Here are 100 books that Animal's People fans have personally recommended if you like
Animal's People.
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The natural world is where I feel at home, and it is also the focus of my work as a writer. In Virginia, where I grew up, I always felt calmest walking footpaths in the mountains. Now I live on a windswept island in Scotland, my little aging caravan a couple of dozen feet from crashing waves. I have always felt curious about how we shape our surroundings and how our surroundings shape us. As a writer and a reader, I probe these questions every day.
This is one of those books that is so dense with surprising and counterintuitive facts that I have found myself quoting it regularly for years. It upended my thinking about the way the world we live in is distributed and the manner in which we tell ourselves stories of change.
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability--at the level of literature, history, and politics--to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today's climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
The natural world is where I feel at home, and it is also the focus of my work as a writer. In Virginia, where I grew up, I always felt calmest walking footpaths in the mountains. Now I live on a windswept island in Scotland, my little aging caravan a couple of dozen feet from crashing waves. I have always felt curious about how we shape our surroundings and how our surroundings shape us. As a writer and a reader, I probe these questions every day.
As a child, I sometimes sensed the problems of the world and felt an anger at my helplessness to solve them.
The first time I read Kincaid’s writing, I was struck by the way in which she captured those feelings of frustration. She channels a well-worded rage at the ruling class, in this case focused on the treatment—socially, culturally, and environmentally—of Antigua.
From the author of AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER and ANNIE JOHN, a novel set in Antigua, where the idyllic tourist facade hides a colonial legacy of corruption, remedial social investment, and disenfranchised local culture. First published in 1988.
The natural world is where I feel at home, and it is also the focus of my work as a writer. In Virginia, where I grew up, I always felt calmest walking footpaths in the mountains. Now I live on a windswept island in Scotland, my little aging caravan a couple of dozen feet from crashing waves. I have always felt curious about how we shape our surroundings and how our surroundings shape us. As a writer and a reader, I probe these questions every day.
In an afterword, Dillard writes that, as she aged, she came to regret the grandeur of the sentences in this book. But I’m grateful that she wrote it—a chronicle of two years in the Shenandoah Valley—exactly as she did.
I carry this book around like a bible, reading its paragraphs like poems.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has continued to change people's lives for over thirty years. A passionate and poetic reflection on the mystery of creation with its beauty on the one hand and cruelty on the other, it has become a modern American literary classic in the tradition of Thoreau. Living in solitude in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia, and observing the changing seasons, the flora and fauna, the author reflects on the nature of creation and of the God who set it in motion. Whether the images are cruel or lovely, the language is memorably beautiful and poetic,…
Mia Lark is running out of options. There is only one way to change the score: the fantasy planet Revivium.
Armed with the powerful magic in the helm and the friendly AI, Hex that goes with it, Mia throws caution out the window. It’s time to find the main guildhall…
The natural world is where I feel at home, and it is also the focus of my work as a writer. In Virginia, where I grew up, I always felt calmest walking footpaths in the mountains. Now I live on a windswept island in Scotland, my little aging caravan a couple of dozen feet from crashing waves. I have always felt curious about how we shape our surroundings and how our surroundings shape us. As a writer and a reader, I probe these questions every day.
No one describes the natural world like Elizabeth Bishop does. She writes with clarity about the way humans look at the world and travel through it. Her writing is pungent and economical.
When I want to describe a natural feature or feeling, I sometimes ask myself, “What would Elizabeth Bishop say?”
This is the definitive centenary edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, recognised today as a master of her art and acclaimed by poets and readers alike. Her poems display honesty and humour, grief and acceptance, observing nature and human nature with painstaking accuracy. They often start outwardly, with geography and landscape - from New England and Nova Scotia, where Bishop grew up, to Florida and Brazil, where she later lived - and move inexorably toward the interior, exploring questions of knowledge and perception, love and solitude, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos.
I have always been a romantic at heart, although it took time for me to realize and act on this as I was conditioned from an early age to be scholarly and rational (life-allowing). One of my favorite silent films as a teenager was a love story that focuses on a forbidden relationship between a British girl and a Chinese man at the turn of the twentieth century, called Broken Blossoms; it left an indelible impression. Eventually, I myself became involved in a life-changing romantic relationship with a Chinese man. I now love exploring the vicissitudes of the human heart at the crossroads of cultural differences in my writing.
