100 books like Summer of Monsters

When recommending Geraldine Brooks’ multi-layered and intricately crafted March, another book must always be mentioned. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. March is the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction rooted in Alcott’s classic novel that’s been read and loved for centuries. The March of the title is Jo March’s father in Little Women. In real life, his name was Amos Bronson Alcott. And he was the father of Louisa May Alcott. Brooks tells March’s fictitious story masterfully and with great historical acumen. Her depictions of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are truly historic. Geraldine Brooks is not a historian. Her husband Tony Horwitz was. In Brooks’ case it seems that to fall in love with a historian is to fall in love with history as well. March is the beautiful proof.

This is quite possibly the funniest book I have ever read. I recommend it for that reason. It will have you laughing out loud. Brooks gives Chaucer’s larger-than-life, serial monogamist an opportunity to tell her side of the story. And fair enough! Created by Geoffrey Chaucer for The Canterbury Tales in 1392, the Wife of Bath is literature’s first feminist hero. The outspoken and exuberant Alyson (the wife’s real name) suffers immeasurably—physically, emotionally, and financially—at the hands of the men she chooses to marry, yet she never loses her self-respect and humour. Likewise, she is never broken, despite her husbands' best efforts to tame her.

I love Michael Ondaatje’s prose; that is reason enough to read this book, but the Booker Prize-winning novel is also filled with mystery. Set in an Italian villa–the Villa San Girolamo, a real place–which is being used as a field hospital at the end of the Second World War and with a small cast of characters, it resembles a classic mystery story, but this is far more.

Each character’s history is gradually revealed to the reader, focusing on the "English Patient," a man burned and bandaged beyond recognition and unable to recall who he is, but whose memory returns to him in sporadic bursts when he is read to from his copy of Herodotus.

In this narrative, the stories of the other characters are wound with consummate skill as we learn how the English Patient came there. A novel about memory, love, and the desire for survival, its central image… show more.

Manhattan Beach is less experimental and more conventional than Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad and The Candy House, but it is every bit as moving, rich, and textured as those justly celebrated novels, and it contains one of the most touching father/daughter relationships that I've ever encountered in fiction.

A historical novel set in Depression and World War II-era New York City, Manhattan Beach begins with almost 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her rakish father, Eddie, on a mission to a wealthy gangster. A few years later, Eddie disappears after abruptly walking out on his family with no warning or explanation.

Has he been killed? Is he in hiding?  Why did he abandon a family he ostensibly loved? Plucky, brave Anna devotes herself to the search for her missing father with the ingenuity and zeal of the detectives she reads about in fiction.

I reviewed Manhattan Beach for… show more.

Despite the author's name on the cover, this book was written by Karen Blixen, who wrote under different names depending upon the country she wished to sell to or where she was living at the time. Probably best known as the author of Out of Africa and the wonderful film it engendered she also wrote many “Gothic” tales including those gathered in this small volume. Many imagine Wilde’s “Dorian”, Stoker’s “Dracula”, Stephenson’s “Dr. Jekyll”, or even Brecht’s “Threepenny novel” as the ultimate gothic tale but I can assure you that Baroness Blixen far outshone each of the above with her wondrous tales. Only Mary Shelley I think, can vie with her for the queen of gothic dark majesty.

The Dreaming Child surpasses even M R James' take on the story which is also wonderful. “The Sailor Boys’ tale” is also horrible and wonderful at the same time. Baroness Blixen also… show more.

Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural is, hands down, the best collection of over fifty short stories, novellas, and poems I've ever read in one, skin-prickling book. With authors like Bram Stoker, Sheridan Lefanu, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Matheson, Isaac Asimov, A.M. Burrage, Robert Bloch, and H.P. Lovecraft, you're in for many sleepless nights. My personal favorites include; "Last Respects" by Dick Baldwin, a story of two morticians preparing a body for a wake, only the body doesn't seem to be quite at rest; "The Quest for Blank Claveringi" by Patricia Highsmith, a story that proves snails can be terrifying. This one had me short on breath halfway through; and most disturbing of all, "His Unconquerable Enemy" by W.C. Morrow. It's about a rajah that has a surgeon amputate his servant Neranya's limbs off, then keeps the poor man in a small pen of open ironwork above his bed for… show more.

I have found so many of Mary Oliver’s poems to be inspirational and thought-provoking that I could call any of Mary Oliver’s poetry collections life-changing. Her ability to be present in nature, to hold both the beauty and the sorrow found in nature in a few lines of a poem and invite me as the reader to hold them both in my heart, is astounding.

Hearing her read “When I am Among the Trees” from this collection makes my heart sing! Listening to “At the Pond” makes my heart ache for one small goose every time. One of my favorite lines from any of her poems, “Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed,” is found in this collection as well, in “It Was Early”. 

I chose this one specifically because it is an audio recording rather than a book. There is something so heart-opening about… show more.

This book was just published in late 2022, but I had the privilege of reading it early, in January. It remained my favorite read of ’22 all throughout the year, which is really saying something, considering the astounding number of excellent novels that were published in ’22 (the pandemic really threw publishing off)! Waldherr is a criminally underappreciated writer. Unnatural Creatures is simply exquisite, from its concept (a retelling of Frankenstein from the women’s perspective) to its brooding atmosphere to its intoxicating prose. 

This is such a fascinatingly researched book about the science during the time Mary Shelley created Frankenstein. I was surprised and enthralled to learn how many real-life Victor Frankensteins there were in Victorian England, all trying to be the first to reanimate a dead corpse. The accounts of grave robbery and, yes, even murder (The fresher the corpse, the better the experiment!) had me hooked throughout.

Also intriguing was how this macabre practice was deemed by many to be the cutting edge of science. I feel the theme is especially resonant today as we face our own life-creating hubris with Artificial Intelligence.

Rejoice, for Mary Stewart’s wonderful books are finally available on Kindle! If Victoria Holt was fun but derivative, Mary Stewart knew how to do a fresh take on the imperiled-heroine-in-a-creepy-setting for the 20th century. And out of all her books, Touch Not the Cat was my favorite for its supernatural, telepathic element. (You can trace the echoes of this telepathy directly to my book because, baby, that’s what inspired them.) Just writing this paragraph makes me want to drop everything and go have a re-read. Enjoy.