Here are 2 books that Trying to Catch Lightning in a Jar fans have personally recommended if you like Trying to Catch Lightning in a Jar. Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail

Ruth Talbot Author Of The Raffle Baby

From Ruth's 3 favorite reads in 2025.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author

Ruth's 3 favorite reads in 2025

Ruth Talbot Why Ruth loves this book

As someone who writes often about the grit and quiet heroism of Appalachian people in the early 20th century, I felt an immediate kinship with Emma Gatewood. Her story isn’t just about a walk—it’s about endurance, trauma, and dignity. Expertly researched.

By Ben Montgomery ,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Grandma Gatewood's Walk as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

2014 National Outdoor Book Award Winner in History / Biography

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, sixty-seven-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. By September 1955 she stood atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin, sang “America, the Beautiful,” and proclaimed, “I said I’ll do it, and I’ve done it.”

Driven by a painful marriage, Grandma Gatewood not only hiked the trail alone, she was the first person—man…


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Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

Book cover of North Woods

Peggy Jenkins

From Peggy's 3 favorite reads in 2025.

Unknown Author Why Peggy loves this book

Great perspective

By Daniel Mason ,

Why should I read it?

34 authors picked North Woods as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.

“With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle

New York…


Book cover of Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
Book cover of North Woods

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