Stylistically, Erich Segal is my idol because he has a distinct, crisp, clean writing style that he could leverage for dramatic effect. I was intrigued by the fact that he was a classicist by profession; I myself minored in Latin and Greek at the university.
Segal wrote successfully not only for scholarly readers but also for the general public, which is not an easy feat. Segal claimed that Love Story ruined his academic career, but this is actually the book people remember him for today. As a young woman, I enjoyed his novel Love Story, but as a middle-aged woman, I prefer Man, Woman, and Child because it is more nuanced and deals with post-marital responsibilities and challenges that a couple must navigate together if they want their marriage to survive.
From Erich Segal comes an unforgettable story of love: the drama of a father and the son he never knew . . . and a marriage that must stand the greatest test of all.
Bob and Sheila Beckwith had everything: rewarding careers, two wonderful daughters, and a perfect marriage . . . almost perfect. For what Sheila didn’t know was that Bob has once been unfaithful—only once, ten years ago during a business trip to France. What Bob didn’t know was that his brief affair produced a son. Now a tragic accident—and one fateful phone call—will change Bob and Sheila’s…
I always want to be where I am not. This was why I read sci-fi and fantasy as a child. This was why I left the country of my birth and became a professional nomad. This is why I am spellbound by mountains I will never climb and oceans I will never dive into. Imagination can take you everywhere. It took me to the academy, where speculative literature became my scholarly field, and to the publishing world, where I am now getting ready for the launch of my eighth novel. When you are at home nowhere, you are at home everywhere–including on the summits of impossible mountains.
I sometimes imagine what it would be like to wake up on top of a snowbound mountain, knowing you are alone–and then to hear footsteps outside…It is safe to imagine, of course, because I am NOT alone in a chalet in the Swiss Alps but in my own home, surrounded by my family. However, for a character in this stunning European novel, this is how it all starts.
And then, as you follow the incredible twists and turns of the plot and try to puzzle out the relationships among the characters, you realize that nothing is as it seems. The novel perfectly captures the brooding atmosphere of the Swiss Alps, which I visited as a tourist, although I did not end up in the abandoned valley haunted by echoes. I am glad I did not–but thrilled to read about the characters who did.
'Echo is a compulsive page turner mixing supernatural survival horror and pulp adventure' Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts
'Hallucinatory, eerie and terrifying' Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street
'Echo is a haunting contribution to the literature of folk horror' Ramsey Campbell
'The most frightening opening scene ever written' The Guardian
It's One Thing to Lose Your Life It's Another to Lose Your Soul
When climber Nick Grevers is brought down from the mountains after a terrible accident he has lost his looks, his hopes and his climbing companion. His account of what…
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
Absurdity gets a bad rap in fiction and storytelling, I think. “It’s too silly,” they say. But for those who can take a step back and appreciate how absurd our own world is—our everyday life—there’s nothing more real than absurdity. (I’m saying “absurd” an absurd amount of times. Let’s just say it’s purposeful.) It might be played for laughs at times, but if it’s done right, it gives you perspective. Sometimes we all need to look through a funhouse mirror to realize that we’re only human. These five books share that spirit and have made me laugh, think, and occasionally reevaluate my entire life in a spiral of existential dread—with a smile on my face.
For those who don’t know Raphael Bob-Waksberg, he created Bojack Horseman. For those who don’t know Bojack Horseman, watch it immediately—it might be the best-written television show ever.
Bob-Waksberg has an unmatched talent for creating an absolutely nonsensical world and then breaking your heart with the characters living in it. In this collection, he does it again and again, story after story, all about love.
It made me chuckle, then broke me, then somehow put me back together again.
Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg delivers a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love—the best and worst thing in the universe.
Featuring:
• A young engaged couple forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding.
• A pair of lonely commuters who ride the subway in silence, forever, eternally failing to make that longed-for contact.
• A struggling employee at a theme park of U.S. presidents who discovers that love can’t be genetically modified.
