82 Books Like Midnight Tides

Rarely do I find a sequel as good as the first book. 

When clever ideas from the first book peter out, sequels lose their freshness and sense of wonder, turning them into stale, unremarkable remakes. Then, my fandom for the author diminishes as well. Despite my enthusiastic admiration of Sanborn’s creative prowess, I couldn’t finish the Mistborn sequel for that very reason.

Words of Radiance worldbuilding is a notable exception. It keeps digging deeper and grows more and more complex.  Similarly, the characters continue to evolve.

For me, character growth and worldbuilding drive a story more than any other factors. Thus, the plot resolution to Words of Radiance was surprisingly satisfying precisely because of this strong foundation.

Because Crook (not Custer!) was probably the most successful and thoughtful general officer to lead troops in the West. Robinson traces Crook’s career from the 1850s Rogue River War in the Oregon Territory, through the Great Sioux War of the 1870s, concluding with the pursuit of Geronimo in the 1880s, where he achieved his greatest fame. And because, as indicated in an epigraph, quoting Oglala Chief Red Cloud, “He, at least, never lied to us.” I found comments on Crook’s employment of tribal scouts especially informative. Robinson concludes, “In war, he could be as cruel as they, but he always respected them as human beings.” He doesn’t apotheosize Crook, who reflected the views of his era in advocating assimilation to make Indians useful and productive citizens “by white standards.”

I loved this book for so many reasons. The world-building is beautiful, the plot line is intriguing, and the main female character has a lot of depth to her. She’s beautiful and courageous, kind but strong, and she does anything for those she loves.

I saw much of myself in her character, which helped immerse me in the book as I read it. I’m a sucker for any book with a female protagonist that has a lot of depth; I feel it makes them more real, as we all have different sides to our personalities. 

The main thing that impressed me about this book was the sheer originality of the story. Greg Bear has created a world unlike any I have read. 

A giant asteroid appears above Earth and is hollow. Inside is a world beyond imagining, a world without end and a path to the future. I was inexorably drawn into the story from the very first page. I especially loved the way all of this is grounded in the very human characters and described in terms to which the reader can easily relate.

Bear is a master of descriptive writing, an author I cannot read enough of. Highly recommended.

I’m going old-school, back to one of the grandfathers of science fiction, Robert Heinlein.

Not only is his book a masterful example of character-driven storytelling, but it takes a critical eye to many of the things our current society takes for granted as being “true” and “right,” finding them wanting. It’s also been a huge influence on me in my writing, as have many of Heinlein’s other works, and I couldn’t not put it in here.

Confession: I’m not a big fantasy reader. I was drawn to this book because there was a disability rep in it—and thank God!—as it ended up being one of my favorite books in recent years. Part steampunk dystopian war story, part feminist manifesto, We Rule the Night is riveting the entire way through. One of the dual protagonists, Revna, is an amputee whose prosthetic legs are made of sentient metal—one of two different kinds of magic in the utterly fascinating world Bartlett has created. Renva and her flight partner in the war effort, Linné, are both completely badass and unapologetic. 

Studies for general readers tend to be weak. An exception that logically would form an example of a popular writer’s efforts in an essential library is John Sugden’s Tecumseh. The Indigenous history of the war is poorly understood, and often suffers from grim biases when non-specialists write about the First Nations. This text on the most famous of the conflict’s Native participants presents readers with an accessible biography aimed at general audiences within the context of the wider issues that afflicted the Shawnees and other tribes of the “Old Northwest” in today’s Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and neighbouring regions. Another, older meritorious book is by Cherokee author R. David Edmunds, who wrote Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Dr. Edmunds is well known for other important books in Indigenous history, and like British historian John Sugden, is well worth reading for his insights, presented through strong… show more.

I like the Jack Ryan concept, a spy whose dad is the president. I like the campus one-for-all-all-for-one esprit de corps.

The starting point is nothing new – a diabolic plan to start a civil war. The Balkan venue is what makes it interesting. Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Turks, Chechens, Syrians, Russians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Muslim fanatics – what a mix! The reason this particular book is special is because I read it twice.

I have a Serbian colleague, which made the story more relevant to me, personally. We often discuss world events. The first time I read the book I did not know him. The second time I read it was after we had met and discussed extensively. I saw things in a different light and enjoyed it much more the second time.

O’Donovan offers us a short but elegantly written book on just war from antiquity to the present. He convincingly argues in favor of the foundational role that religious and theological ideas going back to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas play in the development of a Christian just war approach. He underscores that what we have come to understand as “just war theory” is a misnomer. There is no such thing as just war theory but rather a proposal of practical reason to develop good judgments in the light of armed conflict or war. The backbone of these good judgments is that the deliberate killing of innocent noncombatants is never morally justified. This prohibition remains constant whether we are dealing with counterinsurgency, the development and use of weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism. 

I’ll be honest, I first found the books after watching the TV series Game of Thrones, but the books had so much more to offer I couldn’t help but fall in love with them. In A Clash of Kings, we get to see Daenerys and her three dragons as they struggle through a wasteland. Daenerys is determined to return to the land of her birth and claim her rightful place on the throne, and her dragons are an essential part of her story and her growth. Martin left a huge impact on me as a writer, and the three dragons from this book helped inspire me to write the powerful beasts in my own work.