100 Books Like The Leisure Seeker

This story is a twist on a familiar Lewis Carroll tale.

It is unsettling in a dementia-like way, spinning the reader from the known into the unknown with just enough of the old story to keep them from tipping completely off balance, hope and dark humor always alive. 

This book helped me with the twisting of fact and fiction in my own books, where I used many of my own family incidents (and fears), but gave them to fictional characters with their own generational slant.

Receiving a dementia diagnosis at just 58 years old can be paralysing, but Wendy Mitchell chose a different path. Instead of preparing for the end, she embraced life with newfound determination.

Wendy became a passionate advocate and speaker for dementia awareness. Her remarkable journey includes earning two honorary doctorates and achieving many of her life's dreams, including becoming a published author to share her deeply personal story.

With engaging wit and unwavering courage, Wendy candidly narrates her daily battle with the illness. Her story is both heartwarming and inspirational, as she shows us that despite the challenges, dementia can also bring unexpected gifts alongside sorrow.

Wendy's character is endearing, and her resilience shines through, leaving readers with a profound sense of hope and a deeper understanding of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

You cannot help what your body or the chemistry of the mind does. And the journey of self-acceptance, the love of the family around her, and the understanding this could happen to any of us is a reality.

I felt for the characters and was slowly led down the path of the horrors of losing your memory. It was a steady decline, and I felt every feeling with each page turn.

I was taken by surprise by this unassuming man and his measured journey.

The premise didn’t sound like a page turner. I expected the pacing to be slow, and it is. But in my opinion, his pilgrimage is anything but dull. Life is messy, and his regrets are many, and just the fact that he embarks on this journey is pretty miraculous. I didn’t think he had it in him to finish the 627-mile trek, but I stayed with him—for along the way his observations were profound.

Ms. Joyce’s use of plain language captures the ordinariness of Harold, but his insights are a treasure trove.  Like Harold says, “A journey isn’t measured in miles but in moments that change us forever.”

This book inspired me to write my own account of dealing with my mum’s Alzheimer’s.

This darkly comic yet gripping novel reveals the humorous aspects of the disease. Maud, an eighty-year-old who grapples with forgetting even the cup of tea she just made or recognising her own daughter, surprisingly unravels a seventy-year-old mystery.

The story delicately weaves warm and uplifting moments with touches of comedy, anxiety, and sheer terror that arise when one realises the advancing years and the struggle to be heard in a society that often overlooks the elderly. The portrayal of dementia in this novel is both sympathetic and profoundly moving, capturing the emotional complexity of the experience.

Maud's character is both exasperating and compelling, embodying the kind of older protagonist I yearn to encounter more in literature.

As a kid, I loved this funny and frightening book about the terrible things that happen to bratty children (the same could be inferred for bratty octogenarians).

I’m sure my parents hoped these tales would encourage more reasonable behavior. Instead, these tales set me on a path to writing dark stories. In this case, the contrast of humor and the horrifying is addictive, and characters in any kind of book that combine these traits are always compelling.

The illustrations in the version published by John C. Winston Company are particularly quirky, increasing the impact of each story. This book probably had more influence on my book than I realized during the writing.

In 1948, my life focused on horses, and this was my favorite book.

Pictures were always a plus since dyslexia (though undiagnosed at that point) made reading difficult.

I have no memory of how well the book might have been written. Most likely I didn’t care, never suspecting I’d become a writer. I lived and worked on a farm, eventually running a boarding stable.

The book didn’t have the horror or the humor, but Lightning’s gratifying story of achievement gave me hope for the future, unlike Black Beauty which filled me with horror. I couldn’t read it to my children.

His hideous treatment overwhelmed me, yet the first two books I wrote were even darker.

This exquisitely written, dark saga of family intrigue is worth reading over and over, and I do.

The protagonist’s devotion to family and the land that feed her, both physically and emotionally, is rich and consuming.

Events are seen from her point of view and her antagonist’s, giving opposing slants that generate an exquisite tension throughout the book.

This story was instrumental in my education as a writer, as was the author, both showing the use of deep interiority in every character, and a setting that made me live within the story.

As Sallirae ministered to the elderly in an upscale continuing care community, she wondered how some residents aged into a graceful presence that attracted people to them, while others drove people away with their grumpy discontentedness. Some remained curious and engaged in life, but others shrank in interest and spirit. She studied her subjects and their histories closely and rewarded readers with practical tips to adopt in middle age to prevent us from poisoning our later years with grief and regret. What exactly can we do now to live our old age in joy and contentment? Sallirae died in 2007 at age 66, too young to reap the wise and graceful old age she bequeathed to the rest of us. I hold her memory in gratitude as I myself grow old. 

I recommend this hot and sexy collection of erotic fiction and memoir because for me it doubles as a source of arousal and a mesmerizing glimpse of the range of sexual activities that seniors (mostly hetero, some lesbians, some gay men) imagine and carry out.

From the slow sex of long-term lovers, to hand jobs offered despite arthritic hands or carpel tunnel, to the variety of ways married couples orchestrate hot love-making, to the pleasure of “in-the-meantime” lovers, these stories sizzle and burn. They expand our view of what is sexually possible as we age, and provide an inspiring and stimulating bedside reference for singles and couples of all ages.

To be savored one story at a time, not gulped down as a whole.