84 Books Like The Adventures of Tintin

It was the comic book titles of HG Wells early science fiction books which drew me in as a teenager, including this, his most famous. You never had to guess what it was about. And I was never disappointed. They took me into a different world.

What I always liked about HG Wells was his attention to detail and his attempts to provide a rational scientific explanation for the events which occurred in those books.

Tim Peake is a bit of a hero of mine. He’s a British astronaut who’s spent time on the International Space Station.

More than that, he’s a great communicator – especially with kids – and his boundless enthusiasm for the adventure of space exploration is infectious. Explaining what might otherwise be big, scary ideas (how are stars made? What is antimatter?) in a way that is clear and interesting to younger readers isn’t easy, but he manages it effortlessly.

I learned a lot from this book.

Chris is another astronaut – and another great communicator.

In this book, he connects with younger readers by going back to his own childhood, in which he loved pretending to be a space hero fighting aliens (trust me, I can relate). But he was also afraid of the dark… until he watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on TV.

I’m a bit younger than him, but I also remember seeing that swooshy black and white footage being beamed back from the moon. Beyond the astronauts and the dusty moon surface was the darkest dark – the dark of space – and that’s when Chris learned that it can be fascinating: a place of mystery that is an amazing adventure to explore.

This is a children’s version of the book that inspired the movie.

Like everyone else who saw that movie, I was blown away by the story – I was also thoroughly ashamed that I hadn’t heard about these amazing women before.

I’m no math whizz, so making all those impossibly complicated calculations – on which people’s lives would depend – is already completely beyond me. But doing so with such dignity and determination in the face of the daily grind of petty prejudice and poisonous ignorance puts them in the superhero category.

I was in tears in the movie, and once again when reading the book.

I love Anita Shreve’s writing style, which is spare and yet conveys so much emotion. Resistance is set during World War 2 in occupied Belgium and tells the story of a downed US air force pilot who is found by a young boy, the son of a Nazi collaborator, before being taken in by a couple who hides him in the attic before he can be discovered by the Germans. This atmospheric story is about love and betrayal, but so powerfully portrays the atrocities of war. 

After tasting many beers in my research quest, I honed in on Belgium beers, which are my favorites. I like strong blondes, lol. Blue Moon types, golden with a hint of oranges, or other types of citrus fruits. This book is a guide to all things Belgium brewing. A guide to traveling to Belgium, to the beers Belgium brewers produce and where you can find them. This is a guidebook for brewery tours, pubs, and cafes. If you find yourself in the country and in need of a guide, this is the book for you.

Atkinson’s book tells the story of Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm who were friends and motorcycle enthusiasts. When war broke out they joined a voluntary medical unit heading for France and set up a first aid post near the frontline. They were fearless, sometimes reckless, and always cheerful as they saved the wounded. I loved the way Atkinson’s book captured their youthful exuberance and gung-ho courage.

This book is part of Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolò series, about merchants and trade in the fifteenth century and I love the whole series for its focus on commerce and goods – commodities like sugar, cloth, dyestuffs, and whale oil – and its scope, taking us from Bruges to Italy, Cyprus and Rhodes, Trebizond in the Black Sea, Egypt, Iceland, and beyond.

I chose this particular book in the series because of its unusual focus on the gold trade in Africa, and the cultured Islamic intellectual world of Timbuktu, just before it fell to the Songhai Empire. Written about the world before the Age of Exploration, it made vivid to me the forces that promoted conquest, colonization, and exploitation that led to the voyages of Columbus and others.

British people have often heard of Edith Cavell, who has been commemorated in Britain as a national heroine of the war after she was executed by the Germans in 1915 for her role in running an escape network in Belgium for Allied Soldiers. But Cavell was only one individual amongst hundreds who resisted the authorities in occupied France and Belgium. Like Cavell, young Belgian woman Gabrielle Petit was remembered as a national heroine after her execution during the war. De Schaepdrijver’s book vividly brings her story to life, explaining how she was became involved in espionage, as well as showing how a cult of remembrance grew around her in the decades following the 1918 armistice.

Quite simply, the best Bulge division history ever written. Plus, Fontenot sheds long-overdue light on the fighting at St. Vith, whose importance was nearly equivalent to the more famous struggle for Bastogne. Like every author on this list, he knows how to combine first-rate scholarship with excellent storytelling. Fontenot spent decades interviewing commanders and other participants, visiting the ground, and compiling source material. He knew many of the principal characters quite well and yet he never let his personal relationships stand in the way of historical objectivity. Plus, as a retired colonel and a veteran of Desert Storm who commanded an armor battalion in combat, he brings his own professional understanding into the mix. The result is a fascinating and innovative historical work.