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Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like Jimgrim

anchored on:adventureearly 20th centurymiddle east

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories about rising against rulers — uprisings, resistance movements, and revolutions and their aftermaths.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of El Borak
                  El Borak

                  series · 25 books · 1934

                  similar byadventurousadventureearly 20th centurymiddle east+2 more

                • Cover of Jimgrim / Ramsden
                  Jimgrim / Ramsden

                  series · 10 books · 1916

                  completed

                  similar byadventureearly 20th century+5 more

                  Talbot Mundy's Jimgrim (Jimgrim/Ramsden) novels follow James Schuyler Grim, an American adventurer and secret agent working across the Middle East and Central Asia in the years after the First World War, uncovering hidden treasures and secret societies amid colonial-era intrigue. Serialized in pulp magazines through the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, the loosely connected novels and novellas can mostly be read in any order. Mundy wrote in the swashbuckling, mysticism-tinged adventure-romance tradition typical of the period.

                • Cover of Tarzan
                  Tarzan

                  series · 50 books · 1912

                  part of Tarzan Universe

                  similar byadventurousadventureearly 20th century

                  Tarzan is a series of 24 adventure novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) and published between 1912 and 1966, followed by several novels either co-written by Burroughs, or officially authorized by his estate. There are also two works written by Burroughs especially for children that are not related to the main series.

                • Cover of The Ghost Kings
                  The Ghost Kings

                  H. Rider Haggard · standalone novel · 1908

                  similar byadventurousadventureexpeditionsearly 20th centurymystery & detective

                  The Ghost Kings is a 1908 mystery-adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard, set on the borders of Zululand in Africa.

                • Cover of Queen Sheba's Ring
                  Queen Sheba's Ring

                  H. Rider Haggard · standalone novel · 1910

                  similar byadventurousadventureexpeditions+1 more

                  Queen Sheba's Ring is a 1910 adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard set in central Africa. It resembles the author's earlier works King Solomon's Mines and She, featuring plotting priests, beautiful women, and daring British adventurers.

                • Cover of Kirby O'Donnell
                  Kirby O'Donnell

                  series · 5 books · 1934

                  completed

                  similar byadventurousadventureearly 20th centurymiddle east+1 more

                • Cover of Sphinx
                  Sphinx

                  Robin Cook · standalone novel · 1979

                  similar byadventurousexpeditionsadventuremiddle east+1 more

                  Sphinx is a 1979 novel by Robin Cook. It follows a young American Egyptologist named Erica Baron, on a working vacation in Egypt, who stumbles into a dangerous vortex of intrigue after seeing an ancient Egyptian statue of Seti I in a Cairo market. Cook's third novel, it is one of the few not centered on medicine.

                • Cover of Allan Quatermain
                  Allan Quatermain

                  series · 25 books · 1885

                  similar byadventurousadventureexpeditions

                  Allan Quatermain is the protagonist of H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines, its one sequel Allan Quatermain (1887), twelve prequel novels and four prequel short stories, totalling eighteen works. An English professional big game hunter and adventurer, in film and television he has been portrayed by Richard Chamberlain, Sean Connery, Cedric Hardwicke, Patrick Swayze and Stewart Granger among others.

                • CU
                  Caspak Universe

                  series · 4 books · 1918

                  similar byadventurousadventureearly 20th century+1 more

                  The Caspak trilogy — The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, and Out of Time's Abyss — is Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1918 adventure sequence set on a hidden Pacific island called Caprona, where a World War I-era U-boat crew discovers an isolated world of dinosaurs and successive stages of human evolution living side by side. The story was later adapted into comics by Mike Wolfer, credited alongside Burroughs.

                • Cover of The Lost Trumpet
                  The Lost Trumpet

                  J. Leslie Mitchell · standalone novel · 1932

                  similar byadventurousadventureexpeditionsearly 20th centurymiddle east

                  In modern day (1932) Cairo two American archeologists mount an expedition to find the great horn, which blown by Joshua, crumbled the walls of Jericho.

                • Cover of Thomas Lourds
                  Thomas Lourds

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar byadventurouspolitical intriguemiddle east+2 more

                • Cover of Jungle Girl
                  Jungle Girl

                  Edgar Rice Burroughs · standalone novel · 1932

                  similar byadventurousadventureexpeditionsearly 20th century

                  Jungle Girl is a novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, set in a forgotten kingdom in the jungles of Cambodia.

