100 Books Like The Train to Impossible Places

As a kid, I was hooked on the vast wide-open freedom of this story. The notions of hidden treasure maps, buried fortunes, stealthy smugglers and dangerous pirates affected me in profoundly positive ways, stimulating a wanderlust and a love of adventure.

Although Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson set this swashbuckling tale on the south coast of England and on the elusive “Treasure Island” in the Caribbean, it was inspired by his childhood experiences in Scotland, most notably trips with his dad to rocky islands and promontories (RLS’s father was a lighthouse engineer who designed and built many iconic lighthouses).

When my father took the five-year-old me to The Admiral Benbow en route to a family holiday in Cornwall, I was amazed to find that the inn was a real place. It felt bristlingly alive to me, for this was the same inn where Billy Bones had lodged with the treasure… show more.

This book combines time travel, computer games, and some very thorny puzzles as a group of friends are trapped in a virtual reality game from the future. This isn’t just a simple ‘solve the puzzles to get home’ story, though: there’s something darker going on behind the scenes and as more and more was revealed, I found myself dying to know what was happening. The story is fast-paced, great fun, and different from anything I’d read before.

I was given this book as part of Christmas book exchange. My friend thought I’d love it, and she was right. It’s a pirate story at heart, but the action takes place on a frozen landscape and instead of a ship, the Frostheart is a sleigh. The characters are great, especially Ash and his Yeti friend. The pages are packed with danger, magic, and laughs. All my favourite things.

This book took my breath away when I first read it. An adventure travelling across galaxies, weaving ancient mythology with aliens and spaceships and stars that may literally be singing. I have the hardback edition and the illustrations are stunning. Parts of the book have a graphic novel feel, with the illustrations picking up the storyline and taking it forward. It’s an unforgettable journey.

When I was a kid, I loved books about miniature things; they piqued my imagination and had me thinking long after the story was finished.

The Victorian Era family of five living inside the snow globe is not only miniature but it has its own weather system—and it hasn’t snowed in a long time! The snow globe rests on the mantle of a “big house” with a mirrored human-sized family.

No one in the family remembers the snow globe except for Baby, who is left at home with Mama while everyone goes outside in the blizzard to play. Baby tips over the snow globe, giving the tiny family exactly what it has been waiting for; a blizzard! Now both families get to play in the snow and it’s ever so much fun! Wonderful for children of all ages.

Like the Vikings? Want to read about real Vikings? Angus Donald’s first in a series takes you to the harsh realities of 8th century Europe and portrays the Vikings in all their aspects, both violent and noble.

He wears his impeccable research lightly though and it’s an explosive journey that is most compelling when dealing with the culture clash between Charlemagne’s growing empire and the Viking Dane warriors who listen to the beat of their own drum.

“Beserkers” were a caste of Vikings who would supposedly work themselves into a fearsome frenzy of blood rage in battle. But Donald goes deeper than stereotypes, showing the mystical and religious underpinnings of this class of warrior and in so doing bringing reason, emotion, and honor to their struggles. 

I desperately want to be best friends with Henry (Monty) Montague, the delightful, ridiculous, irrepressibly queer gentleman of this book.

The story follows Monty on a joyous and, at times, harrowing romp through 18th-century Europe, accompanied by his prickly but secretly brilliant sister and his quiet, kind-hearted best friend (who he’s totally in love with but far too clueless to do anything about.)

What I love the most about this story is the way it depicts queerness in a way that feels true to its historical setting. Monty interrogates his identity with the flawed language and beliefs he inherited from the world around him, which I suspect anyone who didn’t grow up with access to an open and loving queer community, i.e., most of us, can relate to.

It takes real historic breadth to write a comprehensive history of the nineteenth century and only a historian of the quality of Evans could pull it off so convincingly. Like his mentor Eric Hobsbawm—but unencumbered by the Marxian straight-jacket—Evans masterfully draws the links not only between decades and between countries and continents but also between the social, the economic, and the political. His book is no demographic history, but it takes demography seriously. This really matters in a century in which the Malthusian bonds were broken for some of humanity, not all of it, making it a period of European global supremacy underpinned by demographic takeoff, the effects of which we are still feeling.

This is Mark Twain’s hilarious, grumpy account of his travels, mostly through the Mediterranean region just after the Civil War. Even though it’s over a hundred years old, I laughed out loud and found a lot of it to be still recognizable from my own travels.

But it’s also kind of disturbingly non-politically correct, raising lots of troubling questions for me, anyway, about how Americans looked at Catholics and Muslims.

A tour de force! This is an amazing book that takes a historical view to explain the story of women’s exclusion from public life and the physical and epistemic violence they experienced through the witch trials in Europe.

I would never have put these two elements together–bringing witch trials into view to help us understand the exclusion of women from the political economy of everyday life. This, Federici argues, led to the restructuring of household relations and the role of women in them, which in turn reflected the changing needs of society with the rise of capitalism.

I found this book illuminating and inspiring as it also tells us about the struggles of women against the shifts in their roles.