Books like The Bloodstained Shade — picked by fans

This fun, heartfelt story is about a middle school girl, Aven, that was born without arms. When her family moves to Arizona, she has to start over and make new friends. Moving is challenging for any kid, but especially difficult if you are in middle school and look very different from your peers.

Aven is funny, authentic, and self-aware. Watching her navigate the challenges in her life is inspiring and encourages readers to question their assumptions and judgments about themselves and others. This story includes a mystery, some adventure, as well as a beautiful reflection on acceptance and friendship.

What on earth would possess you to burn a million quid? And if you’re going to, why travel to the small Scottish island of Jura to do it? Was this some ill-conceived publicity stunt, a cry for help, or a ceremony born of chaos and magic? John Higgs takes the reader on a deep dive into the fractured psyche of a couple of musicians that were briefly the most successful singles band in the world, and attempts to unravel the reasons behind what many people felt was either a self-absorbed, utterly insane, or obsessively destructive act. Along the way we dip into the philosophy of Discordianism, the influence of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy and the significance of darkly magical rabbits, as we’re provided with enough clues to draw our own conclusions. 

Davis’ style is analytical swank and this excavation of the 1970s is his odyssean opus. High Weirdness is a fascinating trip of a book in which the psychedelic epiphanies and freak experiences of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick are each explored and compared for their extraordinary contributions to “consciousness culture,” and for their entrees on the radical form of realism Davis calls “weird naturalism.” The book serves as a remarkable introduction to each of the trio upon whom Davis has made extensive study, from the epicenter of the weird that was the 1971 Experiment at La Chorrera, to the origins and impact of the Discordian “mindfuck,” to Dick’s “perturbations in the reality field,” notably the 1974 events he named “2-3-74.” In the literature, philosophy, and practice of each we see “freak bricoleurs cobbling together their own technologies of the self.” Across this extensive freakography, we have… show more.

This book is a big box thriller that I love, where the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of a simple man. In this case, he’s an academic professor decoding a medieval manuscript that will upset the world order. I was hooked by the out-of-their-depth hero in this story.

He is continually outgunned, outmanned, and outnumbered. However, an ordinary guy like Xander Jaspers discovers he's more resourceful and skilled than expected.

Joshua is another author with multiple series, but Commune is a standout piece of literature. His style is subtle and suggestive, making the reader pay attention so they don’t miss the nuances and the snippets of backstory. That said, his action sequences are fast and brutal with a realism that hits home. The humour of the characters throughout is so genuine it’s a stroke of brilliance.

Full disclosure – I loved this series so much I’m writing more Commune with him!

This novel tells the story of one person, Astrid, who grows up in a dysfunctional failed utopian commune in British Columbia, Canada.

The story of Astrid is told from multiple points of view. Each character paints a different picture of this child-who-becomes-a-woman, at different stages in her life. But what I like most about this book is its exploration of the aftermath of growing up in a failed utopian commune.

How does a person carry this ejected-from-Eden baggage with them over a lifespan? Is it possible to overcome it and fit into “normal” society again? The answers to these questions might surprise you.

T.J. Clark treats 1848 as a time when “art and politics could not escape each other,” and he offers a brilliant discussion of the efforts of artists to confront that situation. There are wonderful chapters on Delacroix’s anguished retreat into a private world, Millet’s portrait of the peasantry as a class in dissolution, and Baudelaire as a poet of post-revolutionary despair.

But for me, the most arresting portions of the book focus on Daumier, who was unique in his ability to depict the life of the Paris streets and create the great image of the Bonapartist con-man in the figure of Ratapoil. What I find most telling in these portraits, and the book as a whole, is T.J. Clark’s ability to “put back the doubt into revolution”—to recapture the confusion, the uncertainty, and the sense that everything was at risk.

Williams was one of the most creative and engaging moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a student at Oxford of E.R. Dodds. While Dodds reminded his readers of how strange the Greeks are to us, in terms of their religious practices, Williams reminds us that the Greeks are also very like us in the moral problems they confronted. Rejecting the idea that modern people have given up on “shame” in favor of “guilt,” Williams showed that we still share the same concerns as the conflicted characters of Greek tragedy – like them, for good and for ill, we gain our sense of ourselves and our moral worth from the reactions of the those around us. 

I opened up this book as a skeptic–how interesting could a history of this ubiquitous writing tool be? However, I quickly ate my words (a fitting metaphor for such a book) after diving into Henry Petroski’s meticulously researched and easy to read tale of how a common thing becomes common in the first place.

While the book is a study in engineering, it’s also a story of people who doodle, think, design, and imagine. Petroski taught me that much as we live in a digital age, we’re indebted to the simple and impressively designed artifacts that stick around century after century. 

Closely related to my love for history is my love of mythology—the boundary between the two is porous. This book started that love. There have been many books published that present the Greek myths to children, and this book is not considered one of the classics, but because it was my favorite book when I was six, I have never found another version better. I love the illustrations and how stylized they are. They capture the myths’ mystique, yet you can always see the human. I was clutching this book in the back seat of my family’s car when my mom announced that we would be getting a baby brother. As I was reading about Jason and the Golden Fleece, I suggested Jason as a name. It stuck!