Here are 100 books that Above All Things fans have personally recommended if you like
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I love the challenge of taking a headline, a photo, or a curious little footnote in someone else's history, and fleshing out all the details to make it a full-blown story. Here are five books where I think this task has been taken to entirely other levels.
Estebenico is believed to be the first Black man to be brought to the Americas. In Lalami’s telling, the small party he is with becomes separated and lost, resulting in a years-long journey through unknown lands. Against a vividly detailed backdrop of the early Americas Lalami patiently lays out how Estebanico's willingness to acquire new skills in language and medicine begins to shift the dynamic of his relationship with the master who he had been brought to serve.
In 1527 the Spanish conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez arrived on the coast of modern-day Florida with hundreds of settlers, and claimed the region for Spain. Almost immediately, the expedition was decimated by a combination of navigational errors, disease, starvation and fierce resistance from indigenous tribes. Within a year, only four survivors remained: three noblemen and a Moroccan slave called "Estebanico". The official record, set down after a reunion with Spanish forces in 1536, contains only the three freemen's accounts. The fourth, to which the title of Laila Lalami's masterful novel alludes, is Estebanico's own. Lalami gives us Estebanico as history…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I love the challenge of taking a headline, a photo, or a curious little footnote in someone else's history, and fleshing out all the details to make it a full-blown story. Here are five books where I think this task has been taken to entirely other levels.
Mishima’s personal story is as dramatic as any of his fiction – on the day that he completed the final novel of his “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy he printed the novel out, laid it on his desk, then he and a band of supporters took a military leader hostage and demanded that the Emperor be restored to power in Japan. The ill-fated coup attempt ended with Mishima committing seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment). While the tetralogy is likely his most famous work, his best in my opinion, is Temple of the Golden Pavillion, a novel loosely based on the burning of the Golden Pavillion of Kinkaku-Ji by a disturbed Buddhist acolyte in 1950. Mishima’s harrowing depiction of the young acolyte’s slow descent into madness will have you disturbed as well.
Generally regarded both in Japan and in the West as his most successful novel, THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION brings together all Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religious life and the history of his own nation. Based on actual incident, the burning of a celebrated temple, the novel is both a vivid narrative and a meditation on the state of Japan in the post-war period.
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
I recommend this book every chance I get when people ask me for a novel that knocked my socks off.
It’s based on real events that happened in Norway, and it reads like Hargrave actually lived in that era because of the rich details. I learned so much, not only about Norway but also about what it was like to live in a harsh climate in a very remote area at a time when there was very little communication between communities.
I couldn’t get the characters, namely Maren, Ursa, and Absalom, out of my head for weeks.
Historically, the mass media have marginalized women's sports by devoting more coverage to men's sports and trying to appeal to a male audience. This volume analyzes the mass media's portrayal of women's sports. The Olympic Games are highlighted because they provide one of the few sports arenas where women's participation is heavily covered, promoted, and celebrated. The author suggests the media are recognizing the significance of female spectatorship and are attempting to respond to this growing audience by adopting some of the rhetorical and textual characteristics of soap opera and melodrama.
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I read and write to better understand people. Why do we do what we do, feel what we feel, hide what we hide? Any book that illuminates these questions and their answers draws me in. Reading and writing are ways that I can attempt to walk in someone else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes, expanding my own understanding of the world. Perhaps the books on this list will offer you the same opportunity.
This is one of my long-time favorite books because of the relationships of these sisters and the way they react to a vicious dictatorship in their home country, the Dominican Republic.
Birthed from a true story, this author deftly weaves the tensions of the times with the real impact the violence has on each character. The bravery of these woman calls me to reread the dramatic, beautifully crafted book from time-to-time.
"A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time.” --St. Petersburg Times
It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas--the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all…
I fell in love with the Himalayas in the 8th grade and vowed to go there one day. Eighteen years later I fell in love again, with a woman this time, who was living in Nepal. While living there I trekked extensively and read everything I could about the mountains, especially Everest. I thought it was odd that all the Everest books started in 1921, but the mountain was discovered in 1853. What took them so long? Hence my bookThe Hunt for Mount Everest.
If you’re a Himalayan enthusiast, this book is a must. Heck, even if you’re not yet an enthusiast, you will be after you start reading Fallen Giants. Its sweep is magnificent, its story-telling superb. You’d think this book would get repetitive, so many mountains and so many climbs, but you’d be wrong.
The story of the world's highest peaks and the remarkable people who have sought to climb them
The first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa teammate Tenzing Norgay is a familiar saga, but less well known are the tales of many other adventurers who also came to test their skills and courage against the world's highest and most dangerous mountains. In this lively and generously illustrated book, historians Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver present the first comprehensive history of Himalayan mountaineering in fifty years. They offer detailed, original accounts of the most…
In my early 50s, I thru-hiked the Ice Age Trail, one of just 11 National Scenic Trails in the U.S. The experience was so rewarding—in many different ways—that I vowed to hike the other 10. To date, I’ve thru-hiked six of the 11 and am in the midst of section-hiking two more. My enthusiasm for long-distance hiking and its numerous benefits also inspired me to transform my freelance writing business to one centered around hiking, whether that’s penning fitness articles for CNN, giving talks on long-distance trails, or writing articles I hope will inspire others to lace up their hiking shoes.
This one scared me. Who wants to think about dying during a hiking trip?! Yet, while I’d never wanted to conquer Mount Everest, I did long to undertake other (less extreme) adventures.
Reading Jon Krakauer’s account of his Everest experience inspired me to continue to dream big about other outdoor excursions more suited to my personality. I credit this book as one reason I wasn’t afraid to start hiking and backpacking long-distance trails—mostly solo—when I was in my 50s.
