Books like The Actual Star — picked by fans

This is the best novel I’ve read about bubonic plague.

Student historian Kivrin travels back in time to England of the Middle Ages—unknowingly at the start of the Black Death. The cause of Black Death was the plague bacteria, unknown to people of that time.

What makes the book memorable is its depiction of everyday life, where children who get lost in the forest must find their way home by the tolling of the village church bell. Ultimately, the bell tolls for all the plague’s victims.

The vivid characterization makes me experience people of a time so distant their minds feel alien to us, yet still deeply human.

I love this book for its Matroyska doll-style structure: The first five sections tell stories in different periods— from the mid-19th century to the 22nd—loosely connected by repeating characters and media, each ending abruptly and without resolution. The sixth section, set in the 24th century, is the spine of the novel, told in its entirety. Then Mitchell revisits the time periods in reverse chronological order, resolving each story, ending where we began in the mid-19th century.

It was a highly satisfying experience that changed my view of how a story could be told. It is widely considered one of the finest novels of the 21st century. It covers ideas I would normally balk at, like reincarnation and the existence of eternal consciousness. Still, the storytelling is so powerful that it all came across as believable to me. I loved the way Mitchell demonstrated how an idea in one time period… show more.

I’d read the reviews, so I was prepared for a great book. I wasn’t prepared to be thrown out of my comfort zone—but in the best possible way.

Mandel made me sit with what it really means to lose everything and still create something beautiful. It’s not about saving the world; it’s about creating a new dream and making it your home. I loved how it celebrates art, memory, and the strange persistence of humanity even when everything else is gone.

This book reminded me that hope is often raw, painful, and ultimately necessary.

I can only speak from my experience and, wow, this book hooked me right at the end of that first chapter, “but it’s happening faster.” Now to go into what that means, I will remain spoiler-free, but my jaw dropped. And the story only ramped up after that.

I love stories where the protagonist finds themselves in genuine peril, and Claire puts Harry August in a particular type of peril that truly had me terrified for his well-being in every chapter. The best type of suspense escalates in every chapter and it escalates here in this book in the best possible ways.

A few years ago when my wife suddenly died, on the second day I spoke to a dear friend who also happens to be a longtime monk on my spiritual path. He mentioned a book by a psychologist who took people to see the greater arc of their soul’s journey—their ‘lives between lives’. That doctor was Dr. Michael Newton, and this is my favorite of his series.

At the time, reading it had a profound effect on my growing understanding of the greater arc of the human soul and provided an immense sense of peace. Above all, it soothed my tattered mind at a moment when life felt incomprehensible and helped me make sense of our larger purpose for being here even while still grieving. Through 70 case histories of real people who were regressed into their ‘lives between lives,’ Dr. Newton reveals life continuing on the other side, ways… show more.

I am a great fan of the sensational xianxia drama The Untamed, which is why I love this novel from which the drama is adapted.

One thing that I really like about the novel is the character Wen Qing. My heart is captured by her quiet ways of going about her practice of medicine, her deep but understated affection for her brother Wen Ning, and her unwavering loyalty to her good friend Wei Wuxian after facing adversities together with him. She actually saves him twice, the second time with her own life.

What also strikes me as outstanding is the way the novel constantly asks the thought-provoking questions: what is good and what is evil, and why are unorthodox ways deemed as evil?   

This is a work of fiction written by Jane Roberts, famous as the writer of the Seth books. Through the novel form, Roberts gets across a plausible way to look at life, the fluid nature of time and some possible meaning and purpose to be found in reincarnation. It’s also pretty entertaining. Yay novels! There are three books in the Oversoul series. This, the second, is my favorite. 

The information in this book is in a whole new realm, literally! I have never read anything quite like this, and it was fascinating to delve into the human brain under the trance that Dolores Cannon was able to induce. The level of detail in each subject was described in the afterlife, soul contracts, and heaven was mind-blowing.

This was a book I could not put down. I turned the pages to hear what the next person had to say. It was one of the most interesting books I have ever read. 

For those with a religious upbringing like mine, Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s book, Reincarnation: The Missing Link in Christianity, may prove a fascinating read. And for those many brought up in the Southern Baptist culture of fear and punishment like I was, the idea of living other lives can be a frightening one or a welcome one, particularly when seen as a second chance, instead of through the lens of the Biblical concepts of judgment and Hell. It is a scholarly read, in that the more you know about the Bible, the more you will get out of reading it.

Dr. Stevenson was the founder and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. In the course of his work, he started to encounter very young children who reported details of lives they had lived before. Many, many young children. Rather than dismissing the stories as fantasy, he started paying attention when he realized many of the stories were provable.

He spent decades traveling the world, finding and talking to the children who remembered. (Since his death, Dr. Jim Tucker has continued the research at UVa. His own work is totally worth a read: Life Before Life: Children's Memories of Previous Lives.)