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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 Pastabilities

anchored on:our worldcontemporary

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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 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 of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • 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 about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • 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 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 Chrestomanci
                  Chrestomanci

                  series · 12 books · 1977

                  completed

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasymiddle grade+1 more

                  Chrestomanci, sometimes branded The Worlds of Chrestomanci, is a heptalogy of children's fantasy books written by British author Diana Wynne Jones, published from 1977 to 2006. In the context of the parallel universe setting of the books, Chrestomanci refers to both the British government office that is responsible for supervising the use of magic and Chrestomanci Castle in southern England, which is both residence and headquarters.

                • Cover of Worldweavers
                  Worldweavers

                  series · 4 books · 2007

                  similar bymagic schoolscontemporaryour worldfantasyyoung adult

                • Cover of Magic Shop
                  Magic Shop

                  series · 7 books · 1982

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasymiddle grade+1 more

                  Bruce Coville's Magic Shop books each send a different kid into Mr. Elives's strange antique shop, where an ordinary-looking item turns out to carry real magic and consequences. The Monster's Ring opens the series with a boy who buys a ring to scare a bully on Halloween, only to find he can genuinely transform into a monster. Later entries repeat the pattern with new objects and new children, tied together by the shop and its owner rather than a continuing plot.

                • Cover of My Magical Life
                  My Magical Life

                  series · 3 books · 2017

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasylightheartedmiddle grade+1 more

                • BU
                  Bunnicula Universe

                  series · 20 books · 1979

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasyhumorfunnyour world+1 more

                • Cover of Azazel
                  Azazel

                  series · 28 books · 1982

                  completed

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldfantasyfunny+1 more

                  Isaac Asimov's Azazel collects eighteen linked comic fantasy stories about George Bitternut, an eccentric linguist who stumbles onto an incantation summoning Azazel, a two-centimeter demon of formidable — if often disastrous — magical power. Azazel refuses to help George directly but repeatedly, chaotically, helps out George's friends instead, framed as tales George tells to an eager Asimov himself.

                • Cover of J. W. Wells & Co.
                  J. W. Wells & Co.

                  series · 8 books · 2003

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasyhumorfunny

                  J. W. Wells & Co. is Tom Holt's comic fantasy series about a London firm of "family sorcerers" (a name borrowed from Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Sorcerer), beginning with The Portable Door (2003) and running across eight novels to The Eight Reindeer of the Apocalypse. Each book follows the firm's hapless junior staff stumbling into magical bureaucracy, ancient rivalries and office-comedy chaos in roughly equal measure. The books are loosely connected workplace capers rather than one continuous plot.

                • Cover of Washington Witches / Jane Madison
                  Washington Witches / Jane Madison

                  series · 6 books · 2006

                  part of Magical Washington

                  similar bycontemporary+5 more

                • Cover of Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.
                  Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.

                  series · 37 books · 2012

                  similar bycontemporaryour world+3 more

                • HH
                  Hex Hall Universe

                  series · 4 books · 2010

                  similar bymagic schoolscontemporaryour worldyoung adult+1 more

                • Cover of Bromeliad
                  Bromeliad

                  series · 3 books · 1989

                  completed

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasy+2 more

                  The Nome Trilogy, also known as The Bromeliad, is a trilogy of children's books by British writer Terry Pratchett, consisting of the books Truckers (1989), Diggers (1990) and Wings (1990). The trilogy tells the story of the Nomes, a race of tiny people from another world who now live hidden among humans. Through the books they struggle to survive in the human world and, once they learn of their history from an artefact known as "The Thing", make plans to return home.

                • Cover of Groosham Grange
                  Groosham Grange

                  series · 2 books · 1988

                  similar bymagic schoolscontemporaryfantasymiddle grade

                  Groosham Grange follows twelve-year-old David Eliot, expelled from every other school, who is sent to a strange boarding school on a remote island where the staff and pupils are not what they seem. Anthony Horowitz drew on his own boarding-school years for the setup; the two-book series carries David from his arrival through The Unholy Grail as he's drawn deeper into the school's occult traditions and his own inherited standing as the seventh son of a seventh son.