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The epic account of the storm on the summit of Mt. Everest that claimed five lives and left countless more—including Krakauer's—in guilt-ridden disarray.
"A harrowing tale of the perils of high-altitude climbing, a story of bad luck and worse judgment and of heartbreaking heroism." —PEOPLE
A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that "suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was wrong.
By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I embarked as a teenager on an overland journey from Europe to Nepal, and have made a career out of returning to the Himalaya as often as possible. My research and photographic expeditions to the mountains over the many decades have led me into some of the most exquisite landscapes and cultures on the planet. In all cases, I seek to combine the physical experiences with aesthetic and spiritual ones, and the books I tend to read about the region also move me in those directions.
I’ve read a slew of books about climbing the big Himalayan summits and this is one of the best. It chronicles the first ascent of Mount Everest by an American team and in doing so provides a thrilling account of the climb itself, of the natural majesty of the mountain, and of the eccentric personalities of the team’s members.
In the midst of the Cold War, against the backdrop of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the space race with the Soviet Union, and the Vietnam War, a band of iconoclastic American mountaineers set off for Mount Everest, aiming to restore America's confidence and optimism. Their objective was to reach the summit while conducting scientific research, but which route would they take? Might the Chinese have reached the top ahead of them? And what about another American team, led by the grandson of a President, that nearly bagged the peak in a bootleg attempt a year earlier?
I love computers, and especially computer systems. I’m interested in how different pieces of hardware and software, like processors, operating systems, compilers, and linkers, work together to get things done. Early in my career, as a software security tester, I studied how different components interacted to find vulnerabilities. Now that I work on compilers, I focus on the systems that transform source code into a running program. I’m also interested in how computer systems are shaped by the people who build and use them—I believe that creating safer, more reliable software is a social problem as much as a technical one.
This isn’t a technical book, but it gets to the heart of why so much software is fragile and insecure. This book examines spectacular failures of all sorts, from nuclear meltdowns to plane crashes to oil spills, but I loved it because its message resonated with my own experience writing and debugging code. It argues that complex, tightly coupled systems involving hidden interactions and close coordination between lots of different parts are more likely to fail catastrophically. It also talks about strategies to make those systems safer, like doing “premortems,” getting advice from outsiders, and building diverse teams.
My big takeaway? Technical solutions alone won’t make software (or other complex systems) safer. We need to change how we build and how our organizations work, too.
A groundbreaking take on how complexity causes failure in all kinds of modern systems—from social media to air travel—this practical and entertaining book reveals how we can prevent meltdowns in business and life.
A crash on the Washington, D.C. metro system. An accidental overdose in a state-of-the-art hospital. An overcooked holiday meal. At first glance, these disasters seem to have little in common. But surprising new research shows that all these events—and the myriad failures that dominate headlines every day—share similar causes. By understanding what lies behind these failures, we can design better systems, make our teams more productive, and…
I know all too well that finding a diagnosis and treating a chronic health condition can be like unraveling a mystery—maybe that’s why characters dealing with these issues make natural detectives. As a mystery writer with chronic illness, I love reading about sleuths who embody the difficulties of living with health challenges yet show the tremendous capacity we still have to contribute. Many of the sleuths on this list are confined to their homes and unable to work, so solving a mystery not only adds suspense. It gives us the satisfaction of seeing these characters find their way back into the world and rediscover their sense of purpose.
No mystery I’ve read has better captured how a chronic condition can redefine your sense of self better than The Black Hour.
This book hooked me on the first page, where we are introduced to Amelia, a sociology professor who is returning to work after being shot by a student the previous year. We witness her struggling to walk up a hill she used to climb without a second thought, and now it’s Mount Everest. She’s simultaneously vulnerable, determined, defiant, and just plain in pain.
Having a chronic illness myself, what makes this book resonate with me is the way Amelia constantly compares her post-injury self to her pre-injury self and must come to terms with the distance between those two versions.
For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction ends in tears (hers). Her fellow faculty members seem uncomfortable with her, and her ex--whom she may or may…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I've often lived around the fringes of nature, from late-night cross-country road trips through forested backwoods, to living off-grid in New Mexico's high desert. As much as I've lived in the shadow of mountains and extreme environments, I've never dared to venture up into them – and I'm endlessly fascinated by the people who do. What is it that drives people toward extreme sports and outdoor challenges, even understanding the risks? Why do people risk life and limb to venture into places where man isn't meant to be? It's a question I don't think I'll ever stop finding fascinating.
Lotz's book is an intense character study, painting a portrait of her protagonist in masterful strokes.
Simon Newman is complex – simultaneously thrill-seeking but lazy, ambitious but anxious, traumatized but desperate to hide his weakness.
He has no business searching for bodies in the notoriously dangerous Cwm Pots, and he takes away exactly the wrong lessons from his survival. He certainly has no business on Mount Everest, and knows it. But now he's haunted by the (possibly literal) ghosts of his own bad choices, and he's in too deep now.
*****From the author of The Three, coming soon to your screen as a major BBC adaptation by Golden Globe winner Peter Straughan*****
Adrenaline-junky Simon Newman sneaks onto private land to explore a dangerous cave in Wales with a strange man he's met online. But Simon gets more than he bargained for when the expedition goes horribly wrong. Simon emerges, the only survivor, after a rainstorm trap the two in the cave. Simon thinks he's had a lucky escape.
But his video of his near-death experience has just gone viral.
Suddenly Simon finds himself more famous than he could ever have…
