100 Books Like The Pastel City

This entire series was amazing. Okay, a few of the books were a bit slow, but overall, it was great. The new worlds, the political intrigue, everything about this story was great. There were histories that drove the characters that were only hinted at or mentioned in passing, but they brought life to them. Just like we are all shaped by our past, our countries, and our places in society, so are all the characters in this book.

My favorite character wasn’t Paul, though; it was Duncan Idaho. I was so sad when he was killed, but I was fascinated when they brought him back from the dead in the second book and others because Herbert made it so interesting. The bodyguard programmed, created even, to kill the one he once died to protect. Now, that’s some drama right there. 😊 

The twists, turns, and world-building were amazing. I learned… show more.

The only Young Adult book on this list but firmly deserving of its place, this book is the perfect example of how to successfully blend science fiction and fantasy. 

Colfer takes a traditional fantasy fairy society and gives them advanced weaponry, surveillance gadgets, and time-stopping devices. It works incredibly well, and through convincing world-building I was immediately bought into the idea of fantasy creatures with sci-fi technology. 

A standout feature of the novel is the characters, whose backstories, motivations, and behaviours all help to build this science fantasy world. We get an elf “LEPRecon” officer with access to bionic wings, a centaur who heads the technology department of the “Lower Elements Police,” and a dwarven thief who sells stolen human property on the black market. They were all enormously fun to read.

For me, Hyperion epitomizes the Gothic space opera.

It may not sound like it on the surface, with the book often being described as a sci-fi spin on the Canterbury Tales, but the devil’s in the details, and Hyperion has many details indeed, with each character’s story bringing us deeper into both their personal darkness and the darkness of the larger world: the labyrinthine Time Tombs; the Cruciform parasite that turns immortality into a curse; and of course, the eldritch godlike entity known as The Shrike.

As an easily-bored reader, I was floored by how easily Hyperion held my attention, as each of the characters’ stories not only made me care about them more, but also contributed to the adventure they shared...especially when it all came to a head in the sequel, Fall of Hyperion.

Spanning multiple worlds, time periods, and philosophical ideas, Hyperion has everything I want… show more.

This book drew me in from the first sentence: “It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.” I was amazed that in just eleven words, Wolfe conjured three time periods (the present moment, the future, and a later future while looking back).

The incredible adventures of the narrator, Severian, span five books, and I’ve read them all several times. Shadow is also one of the most challenging science fiction books I’ve read because the author leaves mysteries behind for me to figure out myself.

Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. I believe that her long poem, The First Water Is the Body, the centerpiece of Postcolonial Love Poem, is The Waste Land of our era.

Lyrical and fierce, beautiful and scathing, it is both a cry from the outside and a spiritual lesson. After reading that poem, go to Snake Light and Ode to the Beloved’s Hips. I was led to her work by her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, which recounts the despair into which her brother, a drug addict, had placed her family.

Every English major in the 20th century (maybe even in the 21st!) came to grips with T.S. Eliot. 

People remember J. Alfred Prufrock and his love song. And The Waste Land has just passed its 100th birthday and readers are still scratching their heads over it.

T. S. Eliot was the man—along with several others—who made modern poetry “hard” and complicated, and he was quite a complicated figure himself.

Lyndall Gordon gives us Eliot in all his complexities and shows how he became our age’s Dr. Johnson.

The work is astonishing in its scope, covering all aspects of human frailty...but incidentally bathing London in a strange, yellow-hued, slightly dystopian light. T. S. Eiliot completely changed my view of the capital.

I still get goosebumps when I walk along the banks of the Thames. And having studied it for o’levels I still know a lot of it by heart.

This beautiful collection stopped me in my tracks. In many ways, it’s a quiet book – the poems celebrate moments of observation and intense connection with the natural world. Many are in the first person, a speaking ‘I’ or ‘we’ caught up in a tender encounter with creatures, stones, water, and grass.

In the words of one of the poems, “the world comes in by the ear,” and these delicate poems echo with music and the simple language of everyday speech. One of the things I love is the way our human lives always hover close – the worlds of work, of love, of our children growing up and moving away. All is brought closer by the quiet lessons of the natural world.

From 1927 to 1931 (and again in 1954), T. S. Eliot would send out a short poem as a Christmas greeting. There are only six of them, but they encapsulate the mystical and religious side of Christmas in ways that yearly move me.

From The Journey of the Magi to The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, Eliot reflects on the spiritually unsettling aspects of Christmas, where the cozy clashes with the necessity to change, and where reminiscence comes up against the mystery of our future, and we see how life brings up moments of spiritual vision.

I also love Eliot’s poetry (and his comments on the creative process) because of how different they are from Wordsworth’s—and equally profound. In essays including Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot argues that keeping your poetry “personal” artificially limits your material. And I think he’s right: some of my own best poems come from imagining my way into someone else’s mind.

Eliot’s own poetry, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, illustrates the value of this approach in how it crafts its titular character. Eliot can also write deeply intellectual poems like The Waste Land that transcend purely “personal” concerns by exploring history and that repay many re-readings. In addition to their thematic richness, Wordsworth’s and Eliot’s poems are also beautifully musical.