Books like Every Anxious Wave — picked by fans

This was probably one of the most intense experiences with non-linear storytelling I ever had, and that did something to me I could not have predicted.

In fact, while reading this book, I started to turn the story into something of a philosophical discourse in my head. 

I really like how this book is at the same time utterly insane in parts—and I do say that with the greatest respect, it‘s the good kind of insane—while at the same time, it explores themes of dealing with earth-shattering events on a very individual level.

For me, the icing on the cake is that Kurt Vonnegut manages to even mix in a little history lesson there, because that bombing of the prisoners in Dresden? That did happen. And I didn‘t even learn about it in school—I learned it from this novel!

The Compass Rose is certainly less well-known than many other Ursula K. Le Guin books, but I think it’s a fantastic example of a book that takes you to unexpected places. It’s a fascinating and varied collection, but my favorite piece by far is “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.” It starts out wonderfully nerdy and weird, with a scholar’s detailed reporting of the “writings” of an ant as written, using touch-gland exudation, on seeds in an anthill. From there it gets weirder, and more esoteric, until it lands in a place sweeping and unimaginable. It’s one of those stories that did something a story had never done to me before, and because of that, it holds a very special place in my heart.

And speaking of, who better than Le Guin to inspire sci-fi and fantasy stories that are truly unexpected? Dispatches from Anarres, edited by Susan DeFreitas, is an anthology of stories by Northwest authors, all inspired by and in tribute to Le Guin, and the offerings are rich and unique. Like Michelle Ruiz Keil’s poetic war cry of ghost cats in “The Kingdom of the Belly,” Jason LaPier’s fascinating tale of the life of a bee colony—with some of the coolest names I’ve encountered in fantasy—in “Bee, Keeper,” and Stevan Allred’s clever Ib and Nib folk-story interludes. I read much of this book in an ER waiting room as my husband was being examined and then treated for a scary collapsed lung, and the uniqueness of these stories kept me beautifully distracted.

I read Sequoia Nagamatsu’s Where We Go When All We Were is Gone on audiobook, having picked it up knowing nothing about it. The first story opens on a wildlife refuge where experts protect and study… Godzilla. Mothra. And other wonderful monsters of Japanese pop culture. Right then and there, I knew this was going to be a favorite book. Nagamatsu’s stories are nonstop rampant imagination, from the man who can stretch his neck and send his head on long journeys in secrecy via the sewer (!), to the clone child that emerges from an underwater cave—but as much as I can fall in love with a book for its creativity, Where We Go goes deeper, often centering its tales on grief and loss. This short collection is equal parts droll and poignant, fun, and devastating.

With almost 3000 positive reviews on Amazon alone, it’s not hard to see that Mariah Stone’s first in series, Highlander’s Captive, is a good book. But why do I love it? Because this medieval highlander romance doesn’t just make me swoon, but it tugs at my heartstrings. There’s such a depth of emotion here that it’s hard to put down, and even when you’re finished, you’re going to want to come back again and again. 

I love this book for its deep dive into the music and time period of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a wonderful discovery of the bands that made this era of music so wonderful and how Laurel Canyon was in the center of it.

There are great behind-the-scenes stories and interviews with the people who were there, in the industry and making the music. It’s a great glimpse into the vision, values, and freedom of the time and how it all got funneled into that fantastic music I so love.

Of all the legendary bands that are part of the history of Rock and Roll, Pink Floyd is the one that appears to have the least amount written about them. That is why this book is so important and so good. Other books had touched on their history, but none of them went as deep and thorough as this one.

Whenever I think of my favorite book boyfriends, Krit in Bad for You is always number one. I don’t know why he struck a chord with me, but he did. Maybe it’s because he’s in a band, maybe it’s because he’s funny and chaotic, maybe it's because he seems a little lost. But mostly, I think it’s because he loves Blythe so much that he becomes a better man for her. 

In its ambition and sweep across time and political upheavals as well as musical styles, this book may have been the closest thing I had to a model for my book.

Part musical memoir and part capsule history of the American South’s era of integration, Dixie Lullaby was written by longtime music journalist Mark Kemp – a man who grew up in Asheboro, North Carolina in the 1960s and ’70s and has the Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers records to prove it.

City Come A-Walkin’ is it, the beginning, the first true cyberpunk novel. 

As William Gibson famously said in the forward to the 15-year anniversary edition, “John Shirley is cyberpunk’s patient zero.” Debuting in 1980, City follows Stu Cole, a streetwise nightclub owner who angered San Francisco’s political and criminal elite, bringing down the full weight of their power; his only hope, the enigmatic construct known only as, “City.” 

A proto-AI, City was a conglomeration of the computer, surveillance, and data infrastructure that took on a life of its own, becoming sapient and dangerous. To ten-year-old me, it was the coolest book I had ever read (and it didn’t hurt that the school library refused to order it for me) and really put the punk in cyberpunk.