wanted to learn more about the title and clicked on the tab "Mysterious Black Soil". Reading the entry, I was entranced all over again by this amazing tale. Briefly, when the Romans abandoned Londinium, around 420 AD, the mile-wide… show more.

This modern gothic follows Ivy Radcliffe as she suddenly inherits an estate house in England, during the tail end of World War I.

Throughout this story grief is explored very intimately through Ivy mourning the loss of her brother to the war, but also the way that the communal grief of the war affects individuals and shapes English society and how it functions.

Without giving away too many spoilers, memory places a huge, multilayered role in the story, and of course we see the way that grief and memory are connected, both through the way Ivy remembers her lost brother and characters mourning the way life once was before the war and, ultimately, will never be again.