23 Books Like Gnomes & Ungnomes

I have a brother who is fifteen years my junior. When he was small, I often read him stories. One of our shared favourites, read over and over, was Sendak’s Wild Things. It’s a masterpiece.

He usually wrote the text, as well as making the wonderful pictures, and the text is short, simple, rhythmic, and beautiful. Sendak was a poet as well as an artist.

Think about it: a child of five and a young woman of twenty, reading the same book, poring over the illustrations together, and both having a whale of a time.

If you know a child of picture-book age who doesn’t own Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are—buy it for them!

The book's great front matter invites the child reader to experience a journey through the night to search for jumbies, which are, it explains, not friendly. But then, within the pages, the jumbies, though lying gently to the child, are, in fact, quite friendly. The darkness is, sort of, implied for later.

I love this ambiguity–gentle enough to allow this book to exist but mysterious enough to open up possibilities. This book will definitely serve as an introduction to the author’s middle-grade series. It is dark, luminous, and wonderful.

This gorgeous book is both metaphoric and literal. A young boy learns about dragons (and himself, his grandmothers, and life) on a mythical bedtime story-walk to find two very different paths.

I love the message here (and that it isn’t too in-your-face message-y; the story is really primary). But the art is so gorgeous that I could dive back into it over and over again for that alone. 

In this silly romp, a little girl, despite her obnoxiously doubting brother, goes in search of fairies and gets more than she bargains for. My favorite line was: “Then a mermaid arrived. She brought her own ocean…” There are ogre boogers (yes, you read that correctly), and the brother eventually becomes a reluctant believer.

Funny is always good. This is funny. 

This book is the one exception to my rule about access to Soviet documents. Writing at a time when he had no such access, Tolstoy nonetheless blew up the field with bold arguments deriving from sources to which he did have access, from Soviet dissident memoirs to a vast trove of material he discovered in the Public Record Office in Kew Gardens, London, in particular on the often-neglected “Phony War” period of WWII between the fall of Poland and Hitler’s invasion of France and the Low Countries – a period during which Britain and France nearly went to war with the USSR after Stalin’s invasion of Finland. At a time when the Soviet bloc still denied Stalin’s responsibility for the “Katyn massacre” of Polish officers and elites in 1940, Tolstoy argued not merely for Stalin’s responsibility but explained why Stalin ordered the massacre when he did, confronted as the Soviet… show more.

Did you know that African and indigenous people worked together in what is today Bolivia and Argentina? They were both enslaved and those who had bought their freedom. Bolivia, high in the mountains, might seem remote, but in the 1500s and 1600s its rich silver mines were the motor of the Spanish Empire’s economy. And Spain was the superpower that dominated Europe, America, and the Atlantic.

Bolivia and the zones that supplied it with coerced and free workers, mules, food, wine, textiles, and the stimulant coca leaf was called Charcas, and it was the most valuable and important part of all of the Americas at the time.

This wonderfully detailed book by an outstanding Bolivian historian tells the story of the Black and indigenous laborers who made this possible.

I lived in Bolivia in the late 1980s, and with three friends set off on a long wooden riverboat journey on the Rio Beni deep into the Amazon rainforest to the tiny jungle village of Rurrenebaque, a village strikingly similar to Ayachero where Ferencik set her story. I can verify that Ferencik’s detailed descriptions of the environment and its indigenous people perfectly capture the wilderness setting for this story.

The protagonist, Lily Bushwold, endures unimaginable challenges as she follows her new Bolivian love from La Paz back to his village. It is a world full of wonders and terrors, where she must use her wits to survive.   

This book gets at questions near and dear to my own ethnographic explorations, namely how migration changes gender roles in households. Women don’t leave home without figuring out care for young children and frail elders. Tanja Bastia looks at how Bolivian families handle the challenge of transnational parenting. Grandmothers often fill in for their migrant daughters (there’s the aging connection!), and migrant women struggle to balance their financial opportunities with the social stigma of having ‘abandoned’ their children in search of wealth.  

I have given this the top spot, not because of the political ideals of the author, but the intimate portrayal of his passion for justice that this classic book portrays with such vivid humanity. Che Guevara was a gifted writer and in this book all the revolutionary idealism that fed into his life-long battle merge into a powerful narrative that is so symptomatic for the romanticism of a bygone era. The Cuban revolution firmly rooted the idea of independence in the political lexicon of resistance movements all over the world, as independence from outside interference, is a necessary step towards a progressive democracy. I read Guevara's books as a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University in order to train my mind in the various methods of critique.

This is not only a great ethnography (a book based on long-term anthropological fieldwork) giving a splendidly detailed and deeply humane account of the lives of Bolivian tin miners and their families in the 1970s, but also one of the most effective case studies within the framework of “dependency theory.”

The title, which comes from one of the author’s interviews with a miner, captures the violence and misery of tin mining, but I also love the way the book portrays its protagonists as ordinary people living and giving meaning to their lives as best they can.