Books like The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever — picked by fans

This is utterly unique in the way Norton Juster is able to build a fantasy world out of words, logic, and math.

As a young adult, I loved the idea of receiving a magic tollbooth and driving into a magic world. But, immediately, I found the book challenging because Milo ends up in the doldrums (a word I had never heard before). This is not just a fantasy adventure, but a cautionary tale, a character study, and a world full of puns and puzzles.

Returning to the book as an adult, I was amazed at how seamlessly Juster puts it all together.

This book is very sophisticated in terms of how it uses the fantasy world.

In the real world, Max’s emotions are controlling him, but in the fantasy world, he is in control of the wild things, and by extension, his emotions. The story perfectly captures what it is like to be overwhelmed by your emotions, but also to find a way to master them, so that when he returns to the real world, he is calm, and finds his supper waiting for him—and it is still hot.

Sendak’s art, and the story, are so appealing, and what kid doesn’t want to be the king of the wild things? It is brilliant and can be appreciated on many different levels.

My favorite novel, and I think one of the greatest leaps of imagination in literature.

It is not technically a portal story because Don Quixote does not travel to another world. Instead, he travels through another world created by his imagination. The brilliance is in the balancing act of spinning adventure after adventure while continuing to extend the meta-narrative, stories within stories.

In part two, Don Quixote reads and comments on Cervantes's rendering of his adventures in part one. On top of this, the author layers in social and literary commentary and humor. Despite being written over four hundred years ago, this book makes me laugh out loud over and over again.

For those who are not familiar with the great Winsor McKay, you have a treat waiting for you.

McKay was one of the great comic strip illustrators of the early twentieth century, and a big influence on Maurice Sendak, particularly Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. The Little Nemo strip ran in the New York Herald from 1905 to 1911. Every night, Little Nemo travels to a fantasy world, returning to his bed in the morning.

The scope of McKay’s imagination and his utterly unique and immersive art style make this strip the high-water mark of both writing and illustration.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is a fantastic tale of two worlds. There is the Land, a mystical place of good versus evil, with inhabitants who use supernatural means to summon help against the darkness, and our world where the writer Thomas Covenant lives as an outcast to keep his leprosy in remission and to avoid his hostile neighbors. When he is magically transported to the Land and its people beg him to fight the evil for them, he refuses, believing it is a suicidal delusion that will reactivate his disease and kill him. The troubled hero Covenant could not be more compelling, or his dilemma better written, especially as the true-blue inhabitants of the Land struggle to understand why he can’t do the right thing.

This book took me to places that I never knew existed.

Once I began to read the book, I was drawn into a land of beauty and realism that I could literally see as I read the story. I learned so much about the strengths and weaknesses of a human being. It made me examine my own inner self.

I saw terrible things happening to deep and intense people in the story, and I saw them react in the best and the worst ways. The beauty and pain that Donaldson put into this book were far more than I had expected or been ready to face myself.

Fedor insists they are thieves, not assassins, but his mentor and a ravenglass dagger say otherwise.

This is a fascinating Dark Fantasy series with magical weapons and wyverns with personality and dark secrets, not least of all their association with the Assassins Guild. Two unlikely anti-heroes get deeper and deeper into trouble with protection gangs, a totally insane assassin who chooses Fedor to replace himself, and a brutal world where danger lurks behind every choice.

I love this book because it made me laugh when I probably shouldn’t have.

The way sickness seeps into ordinary moments, the way your mind can twist itself into something unrecognizable. I remember laughing at the absurdity of some scenes and then realizing how close they were to the way fear really works.

It’s incredibly elegant, disturbing, and oddly funny in the absolutely best ways. That combination is addictive for me, and I still talk about it.

I want to include a fellow British writer in my list and JEM is my favorite for suspenseful steamy stories. The Brit is the first in the Unlawful Men series. Dark and broken, mafia anti-hero Danny Black is brooding and bad. He is not supposed to fall in love with the women he takes as ‘collateral’ in a deadly game of power. Rose Cassidy has learnt to be tough to survive. Danny sees her as the mirror of himself. Their twisted attraction is not for the feint-hearted but I loved it!

I love this novel because it mixes Southern Gothic with speculative fiction in a hilarious epic struggle between man and hog. When middle-aged taxidermist Romie Futch becomes a research subject in the shady Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, he becomes both super genius and guinea pig, his middle-aged brain now brilliant beyond comprehension. Troubled by errant downloads that track his thoughts and actions, Romie turns taxidermy into pop art as he hunts down the legendary super pig “Hogzilla.” This is the funniest, wittiest book I’ve read in a long time.