Here are 96 books that Virus Tropical fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am the Chief Legal Officer at a US publicly traded company. Although I was born in Iran, I immigrated to the US from Iran at age ten. When I was three years old, my father’s side of the family tried to take my brother and me away from my mother after my father passed away. She fought a custody battle and lawsuit and eventually was forced to flee Iran with us during the revolution. I am passionate about the Iranian Revolution, my relationship with my very strong and remarkable mother who has been a mentor to me, as well as family relationships within Iranian families.
I love “Persepolis” because the author very accurately and with a great amount of humor describes, and through graphics, portrays the very heavy topic of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
She makes it easy for people who weren’t there at the time and are not a part of the culture or history to imagine what happened. I like how she describes family relationships, especially with her parents, in a tribal culture. In a very transparent way, she accurately describes the differences between private family life and the one that is portrayed publicly.
Wise, often funny, sometimes heart-breaking, Persepolis tells the story of Marjane Satrapi's life in Tehran from the ages of six to fourteen, growing up during the Iranian Revolution.
The intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-grandaughter of Iran's last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life.
Amidst the tragedy, Marjane's child's eye view adds immediacy and humour, and her story of a childhood at once outrageous and ordinary,…
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…
I have worked as an illustrator and visual storyteller throughout my adult life, illustrating children’s fiction books and comics for educational publications. My educational work focused on publications for kids with special needs, this gave me training in how to communicate visually, very clearly and concisely. I now collaborate with my partner Sakina Karimjee making beautiful graphic novels full-time. Toussaint Louverture is our first; we are now working on our second.
Joe Saccos’ work has had such an impression on me.
In 1991-1992, Sacco spent two months in the occupied territories, collecting stories for this masterpiece of journalism and comics. He was breaking new ground; Comics Journalism as a form did not really exist before this book.
On the ground, Sacco found that as a cartoonist, he could delve deeper into the experiences of the Palestinians he interviewed; all knew their identities were safe as the book would be drawn, with no identifying photos, no names. Their stories and pain pour forth.
Looking back on this publication thirty years later, the situation has become far, far worse for Palestinians. This book is an excellent primer to understand the atrocities of the present and the context of their past.
In late l991 and early 1992, at the time of the first Intifada, Joe Sacco spent two months with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, travelling and taking notes. Upon returning to the United States he started writing and drawing Palestine, which combines the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comic-book storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighty situation. He captures the heart of the Palestinian experience in image after unforgettable image, with great insight and remarkable humour.
The nine-issue comics series won a l996 American Book Award. It is now published for the first…
Documentary Comics are this genre of comics in which you can make a community visible, denounce a crime or expose yourself to the world. Being able to dialogue with the world while dialoguing with the reader is amazing. The elements you have to take into account the things you can hide in the silence of a drawing, compelling the reader to read again, to find the easter egg about that thing you really want to talk about. The ways of telling the truth in drawings. All those things are the things that I love about documentary comics.
I am not recommending a particular volume or compilation. In general I love the work of Harvey Pekar. He has brought me closer to Documentary Comics than any other author. He worked with reflections and anecdotes and was one of those authors that from the writing was able to defy the common places in comics making. Yes, he was a scriptwriter, but he pulled out so many amazing comics from the graphic formula and made them work. I remember seeing gigantic balloons with blocks of text. Pages and pages of close-ups, and they weren’t boring. A comic about him reflecting on his masculinity by unclogging the toilet. Amazing.
Meet Harvey Pekar, a true American original. For over 25 years he's been writing comic books about his life, chronicling the ordinary and mundane in stories both funny and touching. Working as a hospital file clerk in Cleveland, his dead-on eye for the frustrations and minutiae of the workaday world mix in a delicate balance with his insight into personal relationships. Illustrating his stories are the cream of the underground comics world, including the legendary Robert Crumb. Pekar has been called 'the blue collar Mark Twain', and compared to Dreiser, Dostoevsky and Lenny Bruce. With American Splendor now an award-winning…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
Documentary Comics are this genre of comics in which you can make a community visible, denounce a crime or expose yourself to the world. Being able to dialogue with the world while dialoguing with the reader is amazing. The elements you have to take into account the things you can hide in the silence of a drawing, compelling the reader to read again, to find the easter egg about that thing you really want to talk about. The ways of telling the truth in drawings. All those things are the things that I love about documentary comics.