                • Cover of Walter Goodwin
                  Walter Goodwin

                  series · 3 books · 1918

                  completed

                  similar byadventurousexpeditionsearly 20th century

                  The Moon Pool (1919) and The Metal Monster (1920) are connected fantasy-adventure novels by A. Merritt, both narrated by the same character, Dr. Walter Goodwin, as he encounters hidden ancient civilizations and forces beyond ordinary science. The Moon Pool began as two related stories serialized in All-Story Weekly before being combined into a novel, and its success led Merritt to send Goodwin into a second, similarly strange discovery in The Metal Monster the following year. The two books follow Goodwin from one uncanny expedition to the next rather than forming a tightly plotted continuing saga.

                • Cover of Hearts of Three
                  Hearts of Three

                  Jack London · standalone novel · 1916

                  similar byadventurousadventureexpeditionsearly 20th century

                  Hearts of Three is an adventure novel by Jack London. The novel was finished right before the writer's death and released in 1919–1920 in the New York Journal. It is based on an idea by Charles Goddard.

                • Cover of Ancient Egyptian
                  Ancient Egyptian

                  series · 9 books · 1993

                  similar byadventurousmiddle east+2 more

                  Wilbur Smith's Ancient Egypt novels open with River God (1993), narrated by the loyal eunuch slave Taita as he guides the royal family's flight from the Hyksos invasion and their eventual return to power. The series, later continued by Smith with co-author Mark Chadbourn, follows Taita and Egypt's rulers across further installments including The Seventh Scroll, Warlock, and Desert God, spanning three decades of publication.

                • Cover of Duke de Richleau
                  Duke de Richleau

                  series · 4 books · 1933

                  completed

                  similar byearly 20th century+1 more

                  The Duke de Richleau novels follow Dennis Wheatley's aristocratic adventurer and occultist across four decades of twentieth-century intrigue, moving from a 1930s rescue thriller in The Forbidden Territory into Satanist set-pieces such as The Devil Rides Out and Strange Conflict, then a later case in Gateway to Hell. Wheatley wrote the books out of order over nearly forty years, but their internal chronology matches the order they were published in.

                • Cover of Cleopatra
                  Cleopatra

                  H. Rider Haggard · standalone novel · 1889

                  similar byadventurouspolitical intrigueadventuremiddle east

                  Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis is an adventure novel written by English author H. Rider Haggard and first printed in 1889 by Longmans. Cleopatra mixes historical action with supernatural events, and could be described as a historical fantasy novel.

                • Cover of The Cave Girl
                  The Cave Girl

                  Edgar Rice Burroughs · standalone novel · 1925

                  similar byadventurousadventureexpeditions

                  The Cave Girl is a lost world novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. Originally published in two separate stories, The Cave Girl begun in February 1913 and published by "All-Story" in July, August, and September 1913; and The Cave Man begun in 1914 and published by "All-Story Weekly" throughout March and April 1917. The book version was first published by A. C. McClurg on 1925-03-21. In August 1949, Dell Paperback published a version with a map captioned "Wild Island Home of Nadara the Cave Girl Where Violence and Bloodshed Rule."

                • Cover of The Maracot Deep
                  The Maracot Deep

                  Arthur Conan Doyle · standalone novel · 1929

                  similar byadventurousexpeditionsearly 20th centuryadventure

                  "Atlantis rediscovered on bed of Atlantic." – The British Science-Fiction Bibliography, 1937.

                • Cover of Prester John
                  Prester John

                  John Buchan · standalone novel · 1911

                  similar byadventurousadventureearly 20th century+1 more

                  Prester John is a 1910 adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It tells the story of the young Scotsman David Crawfurd and his adventures in South Africa, where a native uprising under the charismatic black minister John Laputa is tied to the medieval legend of Prester John.

                • Cover of Congo
                  Congo

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar byadventurousadventureexpeditions

                  WorldCat: On an expedition to return Amy, his talking gorilla, to her home in the Congo, Professor Peter Elliot is joined by others who hope to find a legendary diamond mine guarded by mutant gorillas.

                • Cover of Doc Savage radio scripts
                  Doc Savage radio scripts

                  series · 34 books · 1982

                  completed

                  part of Doc Savage

                  similar byadventurousadventureearly 20th century+2 more

                • Cover of The Thirty-Nine Steps
                  The Thirty-Nine Steps

                  John Buchan · standalone novel · 1915

                  similar byadventurousadventurepolitical intrigueearly 20th century

                  The Thirty-Nine Steps is a 1915 adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, first published by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. It was serialized in All-Story Weekly issues of 5 and 12 June 1915, and in Blackwood's Magazine between July and September 1915, before being published in book form in October of that year. It is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a knack for getting himself out of tricky situations.

                • Cover of Catacombs
                  Catacombs

                  John Farris · standalone novel · 1981

                  similar byadventurouspolitical intrigueexpeditionsadventure

                  Americans agents, Soviets agents and an archeaological team investigate the catacombs of an ancient advanced civilization in Africa.