100 Books Like The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future

Again, here is a fantastic cast of characters: the bold Mrs. B, the swearing Fox terrier, Decius, and the unassuming protagonist, Janice. Quiet, kind, thorough, outwardly unremarkable, Janice is a cleaner. She is also a wonderful listener. What a joy it is when, with a little help from her friends, she finally unlocks her own story and transforms her life.

Here’s the moment when Janice grasps how much hope can be found in stories: "She looks around at the shelves of books, every one of which she has handled, and she begins to think there may be a way. A way of finding that hope. She is, after all, a collector of stories and a storyteller. Maybe she could tell her story as she has told other stories?"

Rembrandt is a fascinating journey through Rembrandt’s paintings and also his lesser-known (to the general public) prints. It’s also a chronological roadmap of his works from his early years until his final period.  Watching his progression and the mastery in his latest period was a true learning process of how ‘less’ can be ‘far more.’ In the works displayed in the book, Rembrandt shows his skill at wringing every last bit of functionality out of each color in a very limited palette and also the cornucopia of atmospheric density he played with so masterfully to push and pull the viewers’ eye.  

This book is colourful, joyful, and deliciously diverse. The simple rhyme is rollicking but not too sweet, the illustrations are bright and playful, with plenty of fun detail. I love the mixture of people (all ages and colours and abilities) at work in the community garden, and how there is room for different ways of doing things (some plots are neat and proper while others are messy and wild). Best of all is how the story ends with everyone sitting down together to enjoy a garden-grown feast. Community, humour, hospitality, gratitude, and care for the earth—this little story is a cornucopia of good things. 

I really enjoyed this playful, ethereal, experimental collection of seventeen stories from prolific Tanzania-Australian author Eugen Bacon.

Her work often defies genre, spanning science fiction, horror, fantasy with a strong literary sensibility. These are poetic, evocative stories, about migration and displacement, about climate change and technology, about blackness and womanhood, about politics and community.

Adding up to more than just the sum of its parts, I could not help but be impressed. As a whole, with each story allowed to resonate with the other, it’s an excellent, inventive collection.

I was struck by this book’s unusual topic and perspective, namely focusing on maps in fantasy, children’s and science fiction literature, movies, and television. I really appreciated that the book is a collection of essays in which writers and cartographers reflect on the maps of imaginary places that featured in their works and the maps, real or imagined, that inspired their creations.

That really gives the essays a personal feeling, and you get to know a little about the creation of maps like the Marauder’s Map from the Harry Potter franchise or the various maps of Middle Earth featured in The Hobbit series. I like that the essays are conversational, and with over 200 illustrations, I was anxious to turn to the next page.

Ostensibly an academic dissertation, the footnotes begin to reveal a far wilder and manic story happening to the writer.

There are trilingual puns, verbal pratfalls, and all the wild humour that Nabokov is known for throughout this book. Of all the metafiction I have ever read, this book made me feel as if I’d been given something rather than just had a big literary joke played on me.

This must be one of the strangest works I have read in a long while, and I admire it deeply. It surfs on the documentary graphic novel trend. It exists to teach people about the disastrous impact of intensive farming on the environment, and more particularly on dirt. Not a very attractive topic, despite how serious it is – but, and that’s where this comic is so innovative, it twists all this knowledge around a suspenseful battle royal orchestrated by Hades in the Underworld. Unlikely, isn’t it? I loved discovering the facts while cheering on my main characters, two lost 16 years old, who struggle to survive in the underground. While it is directed at teens, I would recommend it to the above 16 only, as there is gore (this book follows the Hunger Games pattern of only one survivor) and nudity. 

I originally sought out this book as a way to inspire some hands-on creativity for a time when I was feeling uninspired, and gosh did it deliver! Joy is someone who I’ve followed for a long time, and I’ve always loved how "joy" has become more than just a name for her.

All of the exercises with flowers in particular were my favourite and Joy offered so many ways to play with them that I had never even thought of. The floral pop print and blooming background exercises were so much fun. My little boy and I also had an amazing time with all of the recipes, and playing with food.

Such a special book that really gets the creative juices flowing.

This is a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful in Australia: the origins of ‘mateship’, rural remedies, measuring the weather by the behaviour of birds, how ‘Waltzing Matilda’ had its origins in a shearers’ strike, and the bizarre life of the itinerant swagman, including hints on how to make a ‘swag’ and carry it according to the legendary writer Henry Lawson. There are wonderful tales of Australian ‘taciturnity’ and folks living so remotely they still thought Queen Victoria was on the throne in the mid-1900s. It may be light-hearted in tone but this book somehow gets to the heart of what makes Australians unlike anyone else in the world.  

Full disclosure, I blurbed this knockout of a novel, and I would do it one hundred times over. It takes place in a near-future dystopia ravaged by climate change. However, a billionaire TERF has started a new climate relief program called Inside, which promises a safe and hopeful future for its members (but we all know that’s far from the real story).

Following an unforgettable cast of diverse characters, including some who get accepted to Inside, this book is at once suspenseful, haunting, and revelatory. It’s about queer community, survival, chosen family, paternalism, the harms of white feminism, parenting, freedom vs. control, and hope, always, always hope. It’s highly propulsive, and you’ll probably read it in one sitting just like I did.