This is not a best-seller graphic novel, you don’t see this book on every bookstore shelf. I discovered it because of Nina Mickwitz’s Documentary Comics. I ordered it from the library network that we had at my grad school. My degeneration is a Jewel of a book in many senses, it is a sincere book, a dialogue that goes through many channels: the images drawn, the text typed, and the way the book was made. The shifting in the line makes you think about the process and the author not just as a character but as a person experiencing the world from certain conditions and telling you about that experience.
How does one deal with a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease at the age of forty-three? My Degeneration, by former Anchorage Daily News staff cartoonist Peter Dunlap-Shohl, answers the question with humor and passion, recounting the author's attempt to come to grips with the "malicious whimsy" of this chronic, progressive, and disabling disease. This graphic novel tracks Dunlap-Shohl's journey through depression, the worsening symptoms of the disease, the juggling of medications and their side effects, the impact on relations with family and community, and the raft of mental and physical changes wrought by the malady.
Each of these novels, in their own way, forces us to confront the realities of war and power, showing how fragile humanity truly is. They’ve inspired me to reflect on how interconnected we are, especially regarding the scars of conflict. I am reminded of the John Donne poem that inspired Hemingway’s title, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)–which begins: “No man is an island, intire of its selfe; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the maine.” War doesn’t just affect the soldiers: war has its hooks in us all.
This book is an eye-opening look into modern warfare, particularly in the context of Colombia and America’s military involvement there. Klay, a veteran himself, writes with a moral clarity that brings home the idea that war is never just a localized conflict—it’s part of a much bigger web of power, politics, and personal ambition. The novel follows multiple perspectives, from American soldiers to Colombian civilians, each grappling with their role in the chaos.
What I found most compelling is how Klay shows the ripple effects of violence—how decisions made in one corner of the world can devastate communities thousands of miles away. This book intimates tough questions about the ethics of intervention and how far-reaching the consequences of these decisions can be. It’s an intimate, often painful look at how war transforms individuals, and it challenges us to think about the cost of global conflict—not just for those on the…
'Expansive, explosive and epic' Marlon James 'A courageous book' New York Times Book Review
A BARACK OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR
Neither Mason, a US Special Forces medic, nor Lisette, a foreign correspondent, has emerged from America's long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unscathed. Yet, for them, war still exerts a terrible draw - the noble calling, the camaraderie, the life-and-death stakes. Where else in the world can such a person go?
All roads lead to Colombia, where the US has partnered with the local government to stamp out a vicious civil war and keep the predatory narco gangs at…
I wear many aprons. I am a writer; a professor of creative writing and literature; a mother to five children – daughters and sons; the wife of a criminal defense attorney; and the daughter of therapists. I read and write at the intersection of these influences: crime, motherhood, and psychology. When I teach children’s literature, I lean toward the Brothers Grimm. Childhood is grittier – more suspenseful – when we darken the stories. The same is true of motherhood. Nobody wants to read about a perfect mother, especially when mothers spend so much of our psychic energy worried about our children in the forms of violence, illness, and death. I prefer to seek out books that complicate the otherwise pristine stories of our lives we pretend to tell.
So much of this book is filled with folklore and magic, but the provocative and devastating ending, which raises important questions about motherhood and the fine line between animal and human consciousness, guts the reader as any honest book should. I’ve always been fascinated by the wide range of strong opinions people feel in response to a simple question: Are pets equal to children in the hierarchy of living things? I was fully transported into this surprising exploration of violence and motherhood.
*Finalist for the US National Book Award for Translated Literature 2020*
In Colombia's brutal jungle, childless Damaris develops an intense and ultimately doomed relationship with an orphaned puppy.
Colombia's Pacific coast, where everyday life entails warding off the brutal forces of nature. In this constant struggle, nothing is taken for granted.
Damaris lives with her fisherman husband in a shack on a bluff overlooking the sea. Childless and at that age 'when women dry up,' as her uncle puts it, she is eager to adopt an orphaned puppy. But this act may bring more than just affection into her home.…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
Over my two decades as a scholar of American foreign policy and international politics, I had multiple opportunities to serve as a Latin America foreign policy aide. Given that Latin America plays a central role in the U.S.-hatched modern war on drugs, much of my policymaking was directly or indirectly tied to drug policy. I thus wrote Drugs and Thugs above all to make sure that I had a good sense of the history of this seemingly eternal conflict, one that is “fought” as much at home as abroad.