                • Cover of Dragon Slayers' Academy
                  Dragon Slayers' Academy

                  series · 20 books · 1997

                  similar bymagic schoolsfantasyfunnylighthearted+2 more

                  Dragon Slayers' Academy is a children's book series written by author Kate McMullan and illustrated by Bill Basso, which currently features 20 books.

                • Cover of Miss Switch
                  Miss Switch

                  series · 5 books · 1971

                  completed

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasy+3 more

                • Cover of Fool on the Hill
                  Fool on the Hill

                  Matt Ruff · standalone novel · 1988

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasyhumorfunny+1 more

                  Fool on the Hill is a 1988 comic fantasy novel by American writer Matt Ruff, set at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

                • Cover of Young Wizards
                  Young Wizards

                  series · 24 books · 1983

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasyour world+2 more

                  Diane Duane's Young Wizards series begins with thirteen-year-old Nita, bullied and friendless, who borrows a library book on wizardry and discovers it's the real thing: an apprenticeship into a covert order that fights entropy, alongside a classmate named Kit. Across fifteen books published between 1983 and 2019, the two age forward in something close to real time as their missions escalate from New York streets to alien worlds and beyond. The series centers on the wizard's Oath and the idea that magic is a responsibility taken on to slow the universe's decay, not a power to be enjoyed for its own sake.

                • Cover of The Ogre Downstairs
                  The Ogre Downstairs

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1974

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasyfunnylighthearted+1 more

                  When a disagreeable man with two boys marries a widow with three children, family adjustments are complicated by two magic chemistry sets which cause strange things to happen around the house.

                • Cover of Creature Teacher
                  Creature Teacher

                  series · 4 books · 2015

                  similar byour worldcontemporarymiddle grade+3 more

                • Cover of Story Time
                  Story Time

                  Edward Bloor · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar bymagic schoolsour worldcontemporaryfantasy+1 more

                  George and Kate are promised the best education but instead face obsessed administrators, endless tests, and evil spirits when they are transferred to Whittaker Magnet School.

                • Cover of Bad Books
                  Bad Books

                  series · 3 books · 2014

                  similar bymagic schoolscontemporaryfantasyour worldmiddle grade

                • Cover of Artemis Fowl
                  Artemis Fowl

                  series · 15 books · 2001

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldfantasymiddle grade+1 more

                  Artemis Fowl is a series of eleven fantasy novels by Irish author Eoin Colfer, revolving around various members of the Fowl family. The first cycle, the Artemis Fowl series, consists of eight books, and the second cycle, The Fowl Twins series, is a trilogy. Both releases have received commercial success and positive critical reception in the children's literature genre, and also originated graphic novel adaptations. As of 2013, the novels have sold more than 21 million copies in 44 languages, and are one of the best-selling series of all time. In 2010, Artemis Fowl was voted by readers as their favorite Puffin Books title of all time.

                • Cover of Morning McCobb
                  Morning McCobb

                  series · 2 books · 2008

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfunnyyoung adult+3 more

                • Cover of Worst Witch
                  Worst Witch

                  series · 10 books · 1974

                  completed

                  similar byfantasylighthearted+3 more

                • Cover of Atlas (Olivie Blake)
                  Atlas (Olivie Blake)

                  series · 3 books · 2020

                  similar bymagic schoolsour worldcontemporaryfantasy

                  Olivie Blake's Atlas trilogy follows six magical scholars recruited into a secretive society that grants near-limitless magical resources in exchange for a mortal cost only revealed after they've already committed. The Atlas Paradox and The Atlas Complex escalate the group's rivalries and the price of the power they've been given. The series began as a self-published web serial before its traditional re-release.