100 Books Like Fighter

Have you ever read a book that grabbed you with a character challenged by circumstances you’d never considered? Imagine being blind and trying to survive WWII! I was intrigued by this essentially two-person novel set during World War II, which had a ‘cast’ of millions.

Again, the characters! Marie-Laure LaBlanc is a young blind French woman hiding in her great-uncle’s house in Saint-Malo after the Nazis invade Paris. I found Doerr’s lyrical sensory descriptions of Marie-Laure’s efforts to make her way around town as she’s pulled into the French resistance thrilling. I loved the depth of characterization when I met the second main character, Werner Pfennig, a radio repair savant, and his journey from a Nazi soldier tracking down illicit resistance radio operators to a young man repulsed by the Nazi brutalization of civilians.

The characters and intrigue pulled me through this book; mixed in with the eventual connection of… show more.

Geoffrey Wellum was the youngest pilot to fly in the Battle of Britain, getting his wings as a teenager. I love this book for its beautiful descriptions of flight training, the rigors of squadron life, and the odd way he feels after taking a life in combat–all while being so young he sleeps in his childhood bedroom when returning home on leave.

But I love this book most because Wellum kept these stories to himself for almost forty years, writing these memoirs and then publishing them only when he was in his old age.

This beautiful memory of life as a fighter pilot is Wellum’s one and only book and one of the great adventure books of all time. 

I write stories about famous people and moments in history. I like to strip down the narrative and make history read like a top-notch thriller. But to do that, I need to stand on the shoulders of authors who devoted ten or a dozen years to researching and writing the detailed lives of a subject they adore. I do not have the attention span to spend so long on one character.

I love this book because William Manchester (and Paul Reid, who stepped in to finish the book when Manchester died) loves Winston Churchill. What he wore, how he spoke, who he loved, what he drank. It is hundreds of pages of gorgeous detail, waiting for a long winter’s reading night. 

I did not love this one at first. This is the life story of Richard Hillary, a would-be poet who happened to fly Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. His first attempts to tell what it feels like to be in the cockpit engaged in a life-or-death dogfight at 15,000 felt self-absorbed.

But then he reveals what it’s like to be shot down and the harrowing aftermath of a cockpit fire. All pretense is set aside as Hillary battles to return to the sky and be a pilot again. It’s a lovely, lovely book.

Bungay packs more useful information about the Battle of Britain into this outstanding work than dozens of other books on the same topic put together. He provides the Order of Battle for both the RAF and Luftwaffe, records the squadron rotations, the attacks by date and target, the losses of aircraft and crews, and much more. No other book is as precise about what happened to both the RAF and the Luftwaffe not just stage by stage, but day by day. Yet this book also provides lucid analysis of events and assessments of key personalities. While writing about the Battle, I referred to this book so often it is now falling apart!

Because pictures are worth a thousand words, I had to include this “coffee-table” book about the Battle of Britain among the “best five” books. This book is 200 pages of evocative images — of aircraft, of pilots, WAAF, controllers, and commanders, of landscapes, airfields, and equipment. The words of Bungay and especially Bishop are transformed into something more tangible and understandable by this lovely collection of contemporary photographs.

It might be a venerable classic, but it’s still in print for a very good reason. Collier focusses on the six weeks of 1940’s English summer when Great Britain was in extreme peril of defeat and subjugation. He relates the history of this pivotal moment using a rich tapestry of personal accounts and eye-witness testimonies of the real people who were involved in this epic struggle. We hear the voices of pilots fighting for their lives in the air, their crews grafting on the ground to keep the aircraft serviceable and the civilians who daily watched the frenetic dogfights that swirled through the sky above their towns and villages, duels to the death upon which the very fate of the nation depended.

This one’s easy. The writing in this book is so tight, thorough, clever, and subtly funny that I wanted to copy the author's style, but I wasn’t born an English aristocrat.

From the perspective of prose, it is the finest written book I have ever read. The author is clearly brilliant, and I’m in awe and envious of his mastery and usage of the English language and his seemingly unlabored way of phrasing the essence of situations, events, characteristics, and motivations of the people involved.

Then Jenkins chose Simon Vance to narrate with his voice impressions that are so eerily accurate I could feel Churchill in my very own presence.

The entire book is so thoroughly researched and documented that it clearly has become the go-to resource for all things “Churchill,” a man who may have more written about him than any man who ever lived except Jesus Christ.

With great skill and sensitivity, Bishop depicts the human drama of the Battle of Britain. Bishop allows the pilots to speak for themselves, collecting their thoughts from letters, diaries, speeches, and memoirs, and presenting these within a chronological framework reinforced with historical context provided by the author. The result is a wonderfully readable and moving book that embraces not just the Battle of Britain itself but also explains the society in which the heroes of the Battle were born, the institution (RAF) in which they served, and the world in which they died. It ends with a chapter telling what happened to the survivors after the war. Altogether a beautiful tribute to the “Few.”

Nine Lives is an autobiography by one of the RAF aces of the Battle of Britain and, as such, is one of a handful of authentic accounts about the Battle told by a participant. (I actually recommend all these first-hand accounts, but since I’m limited to five titles altogether, I confine myself to two.) Deere’s account stands out for its brutal honesty and his willingness to analyze his behavior and reactions to events. It is not a literary masterpiece, but its sincerity is all the greater. Deere was a New Zealander and therefore this book highlights the often-forgotten contribution of Britain’s Commonwealth to the Battle of Britain.