Drawing and painting people has been my passion and my profession for a couple of decades now. Fine art, comic books, animation, illustration – as long as I'm drawing people, I'm happy. I love the challenge of trying to capture (or create) a living, breathing, thinking person on paper. And I love talking about art books with other artists. Which ones are great, which ones miss the mark, which ones have tiny hidden gems in them. This list is a mix of books I love, and books I heartily recommend.
You're drawing, you're painting, you're doing whatever you do – you're making things that weren't there before. You're creating images, you're creating visual stories. Sometimes creation is a thrill, and sometimes it's a bizarre disorienting struggle. Nobody expresses the creative life quite like Mr.Earbrass (and Edward Gorey). Is it a how-to book? No. Is it a how-not-to book? It's not really that either. It's a story about an eccentric novelist crafting his latest book. I give this weird little storybook as a gift to artist and writer friends all the time. Everyone I've given it to just raves about it.
On November 18th of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing 'his new novel.' Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply, but his mind will keep reverting to the last biscuit on the plate." So begins what the Times Literary Supplement called "a small masterpiece." TUH is a look at the literary life and its "attendant woes: isolation, writer's block, professional jealousy, and plain boredom."…
A couple of years ago, in my late 50s, I learned I had ADHD. It was a huge discovery to finally understand why I daydreamed while being lectured and had so many thoughts racing through my mind. When I was younger, I assumed that there was a level playing field between my classmates and me when it came to basic brain function. So, I always felt extra frustrated and sad when I didn’t learn the same way as others. Only recently have I come to the new understanding about what was going on then—that my brain has always worked a little differently.
We all know Numeroff’s “IF” books. I love them all, but I picked the Moose book because the moose scares himself by shouting, “BOO!” But all of them have a similar message.
Whether neurodiverse or neurotypical, we are all familiar with the feeling of starting one task, which leads to another, which leads to another…etc. I remember reading this book to my kids when they were young and how it captured how I felt as an overwhelmed mom (not to mention one with undiagnosed ADHD).
Interestingly, it was written over 30 years ago during a time when ADHD wasn’t as easily diagnosed. In a way, this speaks to the ever-presence of neurodiversity, whether specifically recognized or not.
If a big hungry moose comes to visit, you might give him a muffin to make him feel at home. If you give him a muffin, he'll want some jam to go with it. When he's eaten all your muffins, he'll want to go to the store to get some more muffin mix...
In this hilarious sequel to the beloved If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the young host is again run ragged by a surprise guest. Young readers will delight in the comic complications that follow when a little boy entertains a gregarious moose.
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
My love for strange women began with a love of the tomboy, growing up in the ‘80s and 90’s with characters like Pippi Longstocking and George from The Famous Five. They’re young women who broke the rules of decorum or gender presentation—and they just always seemed to be having a lot more fun. Or at least more interesting experiences. This love of rebels and unruly women has stuck with me, and I think our depiction of women like this has become deeper and more varied. I just love a character who’s a bit of an odd duck, is irrepressible or voracious, or just plain messy. Nice is boring—give me the chaos.
This could be a polarizing book, but if you’ve picked this recommendation list from all the others and have gotten this far, there’s a good chance you’re also into books about young women making questionable choices. The protagonist, Hera, is starting a relationship with her older colleague at her workplace, where she’s an online comment moderator.
The story is written from Hera’s point of view, who has a sense of ironic self-awareness but is also desperate to feel something, which is probably what leads her into a course of action she knows is going to bite her in the arse, eventually.
A BEST BOOK OF 2024 IN STYLIST, DAILY MAIL, THE I, IRISH TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES AND RED
A GUARDIAN SUMMER READING PICK 'One of the best books you will read all year' ELIZABETH DAY 'Brilliant. What a writer' NIGELLA LAWSON 'Incredibly funny' CAITLIN MORAN 'Wonderful' GILLIAN ANDERSON 'This year's Sorrow and Bliss. Hilarious and heartbreaking' DAILY MAIL 'The book of the summer' IN STYLE
Hera is in her mid-twenties, which seems young to everyone except people in their mid-twenties.
Since leaving school, she has been trying to kick and scream into existence a life she cares about, but with little…
