100 Books Like The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Blue Bear

In this science fantasy novel, humans, like horses, are used as riding mounts by a race of weak-legged aliens who have taken over Earth centuries earlier. Charley is a mount and, like most other humans, content with his role, prideful even. However, when he meets his father, an escaped mount leading assaults on the human stables, he is forced to confront the slave/master relationship he has always relied upon. Unique and utterly fascinating, The Mount is guaranteed to keep readers entranced.

Part graphic novel, part brain teaser, The Lying Carpet is about a statue of a little girl that awakens in a grand, strange house. Her name is Faith and she wishes to know how she came to be, and the only one who can tell her is a lying carpet in the shape of a tiger who offers her numerous and confounding possibilities. A great introduction to philosophy and a story for readers of all ages, a book to be opened again and again and again. A timeless classic.

This was the first fantasy recommendation I ever got from my dad. He saw me taking an interest in stories with castles, knights, wizards, and kings and knew just the book from his favorite author to put in my hands.

I hadn’t had any experience with Stephen King before this, and I found that his prose was friendly and familiar to me; the story itself is good, a solid entry into the genre, and I found the intrigues of the villain to be the most interesting part of the story. It turns out that the King (ha) of horror can write a fine fantasy story, too.

With the subtitle Solve The World's Most Challenging Puzzle, how could one resist a dive into this fantastic world? Each page number represents a different room in a strange mansion with clues and riddles littered throughout. At less than 100 pages, one might think it’s quite simple, when in fact there are people still lost within the maze, unable to escape - very few have managed to find their way to the center and out again without looking up the correct path. Good fantasy is always immersive, but rarely like this.

This notorious 1969 Roth novel is a monologue of a self-loathing and sexually repressed Jewish man to his psychologist.

He recounts in excruciating detail his efforts to escape his parents’ interference in his life and his lifelong obsession with bedding a "shiksa" (non-Jewish woman). Portnoy’s rants are brilliant, vulgar, and entertaining – though the cultural references are dated and female readers might become incensed at the demeaning descriptions of “Monkey” (the shiksa he finally beds).

In a story I wrote, a man facetiously asks his female friend whether Carrie Bradshaw’s neuroticism and sexual dalliances would make her the “female Portnoy.” Both are insightful, emotionally needy, and charming characters. Behind this novel’s sexual humor is a complex portrait of a man trapped by his own obsessions.

I was surprised to learn that John Hersey won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for a novel—in fact, his first. I had always thought of him as mainly a journalist for The New Yorker. One of my students recommended this. He was the grandson of the model for the main character, an Italian-American US Army major. My student was proud of his “nonnu,” the Allied military governor of a Sicilian village, for his efforts to help the starving villagers.

What they wanted more than food, though, was to replace the church bell that Mussolini had requisitioned to melt down and make into weapons. Spoiler alert: in the novel (and in real life), he succeeds—despite opposition from a superior officer, a thinly disguised General George S. Patton.

I’m both inspired and depressed by this book. Yes, the book itself is on the depressing side, but what truly saddens me about it is that I’ll never write as well as Richard Yates. He packs so much into this 57,000-word work that it almost defies logic. Still, he’s an inspiration as a writer, and I will always use him as a guidepost. No one’s ever going to confuse me with Michael Jordan, either, but I’m still going to shoot hoops (poorly) in my driveway.

Lawrence Block has written, I don’t know, 33,000 books? That’s inspiration alone. But in Keller, the mononymous title character of Hit Man and star of numerous short stories, he compels readers to root for someone who’s not exactly committing good deeds. I find that intriguing, and Chapel Fox, the antihero of my story within a story, travels down a similar road. You’ll find yourself cheering him on. You shouldn’t.

Barbara is a deliciously deceptive, vicious character wrapped in a seemingly mild-mannered 60-year-old woman. I loved how she both hated being overlooked and used her almost invisibility as an older woman, taking advantage of it to manipulate the object of her obsession–the foolish Sheba. When Sheba, a teacher, embarks on an affair with a pupil, it’s the opportunity Barbara has been waiting for. 

Reading this book is a little like the cliché about watching a car crash in slow motion because there is an undeniable inevitability about Sheba’s fall from grace and destruction. Yet I couldn’t look away; I was too fascinated. Ultimately, they are two characters who are unpleasant in their unique ways, but they create an irresistible story when combined.

This book takes a comic yet piercing look at espionage. 

Jim Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Cuba, is recruited by MI6 out of desperation and fabricates his spy reports. He invents agents, sketches of weaponized vacuum parts, and absurd clandestine plots—all to keep the money coming and satisfy his daughter’s extravagances.

What makes the novel shine is its satire of the spy apparatus—how credulity, vanity, and bureaucratic inertia turn fiction into danger. Greene balances light humor with real human stakes: financial strain, moral compromise, a man pretending to be something he is not. Even decades after its writing, Our Man in Havana remains sharp, funny, and deeply relevant in its critique of power, truth, and illusion.

This is both your main course and palate cleanser. Absolutely riveting!