100 Books Like Where You Linger & Other Stories

Reviewers of The Great Fossil Enigma thought that book strange. If they tried to think of a book like it, then they alighted on this one. I don’t see much similarity, but I do think Cohen’s book is strange. Her first paragraph is a single sentence of just seven words. It is: ‘This is not a book about mammoths.’ That sentence isn’t quite true because the book is about mammoths, but Cohen uses these animals as a pretext for a much grander history of science. The approach couldn’t be more different from the other books on my list. 

Kathryn is the best sci-fi author you haven’t read. How do I know? I was her critique buddy. We traded chapters as we wrote, each acting as advisor to the other.

I really liked Monkey Girl, a great choice for teen girls. But Project Hannibal is my favorite. Kathryn works at a zoo, so she knows a lot about animals. In Hannibal, she asks, could DNA from extinct woolly mammoths be used to impregnate a modern elephant? And if you could produce mammoth offspring, why do it?

As it turns out, mammoths might be exactly the wildlife our neglected planet needs. Join a flying doctor and her teenage assistant in a grand adventure across the wilderness of Alaska.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world where the last human left alive is a young boy, Fisher, this dystopian, fast-paced adventure story lets us glimpse a future where people tried...and failed...to save humanity. Determined to find out what happened, Fisher heads out on a wild journey with his robot, Click. This is one of the most unexpectedly laugh-out-loud middle grade novels I’ve ever read, and it combines the hilarity with incredible action scenes and a truly creepy “bad guy.” I devoured it in one sitting—this is a book I wish I could read for the first time again.

I picked up this book because of its gorgeous front cover. Reading the back cover, I was instantly mesmerized. Such ravishing words! And such a strange notion. What would happen if suddenly, mammoth trees shot up and filled every space, splintering and sweeping houses, shops, gas stations, and roads up into their inexorable, growing, entwined branches? Civilization is shattered—electricity, running water, communications, all gone—and in its place is an endless forest. This is a story of apocalypse like no other, lovely and terrible in equal measure. Our extremely reluctant hero, Adrien, must learn to not just survive in the world of the trees, but to find its magic, and to help humanity have a proper place in it. Mythical and deeply philosophical.

Two great talents came together to produce this classic story of a bored baby who annoys his parents by drawing on the walls. Only their home is a cave. In the night, he is whisked away by a mammoth, which could be terrifying, but the great beast just wants the baby to paint animals on his cave walls.

I was truly astonished to read a book that celebrates the dark side of life. It is full of unsavoury facts and includes many amazing lists. I found them really appalling, but at the same time was taken in by the sheer depravity of people from history.

In fact, I found myself reading this large volume twice as it was easy to forget just how nasty some of these characters were. I have recommended it to my friends, who also found it as fascinating as I did.

Willy Ley was a fascinating individual – a member and founder of the German VfR, the Rocket Society whose membership included Werner von Braun.

He fled Nazi Germany and settled in the United States, writing popular science articles, translating German science fiction, and writing some of his own. He was instrumental in popularizing the Space effort, even appearing on Disney’s Man into Space shows on television.

But he wrote on a range of topics, and his articles discussed the dwarf elephant fossil role in the myth of the Cyclops, the possible origins of the Babylonian sirrush, the role of fossil mammoths and wooly rhinoceros in shaping European legends, and the possible origins of the Unicorn legend.

The earth is in an another extinction period, and humans blame ourselves.

So we have the motive (guilt) to de-extinct what were once living organisms, like the passenger pigeon, Tasmanian tigers, and dodo bird. It turns out we also have the means: selective breeding, cellular cloning, CRISPR/Fanzor for specific genetic modifications.

All we needed was opportunity, and we have that now, too, in well-funded labs that can justify spending huge amounts of money on cloning a mammoth. But wiser men than I have raised an important question. What are the risks? This is why Britt Wray’s Rise of the Necrofauna is a must read for anyone planning a future vacation to a de-extinct zoo—like me.

Brad was one of the first psychologists to recognize that how we think about money is critical to financial success. My book gives you the tools; Brad’s gives you the mindset for success.

I was surprised to find that so many of my friends and family are wired for one aspect of living but not for financial success. Being a great ball player or surgeon does not mean you will be a great saver or financial planner.

This book will open your eyes to the mental pitfalls that keep so many from success. My book will show you what you need to do; this book will clear away clutter you never knew existed to give you confidence that you are on the right track.  

Dinosaurs are the gateway drug to kaiju: most Godzilla fans began as kids fascinated by T-rexes and brontosauruses. I was blown away when I discovered W.J.T. Mitchell’s wonky, geeky, and wonderfully eccentric exploration of why we love dinosaurs, actual monsters (albeit prehistoric ones we can only experience today as skeletons in museums) rather than monsters conjured from our darkest imaginations.

Mitchell’s book is lots of fun to dip into, like a jarful of monstrous candy, but reveals in wonderful detail how dinosaurs (just like the creatures of folklore or fiction) are blank slates onto which a culture’s anxieties and aspirations can be inscribed.