61 Books Like The Circle

I love this book because out of all the time travel tales I’ve watched and read, this one seemed the most plausible. I mean the method of time travel that was used, if time travel to the past is ever possible, the method they use in the book would probably be the means to do it.

So it made me think about that, but it also enlightened me about other aspects of time travel back to the medieval period in England that I’d never considered before: like for instance, the English they spoke would be mostly indecipherable, and you’d need a translating device (which, sadly the movie version didn’t address). So, it had me thinking a lot about language and how it’s evolved over time.

This is my favorite portal fantasy series. It truly defined portal fantasy for me, on top of all of the other books/series that I’ve already mentioned. 

Meghan is your average teen…until she discovers a portal to a parallel world, the world of the Fey. This series has Meghan, and creatures from the fey realm, traveling back and forth as Meghan seeks to discover her true identity and her role in both worlds. 

I loved how this series was fantasy but intertwined traditional fairytale creatures, storylines, and elements with Kagawa’s own twist on the Fey, along with Shakespearean creatures and even Shakespearean humor. 

The Iron Fey is always my foremost recommendation for anyone who enjoys a great portal fantasy series, with one foot grounded on Earth, in reality, and the other in the fantastical.

This book is technically more ghost/time travel than strictly fantasy, but it was the book that opened my eyes to the idea of “portal fantasy.” It’s the story of a teenage girl in an old mansion who is able, with her horse, Candlelight, to travel through a portal and meet the girl who lived in the mansion many years before her. It was mysterious, slightly spooky, and used the idea of parallel worlds in such a unique way. I read hundreds of books as a teen, but this one really stuck with me. 

This was probably the next book that confirmed the concept of portal fantasy for me. It’s an allegorical story of a young woman’s fight against evil and evil forces, but starts out on Earth before moving to a parallel fantastical realm. I remember reading this as a teen and being fascinated by the idea of moving back and forth between worlds. At this time, I wasn’t even aware of the term “portal fantasy” or the subgenre, but Arena developed my interest in it. 

In this series intro, Marc Cameron introduces us to Special Agent Jericho Quinn, an Air Force veteran, champion boxer, and trained assassin.

When three Middle Eastern terrorists are injected with a biological weapon and unleashed on American soil, Quinn is chosen for a new global task force. He works directly for the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. President himself.

Quinn's methods, as he navigates the treacherous world of international espionage and terrorism, are simple and brutal. His Air Force OSI background proves to be an integral part of the way he thinks and operates. National Security is a page-turner and even better on audio. Great read!

This was one of the first fiction books I read that set before me a world that is ordinary interrupted, and affected by another world that is supernatural.

In this book, when the main character goes to sleep, he wakes up in another world populated by mysterious beings and people.

Perhaps most interesting about this set up, is that events in this “dream world” affect events in the waking one.

While the main character only retains a passive ability (entering this other world and healing) the whole traveling between both spaces, his interactions with both divine and malevolent beings, and his race to stop his world from destruction all pulled me into the story in such a way that I could not put down.

I learned a great deal from this book’s insightful and wide-ranging coverage of the motives of terrorists; economic, political, and social causes and effects of terrorism; and government and private-sector counterterrorism efforts.

I especially like the book’s accessible coverage of leading research results in the field including risk factors for terrorism and conundrums associated with policy efforts to stymie terrorism. I loved how the book offered a fruitful blend of theoretical models, data trends, empirical results, and policy perspectives.

The authors are economists, so the book is strongly economic in approach, yet multidisciplinary perspectives are richly woven into the chapters, giving rise to a true “political economy” of terrorism.

I have taught the history of terrorism for over twenty years, and I think this is the single best introduction to terrorism available. When people ask me for one book to read on the subject, this is my obvious choice.

Hoffman is one of the most respected scholars of terrorism. In this book he includes a brief survey of the history of terrorism as a springboard to examining how it manifests in the world today. The writing is accessible, and the takeaways are clear.

This book turned the field of Terrorism Studies on its head. Historical sociologist Lisa Stampnitzky demonstrates that the legion of terrorism experts who rose to prominence in North America, Western Europe, and Israel in the 1970s were not neutral analysts of political violence. Rather, through their intellectual work, much of it funded with government grants, terrorism scholars helped construct the contemporary meaning of terrorism as a threat to society fundamentally different from other forms of violence, crime, and political activity. This book made it clear that we can’t understand the history of “terrorism” without analyzing the history of the term itself, and how the use of this term in law, academia, politics, international relations, and popular culture has shaped political power and violent conflicts between states and insurgents.

The field of terrorism research is dominated overwhelmingly by social scientists. However, Richard English has established himself as a leader in the historical study of terrorism and counterterrorism. As the title suggests, this book tackles a difficult, frequently avoided question. Using four case studies—al-Qaida, the Provisional IRA, Hamas, and the Basque ETA in Spain—English demonstrates that the answers are complex, and best explicated through long-term historical analysis. Terrorism has augmented other types of political action, enflamed broader political crises, and provoked disproportionate state responses, frequently with high costs and unintended consequences. While terrorism sometimes has achieved some of its perpetrators’ political goals, it also often has backfired. English shows that terrorism history is not only bloody, but messy, and entwined with wider conflicts between states and dissidents.