Decades before Netflix’s hit series Narcos, Gugliotta and Leen turned their prize-winning series of articles in The Miami Heraldinto a highly original book, Kings of Cocaine. What astounds me is how well the author’s uncovering the psychopathic violence, unimaginable profits, and political and social corruption of the Colombian cocaine trade. And this rot and bloodshed were not just occurring in the less developed Colombia but right inside Ronald Reagan’s America.
This is the story of the most successful cocaine dealers in the world: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, Carlos Lehder Rivas and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. In the 1980s they controlled more than fifty percent of the cocaine flowing into the United States. The cocaine trade is capitalism on overdrive -- supply meeting demand on exponential levels. Here you'll find the story of how the modern cocaine business started and how it turned a rag tag group of hippies and sociopaths into regal kings as they stumbled from small-time suitcase smuggling to levels of unimaginable sophistication and daring.…
The newspaper crime beat sunk its talons into my flesh nearly 50 years ago and has never let go. As Shakespeare knew, the best stories—about love and hate, life and death, good and evil—can be found on the daily police blotter. I’ve spent my career writing about those tales in newspapers, online, and in books. My interest has never really been the gore—a tally of the knife wounds or the volume of blood lost. No, my fascination is the mind and the psychology of the criminal, who always believes he is smarter than the rest of us—and is generally proven wrong.
Do you like to root for the bad guy? Then George Jung, the central figure in this true crime classic about the Columbia-to-America cocaine snowstorm of the 1980s, might just be your man.
Author Porter weaves a brisk, vivid narrative about his anti-hero Jung, a likable goofball stoner who stumbles into the big-time international coke biz and isn’t smart enough to get out (and he had his chances, lord knows).
Johnny Depp did a memorable job of portraying Jung in the film version of Blow (released in 2001), but the Porter’s book takes the reader three or four levels deeper into the absurdities of Jung’s narcotics hellscape.
BLOW is the unlikely story of George Jung's roller coaster ride from middle-class high school football hero to the heart of Pable Escobar's Medellin cartel-- the largest importer of the United States cocaine supply in the 1980s. Jung's early business of flying marijuana into the United States from the mountains of Mexico took a dramatic turn when he met Carlos Lehder, a young Colombian car thief with connections to the then newly born cocaine operation in his native land. Together they created a new model for selling cocaine, turning a drug used primarily by the entertainment elite into a massive…
Emotional novels are my forte. I love to read them, and I especially love to write them. Most folks say they want a book they can’t put down – but I search for ones that I have to put down and walk away from long enough to pull myself together. I want stories that linger with me, that infiltrate my dreams – books that inspire me to create works in their honor. While my life is great, sometimes I just want to get away to a world where right prevails, long conquers all, and holding out for a hero is not an impossible dream. Trust me, these picks will not disappoint.
My God, this book ripped my heart out and put it back together again. I love stories that make me cry and I’ve made that a goal in my own writing. I want to make the reader laugh, weep, and swoon – then I know I’ve done my job. This book fulfills those requirements in spades. I adored this story. I’ve reread this book a dozen times or more. The characters, Nathan & Bella, will be with me forever.
It was supposed to be simple. All Navy SEAL Nathan Malone had to do was rescue three young girls from a Columbia drug cartel, then allow himself to be captured long enough to draw out a government spy. That was before his mission went disastrously wrong...and before his wife, Bella, was told that Nathan was never coming home.Bella's mourned her husband's death for three long years. But she has no idea he's still alive. Forced to assume a new identity, the man Nathan is now dead. If he can get back to his wife, can he keep the secret of…
As someone who has endured great challenges in life, I am fascinated by stories about overcoming obstacles and facing difficult challenges. We do not choose where we are born or to what circumstances ,but we do have the opportunity to rise above those challenges that we face on a daily basis. The human spirit and the desire for a better future is a universal gift we all share.
I don’t think Garcia Marquez needs a review or introduction. Reading any of his books is a pleasure, with easy and delightful writing and striking sentences.
These sentences often describe things or people in a way that feels natural and perfectly captured. For instance, he describes the world as so new that many things lack names. His eloquent descriptions, like that of ice, create vivid images. The characters are relatable, and you feel a happy exhaustion after finishing the book, reminiscent of great works like Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
Those who find the stories too unbelievable should learn about Colombian history, as they provide real context. I simply love the book!
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
