Here are 29 books that The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed fans have personally recommended if you like
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Growing up in Philadelphia, with school and family visits to landmarks like Independence Hall and Betsy Ross’s house, I’ve long been interested in American history. That led me, eventually, to graduate school and my profession as a historian. At the same time, I have greatly enjoyed reading American novelists, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin, as well as the works of thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. DuBois. The sweet spot combining those two interests has been American intellectual history.
This is my candidate for the Great American Novel. Read it for its storyline and its fascinating chapters on whales. Along the way, you’ll encounter discussions about race, religion, friendship, and the virtuous life.
Some of my students ask, “Why does Melville digress so much?” My response: persist in reading this work. What at first seems extraneous becomes vital. You’ll discover a masterpiece.
Melville's tale of the whaling industry, and one captain's obsession with revenge against the Great White Whale that took his leg. Classics Illustrated tells this wonderful tale in colourful comic strip form, offering an excellent introduction for younger readers. This edition also includes a biography of Herman Melville and study questions, which can be used both in the classroom or at home to further engage the reader in the work at hand.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I like fiction which makes a character confront what the poet Thom Gunn called ‘the blackmail of his circumstances’: where you are born, the expectations of you. I like to think I am very much a self-created individual, but I can never escape what I was born into; the self is a prison that the will is trying to break out of. I like literature which reflects that challenge.
I first read Lolita when I was 14 and have read it every few decades since, learning something new each time.
I love the first-person immediacy of it and the way it is a crime novel in reverse: the narrator is already imprisoned but not for the crime he describes. It is a love story turned on its head: what the narrator says is love is in fact abuse.
It is a road trip across the vastness of the US, like one I took when I was a student.
'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.'
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants.
Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all…
From an early age, it became obvious there were two types of people in the world. There were those who played it safe, who sold life insurance or worked for the government, who took their kids to soccer games and dutifully hosted Thanksgiving dinner. Then there were those who were haunted and driven by inner forces they couldn’t begin to understand. After realizing that I fell into the second category, I discovered many kindred spirits who had written books. While some of them sugar-coated their stories into “page-turners” or “beach reads,” the core of human obsession was unmistakable. I resolved to explore the outer edge of that obsession.
Think Friend of the Devil is merely fiction? Consider this: Bernard Loiseau rose from obscurity to the pinnacle of his profession, earning the ultimate accolade of three stars in the Michelin Guide for his restaurant La Côte d’Or in Saulieu, France. Yet in 2003, immediately after the lunch service, this acclaimed chef blew his brains out with a shotgun. The Perfectionist traces his life, obsessions, and insecurities to give us a chilling portrait of why attaining your dreams might be the most dangerous situation of all.
An unforgettable portrait of France’s legendary chef, and the sophisticated, unforgiving world of French gastronomy
Bernard Loiseau was one of only twenty-five French chefs to hold Europe’s highest culinary award, three stars in the Michelin Red Guide, and only the second chef to be personally awarded the Legion of Honor by a head of state. Despite such triumphs, he shocked the culinary world by taking his own life in February 2003. TheGaultMillau guidebook had recently dropped its ratings of Loiseau’s restaurant, and rumors swirled that he was on the verge of losing a Michelin star (a prediction that proved to…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
From an early age, it became obvious there were two types of people in the world. There were those who played it safe, who sold life insurance or worked for the government, who took their kids to soccer games and dutifully hosted Thanksgiving dinner. Then there were those who were haunted and driven by inner forces they couldn’t begin to understand. After realizing that I fell into the second category, I discovered many kindred spirits who had written books. While some of them sugar-coated their stories into “page-turners” or “beach reads,” the core of human obsession was unmistakable. I resolved to explore the outer edge of that obsession.
Some of us marry our childhood sweetheart, while others carry a lifelong torch for a love that seems unattainable. For Inez Victor—married to a U.S. Senator and failed Presidential candidate, a woman who has spent her entire adult life being photographed—the memories of Jack Lovett come in and out of focus like a camera lens. For decades, the two of them nurture a fantasy that finally explodes into the open with the force of the munitions that Lovett sells to governments around the world.
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean—a gorgeously written, bitterly funny look at the relationship between politics and personal life.
Moving deftly between romance, farce, and tragedy, from 1970s America to Vietnam to Jakarta, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.
Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his…
A long time ago, I was an early-aviation historian, but eventually realized that I knew only half the story—the part about airplanes. But what about airships? Initially, I assumed, like so many others, that they were a flash-in-the-pan, a ridiculous dead-end technology, but then I realized these wondrous giants had roamed and awed the world for nearly four decades. There was a bigger story here of an old rivalry between airplanes and airships, one that had since been forgotten, and Empires of the Sky was the result.
This is an academic book, one that’s engaging, fluidly written, and immensely interesting for anyone intrigued by the longtime German fascination with airships. Rather than the technical details, Syon’s broader focus is on what the wondrous technology meant to Germans and how it shaped their culture and history over the decades. His approach, in other words, puts Zeppelins into context. Put it this way, in 1938 a large-scale survey discovered that Count von Zeppelin, the inventor of the airship and dead for twenty years, ranked among the best recognized of German luminaries. His score was higher than even that of the immortal Beethoven at a time when the Luftwaffe-obsessed Nazis were trying to scrub any memory of their airships. Such a finding is impossible to explain unless you understand the cultural importance of the Zeppelin, making this book critically important.
"Whenever the airship flew over a village, or whenever she flew over a lonely field on which some peasants were working, a tremendous shout of joy rose up in the air towards Count Zeppelin's miracle ship which, in the imagination of all who saw her, suggested some supernatural creature." As this paean to the Zeppelin from an early-20th-century issue of the German newspaper Thuringer Zeitung makes clear, the airship inspired a unique sense of awe. These phenomenal rigid, lighter-than-air craft-the invention of Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin (1838-1917)-approached the size of a small village. Although they moved slowly, there was no…
My name is Thomas Tarasios and I'm a fantasy author. I was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy games growing up, particularly I to IX, and as a voracious fantasy reader I've made it my business to find novels that deliver that 'Final Fantasy feeling' (eccentric ensemble cast, adventure, hard magic system, grim yet fun, etc.), scouring the web, message boards and Reddit for recommendations on this topic and reading the suggested books. When it came time to write my own fantasy series, I set out to write as if it were an original Final Fantasy game—a fan novelization of an awesome new Final Fantasy game that doesn't actually exist as a game!
Described by the author as a ‘steampunk opera’, I utterly adore Jim Butcher’s ongoing series, currently two books in and beginning with this one. It’s got airships, magic crystals, talking cats, a multi-POV cast of quirky characters, and a post-apocalyptic world of which the surface is covered in monsters–wait, this is as close as I’ve found to Final Fantasy in novel form!
Set in a world where humanity now lives in cities built on platforms at the top of huge spires, in the first book of the series we meet Captain Grimm, commander of the airship Predator, and Gwendolyn Lancaster, a young heiress and recent military academy graduate, and go on a breathtaking adventure with them as they uncover an existential threat to their home of Spire Albion.
I read this book to my wife, and we are both now huge fans. I love the whole aesthetic, style, pacing…
Jim Butcher, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Dresden Files and the Codex Alera novels, conjures up a new series set in a fantastic world of noble families, steam-powered technology, and magic-wielding warriors...
Since time immemorial, the Spires have sheltered humanity. Within their halls, the ruling aristocratic houses develop scientific marvels, foster trade alliances, and maintain fleets of airships to keep the peace.
Captain Grimm commands the merchant ship Predator. Loyal to Spire Albion, he has taken their side in the cold war with Spire Aurora, disrupting the enemy’s shipping lines by attacking their cargo…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I’ve long had a passion (read: obsession) with the apocalypse in whatever form it takes. I’ve written viral pandemics, zombie outbreaks, post-nuclear survival, dystopian totalitarianism, extinction-level-event, alien invasion, WW3… all of them have the theme of the great reset. The ability to reinvent yourself in the new world. The erasure of your life and the clean slate to try again and become who you want to be. I read and listen to this genre as well as write it because I'm passionate about the worlds writers create and the way their characters adapt to overcome the challenges my own have faced. As a former police officer, I’ve probably spent too many night shifts pondering the end of the world.
Nick should be considered royalty when it comes to the post-apocalypse. He has numerous series with vastly different settings, but all of them are a masterclass in characterisation and story craft. His books draw me in with slick action and characters I care about from the get-go. He tackles the real issues without rubbing it in the reader’s face, and his work makes you question what you would do if the world went sideways.
