100 Books Like The River Swimmer

Jerry Dennis is a true believer when it comes to the wonderment of the Great Lakes.

As someone who has lived on Lake Michigan’s shore for much of his life, he’s an ideal author for sharing his love of the Lakes, their history, and their ecological wealth.

He travelled through the Lakes on an antiquated sailing ship to the Erie Canal and eventually the Atlantic Ocean as part of this book, and that perspective brings a special clarity to just how wild and unruly this part of the continent remains, even in an age where cities line the shores and technological advances might lead us to take the Lakes, and their valuable freshwater resources, for granted. 

As you can already tell, I love a good travelogue. And as someone who was drawn to the Great Lakes originally via canoe, I found a fellow-traveler in Margaret Wooster.

Her vantage point comes from the hull of her boat, as she canoes and portages her way around the rivers that drain into Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and the St. Lawrence River. In canoeing these waterscapes, she recounts the many centuries of history of the area but also shares her perspective as a conservationist when it comes to the challenges of protecting the Lakes and their rivers in our current moment.

Her attention to ecological detail, her rapt descriptions of wetlands riches, and her local storytelling invoke the intwined human and aquatic histories of this region. 

The first two books on my list are, in many ways, positive. Dan Egan’s book is not.

Egan tackles the ongoing ecological threats to the Great Lakes from a realist’s telling of its past environmental changes and future problems. Readers learn how a bombardment of human-induced invasive species have wracked the Great Lakes ecology in the recent past (think sea lampreys, alewives, and zebra and quagga mussels) and threaten to do so yet again in the near future, in the form of Asian carp entering the Chicago River.

Even welcomed biological introductions from the human perspective, such as the proliferation of Pacific salmon, have altered the Lakes’ environments. At the end, we’re left with the uneasy reality that the Lakes are a fragile set of freshwater ecosystems that remain at the mercy of humans, who can either protect or destroy them through future actions, or inaction.

I’m a historian, and I didn’t want to bog down this list with academic history books exclusively. But if I had to recommend one history book, written by a top-notch scholar that offers an accessible and accurate picture of the history of the Great Lakes, it would be Tanner’s Atlas.

This is so much more than just a collection of maps; it is a labor of love by an expert who dedicated her career to understanding the human geography of the Great Lakes region. Readers will find guides to everything from the region’s environmental resources to military clashes between Europeans and Native peoples.

The beautiful maps are further contextualized with text sections laying out the history of the Native peoples of the Lakes from pre-contact through the end of the treaty era in 1871. As someone who believes geography is crucial to understanding history, this is one of my… show more.

I love the poems in this book, which are all about shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. I was drawn in by the writing itself, which is specific and imagistic. The author does a really good job of imagining the lives of people who worked on these ships.

One of the things I remember most is the description of the various cargoes—peaches, Christmas trees, logs—not to mention the description of a boiler that explodes and crashes through the roof of a funeral home during a funeral. I never realized there were so many ships at the bottom of these lakes. Even reading about such tragedies, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful Morgan’s writing is.

After I moved to the Upper Peninsula, I kept hearing about an event referred to as the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan, when over 70 people were killed, most of them children, in 1913.

This book features that event as part of its plot, but it really drew me in because I felt so sympathetic to its main character, Annie Clements. She cares about people, and she cares about justice, and I admired her from the start. I wanted her to succeed even as I sensed she probably would not. She’s one of the few characters I actually grieved for when I finished the book.

Can you imagine losing your entire family to a plane accident? That’s what the heroine of this first-in-a-series book by Colleen Coble has to deal with.

With so many unanswered questions, Bree Nichols puts her K-9 search-and-rescue skills to work, looking for the bodies of her husband and son in the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Having been widowed young, my heart went out to her from the start.

Working with Park Ranger Kade Mathews, Bree stumbles upon a terrible crime that may be linked to the plane crash. I think this book speaks to the importance of never giving up on faith and hope, even when everything looks absolutely bleak.

The best thing about Ms. Coble’s books is her character development. The pacing is less of a thriller than a cozy mystery with a good dose of romance. While lacking a military hero, I do like that there is… show more.

What if the end of the world was the best day of your life? This intriguing premise drew me in, but it was the characters that kept me hooked through all seven books of this series.

Focused on a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula after an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) devastates America, the series is packed with characters who feel like real people, with relatable struggles and flaws. I was rooting for them as they fought to hold their town together against an onslaught of threats.

This book appealed to me because of its strong central character, Helena, who’s carrying around a big secret. Let’s face it—we all have secrets. But most of our secrets are comparatively minor. Helena’s is anything but. Helena’s past is complicated, which makes the plot complicated, just the way I like plots, but the book is still easy enough to follow.

I was interested to see how Helena appreciated some aspects of her past life, even if most people would consider her present life much better. I kept wanting to know more about this imagined place in the U.P., which seemed so strange even though it’s not that far from St. Ignace or Sault Ste. Marie or even the Mackinaw Bridge. 

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates is a disturbing look into the mind of a serial killer. Loosely based on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's notorious life and murders, Quentin P. is a young man struggling to come to terms with his disintegrating mental state as he succumbs to his urges and a psychopathic blood-lust. I recommend this book not because it is one of Oates's best books, but because it is one of her most interesting in the way it manages to capture such a realistic portrayal of the workings of a psychopathic mind. Unique, disturbing and thought-provoking, and well worth a read if you like SK novels.