100 Books Like In Conquest Born

When I first encountered Harry Dresden, a professional wizard solving a double homicide in Chicago, I was instantly hooked by its noir, fantasy, and traditional mystery with dollops of humor. This novel—the first in The Dresden File series—kept me engaged the entire time with a fast-moving plot and interesting characters.

I could see in my mind’s eye Chicago’s skyscrapers and their reflection in Lake Michigan as Harry dug deeper into the crimes and the supernatural world. This was my first urban fantasy read, and Butcher’s ability to blend a private investigator story with the supernatural ensured it was not my last.

For me, the Dark Tower series is an easy first pick as it so thoroughly encompasses everything I love about speculative fiction: big ideas, compelling, at times mysterious but ultimately fully realized characters, and a healthy, rich, and potent dose of world-building.

Over the years, I’ve reluctantly come to accept that this book and series are not necessarily for everyone, but they are absolutely for me, and I always find myself feeling a sort of kinship with other readers who love them as much as I do.

For me, Hyperion epitomizes the Gothic space opera.

It may not sound like it on the surface, with the book often being described as a sci-fi spin on the Canterbury Tales, but the devil’s in the details, and Hyperion has many details indeed, with each character’s story bringing us deeper into both their personal darkness and the darkness of the larger world: the labyrinthine Time Tombs; the Cruciform parasite that turns immortality into a curse; and of course, the eldritch godlike entity known as The Shrike.

As an easily-bored reader, I was floored by how easily Hyperion held my attention, as each of the characters’ stories not only made me care about them more, but also contributed to the adventure they shared...especially when it all came to a head in the sequel, Fall of Hyperion.

Spanning multiple worlds, time periods, and philosophical ideas, Hyperion has everything I want… show more.

There’s something deliciously attractive about this book.

The language Bradbury uses draws me in every time I visit it, and it keeps me hooked. This was another book I found as a kid, and it left its hooks in me from when I was young.

Is it morbid? There are definitely morbid parts to it. And it deals with life-and-death situations, but it’s just so good. I never wanted it to end.

There are so many histories of fin de siècle Vienna that this book is a welcome, long-awaited postlude. It explains how the city’s creativity did not die with the fall of the Habsburgs but became the source of everything we think of today as “modern”, from shopping, to cooking, to economics, to housing, education and the interaction of state and society.

Berlin may have been livelier in the 1920s, but the new ideas that would take root across the world and shape modern society were still coming out of Vienna. 

There is a scene in this book where one of the characters finds himself diving among the bodies of dead veterans in the flooded basement of a building. Is it real? Is it a dream? The uncanniness and careful sense of loneliness and history in the scene not only intrigued my imagination, but touched my heart too. In talking about the search for a bicycle, this Booker International Prize-nominated novel encompasses so much more—archive, history, memory, war, colonialism, butterflies. This is a surprising and expansive book by one of Taiwan’s best contemporary writers.

Though published in 1941, this book remains, for my money, at least, the most insightful book on white southerners. In an account equally rich in provocative thought and vivid phraseology, Cash explored the roots of the historically fierce masculine individualism, and near-visceral hostility to new ideas—the "savage ideal," he called it—that not only kept the South a hot mess most of the time, but sustained it as "not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it" right up to the eve of American entry in World War II. Cash trembled at the prospect of the powerful, likely irreversible new forces unleashed by this momentous development colliding with the South's historically rigid resistance to change. When the time came, however, the region would show a “capacity for adjustment” that would have astounded its reproving, though still affectionate son, had he not taken his own life just short… show more.

I first encountered this book as a series of lectures in Oxford in 1978 and was riveted.

Lyons faced head-on the themes of cultural and sectarian antagonism in Ireland from the death of the constitutionalist nationalist leader Parnell in 1891 to independent Ireland’s decision to remain neutral in World War II, using sources that were as much literary as political, and at the end projecting the divisions in Irish society forward to the then-current violence in the North. The tone was notably acerbic, even verging towards despair, but also employing bitter humour.

A great historian, he died prematurely a few years later when just embarking on his projected but unwritten biography of Yeats. He had written many books, but this is the one that left the loudest echoes–notably in nailing the psychological gulf of understanding between Ireland and Britain that became so apparent in the early twentieth century.

David Reynolds is simply one of the smartest and most original historians operating today. Do we imagine that no one thought much about the poems of Wilfred Owen until the 1960s? Do we think about how important the fiftieth anniversary of the Somme was for the politics of Ireland? This book is packed full of perceptive and original insights about the Great War’s very long legacy.

Jim Thompson’s novel is arguably San Diego’s greatest classic noir work.

While not a crime novel, it captures wartime San Diego through the glass darkly, and I was moved and unsettled by Thompson’s unsparing forays into the alienation of those who were the most exploited in the city.