100 Books Like Soulless

This book has been criticized for ignoring the brutal aspects of the Bolshevik revolution and giving us only old-world elegance and luxury. Hello? It’s historical FICTION! Instead of facts, the author gives us atmosphere, a charming main character who is being gradually revealed to us.

It made me ask: Did time change him, or was he always that way, and the events brought out his “true” self? It’s a story told in a polished style or, as one reviewer put it, with “a permanently arched eyebrow.” 

I love The Host because it has two female heroes, but one is a parasite inside the other. When a parasitic alien race, the Souls, invades earth, Wanderer is placed in the body of Melanie Stryder. When implanted, Souls are supposed to completely subsume the host, but Melanie Stryder won’t give up her mind or her body that easily. Melanie is a hero because of her strength and willingness to sacrifice anything to maintain her autonomy. Wanderer is a hero because of her empathy and willingness to defy the construct of her society and forge a new path. The book is the most interesting portrayal of the capacity for sentient beings to develop empathy against all odds that I’ve ever read. It’s also a remarkable portrayal of a most imaginative female bond.

Jane Austin is a classical writer of romance and a perfect combination of well-written English. The love Mr Darcy had for Elizabeth was explained with passion through the English language. 

It addressed issues within that time, and the beauty of a girl, as well as the strength of a man, was portrayed well. Jane Austin has other books, but my favorite was this one. 

I’ve never read a book as quickly as I read this one. Our eponymous lead character is quirky and odd, but the story is written with so much empathy, depth, and humor that I was rooting for her from the start.

I loved how the relationship between Eleanor and Raymond plays out and avoids the predictable ‘boy meets girl’ ending. It doesn’t surprise me that the book is ‘in development’ as a movie, as the story plays out like a film when you read it. Definitely read this one first before you see the film! (It probably won’t take long as I couldn’t put this book down.)

A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! is an outlier, if you like. I call it ‘proto-Steampunk’ as it was published before the term was coined in the early 1980s. Regardless, it could be a template for Steampunk when it arrived. In some ways, it’s an alternate history, and it has steam-powered contraptions, big engineering projects, a Victorian tone that still incorporates our modern gaze, cameo appearances by real historical figures, and a rip-roaring narrative. Its rollicking diction is uplifting, and it mirrors the gorgeous stiff upper lip tone of much Victorian fiction to heart-warming effect. It plays with the manners, morals, and decorum of the times to create a world that isn’t the nineteenth century as it was, but as it should have been. The edition I have, purchased many years ago, has a foreword by the notoriously curmudgeonly Auberon Waugh where he admits that he ‘cried like a baby at the… show more.

My journey with this book came at a young age, recommended to me by my older brother, and was a formative experience. Not only was it an early experience with a more adult version of the fantasy literature I’d grown up reading but it also built a bond between my brother and I, it was a shared literary experience that became special because of who I shared it with.

It opened my eyes to the idea that you could write this kind of stuff for grown-ups, and therefore, a whole new world of reading was opened to me.

OK, yes, I know. It’s fiction, and the first steampunk novel too. But I think that sometimes fiction can tell us (almost) as much as factual history about the past, if the authors have done their research – and Gibson and Sterling absolutely have. I can even tell just what academic papers they’d been reading!

It’s alternative history Victorian, But I think it tells us a lot about the real Victorians too, because it shows just how much technology mattered to their sense of who they were and what made them different from their parents. And, obviously, it’s a great story.

Who doesn’t love a good cyberpunk novel? Well, I love them! And this is a good one! It depicts a dark and gritty 21st century sci-fi future, which is fine, but now that we are actually in the 21st century and approaching some of the technology featured in the book, it makes it now all the more interesting.

With nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and an interactive book for learning (which now we’d just call a tablet like an iPad), it really makes you wonder if we are actually heading for the world of the book. 

All of R. Lee Smith’s novels are dark, explicit, and fascinating, but my favorite (and it was a Sophie’s Choice, for sure!) is The Last Hour of Gann. The heroine, Amber, and her spaceship full of fellow pioneers crash land on a dystopian alien world inhabited by lizard people. The humans are woefully unprepared to survive in the wild and all too willing to turn on one another. When a passing lizard/warrior/judge, Meoraq, stumbles upon their camp, Amber jumps at the opportunity to beg for his aid, a near-impossible task without knowing his language. Together, they learn to communicate, and as Meoraq embarks on the futile task of keeping “his humans” safe, so begins the delicious, inexplicable, slow-burn romance between woman and lizard that I never knew I needed.

As a fan of fantasy books about quests, I was familiar with Terry Brooks’ Shannara series.

Since I enjoyed his writing and his characters, I picked up this one on the assumption that it would be similar. Instead, I encountered a story about Ben Holiday, who purchased a magic kingdom from a fancy gift catalog and traveled to a new world where he became the ruler.

The characters appealed; especially Abernathy, the court scribe turned into a soft-coated, wheaten terrier by the wizard, Questor Thews.

Although a mature man, Ben’s trials upon obtaining the throne and adjusting to the magic of his new home support the theme of a hero’s coming-of-age story. With a few wrinkles and twists of magic, and a humorous overtone, I recommend this book as a nice change of pace from more serious fantasy tales.