The New York Times and USA Today bestselling series
They dive so humanity survives …
More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in search of a habitable area to call home. Aging and outdated, most of the ships plummeted back to earth long ago. The only thing keeping the two surviving lifeboats in the sky are Hell Divers -- men and women who risk their lives by skydiving to the surface to scavenge for parts the ships desperately need.
I grew up on the coast of South Carolina, where many of the Golden Age pirates were welcomed as business associates and charming guests by some of the most influential people of the day. They are, to this day, considered local heroes. I read everything I could lay hands on about them, fiction and histories, and I knew my first book would have to be about the pirate I always pretended I could be, if I’d only been born two hundred years ago.
This one’s a little different – pirates sail the clouds instead of the ocean. In a world where Haiti won its freedom at a devastating cost, a young Black woman wants to earn a place on an airship, but can’t seem to find any way to prove her worth to the sky pirates she longs to join. Until she learns about a weapon called the Black God’s Drums, that someone plans to use to wipe New Orleans off the map. Add in the whispers of an orisha with its own agenda and a possible romantic attraction to the peg-legged Captain Ann-Marie, and you’ve got everything a pirate might want.
In an alternate New Orleans caught in the tangle of the American Civil War, the wall-scaling girl named Creeper yearns to escape the streets for the air - in particular, by earning a spot on-board the airship Midnight Robber. Creeper plans to earn Captain Ann-Marie's trust with information she discovers about a Haitian scientist and a mysterious weapon he calls The Black God's Drums.
But Creeper also has a secret herself: Oya, the African orisha of the wind and storms, speaks inside her head, and may have her own ulterior motivations.
I grew up in Texas during a time when girls still had to wear poofy dresses and pantyhose, and boys got to have all the fun. The whole idea of traditional womanhood never fit me. It took a long time, but I finally reconciled with the fact that being able to run in heels and pop a grackle off the birdfeeder from thirty yards out are not mutually exclusive: a skill is a skill, and the injection of some femininity into a traditionally masculine feat can be wildly refreshing. We’ve only just begun to explore the genre of the fierce warrior woman—mine is merely one of infinite definitions.
This novel begins in the fiery aftermath of a gruesome airship battle—and it only gets better from there. Our heroine, Josette, is a scrappy, hardworking airship captain who must contend with the undermining efforts of the fleet’s dubious general and his spies, all while fighting *actual* battles against an enemy that wants to blow her crew out of the sky. What really captured my attention about this book was the incredible descriptive voice displayed by the author: from the gory battle scenes to the complex inner workings of an airship, this is a truly immersive adventure. Josette is a smart, relatable heroine who pulls no punches and doesn’t let herself get sucked into the political minutiae, which keeps the story moving at a good clip.
For Josette Dupre, the Corps first female airship captain, it might just be a bullet in the back.
On top of patrolling the front lines, she must also contend with a crew who doubts her expertise, a new airship that is an untested deathtrap, and the foppish aristocrat Lord Bernat, a gambler and shameless flirt with the military know-how of a thimble. He's also been assigned to her ship to catalog her every moment of weakness and indecision.
When the enemy makes an unprecedented move that could turn the tide of…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
Here's my confession—I am a closet sadist. IRL, I carefully catch beetles and spiders in a jar to take them outside when I find them in the house. But at the keyboard? Mr. Hyde. I torture my major characters. A half dozen in Saturn Run look death in the face. Some die. In my second novel, Ripple Effect, it's way over a dozen and the carnage starts in the very first chapter. What can I say? I am a very nice and kind person, just not a nice and kind author!
This is not your parents’ steampunk! It’s an oh-so-different take on the genre with an edgy, improbable, and yet somehow entirely believable motley band of revolutionaries. Delightfully, it was born in a wisecrack! Maurice complained online about the lily-whiteness typical of steampunk mythology (tru dat!) and quipped that he might well have to write “Pimp my Airship” in retaliation. More than one editor told him that if he wrote it, they’d buy it. Well, what’s an author to do? So, he did.
And yes, there ARE airships, and yes, they ARE tricked out.
All the poet called Sleepy wants to do is spit his verses, smoke chiba, and stay off the COP’s radar—all of which becomes impossible once he encounters a professional protestor known as (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah. They soon find themselves on the wrong side of local authorities and have to elude the powers that be.
When young heiress Sophine Jefferson’s father is murdered, the careful life she’d been constructing for herself tumbles around her. She’s quickly drawn into a web of intrigue, politics and airships, joining with Sleepy and Knowledge Allah in a fight…
