100 Books Like The Stars Are Fire

I love this book about seriously kickass women. Mi-Ja and Young-sook are part of a collective of women who live on the Korean Island of Jeju and support their families and communities, such as Haenyeo, sea divers. They dive without the aid of scuba equipment.

The story covers several decades, from 1930s Japanese colonialism through WW II and the Korean War to the present day, so we get to see our protagonists grow from young girls through middle age and into old age. In this world, the men raise the children while the women work, and as women age, they are held higher in all regards. 

I was so blown away by the fierce determination, athleticism, and girl power that these women share. Admittedly, The Island of Sea Women is an outlier here, as it doesn’t just focus on their middle-aged years, but I couldn’t miss this opportunity to recommend… show more.

As an 80s kid, it pains a small part of me to recommend a historical fiction book that takes place in 1984, but this book goes into so much more than simply the tragic fire that destroyed part of the LA Central Library. While I found those aspects compelling, what really drew me in was the history of library sciences and how women played—and got pushed out of—the history of such beloved institutions.

There is also a nice bonus of humanity restored for all those who helped salvage as many books as they could after the tragedy. I found it to be a really gripping and informative read.  

The narrator and protagonist, Ana, grabbed my heart and imagination immediately. Her tenacity, vulnerability, heartbreak, and clarity brought me into every experience she had throughout the story, one of which was being Jesus' wife. I loved that the experience of being Jesus’ wife was not the epicenter of her being. Instead, the depth of her longing to write and find her purpose in that calling shone through.

This book resonated deeply with me, helping to round out my childhood experience of religion, in particular, the bible being held in a very patriarchal view. 

This book grabbed my heart and mind and would not let me go. I cried several times and finished it in a week, which is fast reading for a slow reader like me.

I love how historical fiction teaches me more about a time period and person. This book threw me right into the late 1890s and the world of Louis Comfort Tiffany and his “glass girls”. It was fascinating to hear these un-sung stories of the female workers in his glass factory and I especially loved the banter between Clara and Tiffany and how tough of a woman she was standing up to this powerful and talented man. 

Bonus points, there is a museum near me with the largest collection of Tiffany glass and I was able to visit after reading the book to see some of the pieces and photographs of the glass woman who helped create such beautiful and timeless pieces. 

Having worked bank robberies as a former FBI Special Agent, I have a keen sense as to what makes these people tick. Most are quite ignorant, however, occasionally clever planning takes place by those as brazen as Hogan has portrayed here. A true masterpiece, Chuck Hogan does a splendid job bringing his characters to life in all the real-life depictions you will enjoy. This is a gut-wrenching roller coaster mixing crime with romantic infatuation to the point you can’t stop reading. I’ll admit, once the movie came out, I had to get the book and now it’s one of my all-time favorite crime thrillers.

The University of Michigan professor-emeritus William Ian Miller is, of course, essential reading on violence and revenge, particularly his Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga, Iceland.

But Miller has been so deservedly lauded elsewhere – and his books so widely recommended – that I'm using this space to suggest that readers also open his sources. Among the sagas, Njal's Saga is much more complex than this one, and probably more revealing of the Saga tradition. But I'm a fan of the shorter, more readable Hrafnkel's, not least because I have a weakness for spooky horses.

Hrafnkel is a bully who would not pay compensation, and the arc of his distinctly pre-modern biography is not what you might expect. In fact, it will make you realize exactly how much what we call "modern" is really a product of legal development, including our ideas about satisfying narratives.

Also, dark… show more.

This is by all estimation the greatest of the sagas. I would even claim that its excellence allows it to be fairly mentioned in the same breath as the Iliad, Don Quixote, and the tragedies of Shakespeare. It is quite complex and I would suggest, if I am allowed to, my Why is Your Axe Bloody? (2014) as a guide. But the present Penguin translation is a travesty and should be avoided. The best English translation available is the older Penguin translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (1961) and still available from various used booksellers online. Their translation is as good as a translation can get. Hrafnkels saga is a perfect entry to the sagas because it is short and compact and prepares one for the complexity of Njáls saga. 

This is a page-turner of a novel about a shooting at a women’s reproductive health services clinic in Mississippi, where the 15-year-old daughter of the hostage negotiator is caught inside the clinic. A variety of people are trapped inside the clinic for hours that day. The shooter, the daughter, the hostage negotiator, the abortion doctor, a pro-life protestor who was spying inside the clinic, and a woman who just had an abortion in the clinic–their characters and motivations are all very understandable to me, which makes the tension about this horrible situation that much more riveting. 

This book, from a fin de siècle Scotsman, is a classic of literature in its own right. It contains a perfectly brilliant reading of the sagas as well as other works of medieval literature. It has never been surpassed and is perhaps unsurpassable. Every sentence is an elegant gem, with one nonobvious insight after another. He just nails it. Ker reminds you that literary criticism need not be pretentious and badly written as it so often is. Treat yourself. 

I read all of Catherine Cookson’s novels at a much too-young age, having “borrowed” them from my mom’s bookshelf when she wasn’t looking. I was immediately hooked. So many of Cookson’s books, not just The Girl, pit the wealthy, landed class against their poorer servants, and this theme made a deep impression on me. In fact, I think that Cookson, along with Dickens, probably had the most influence on my personal writing style.