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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 The Devil's Mode

anchored on:literary & generaleuropehistorical fictionart and artistsmusicreflective+1 more

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 gods and deities act as characters — walking the world, meddling in mortal lives, or dying.
  • 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 A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
                  A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

                  Julian Barnes · standalone novel · 1989

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                  A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by English writer Julian Barnes published in 1989 is usually described as a novel, though it is actually a collection of subtly connected short stories, in different styles. In a review Joyce Carol Oates describes them as "a gathering of prose pieces, some fiction, others rather like essays".

                • Cover of Orlando: A Biography
                  Orlando: A Biography

                  Virginia Woolf · standalone novel · 1928

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                  Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928, inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover and close friend. It is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.

                • Cover of The Inheritors
                  The Inheritors

                  William Golding · standalone novel · 1955

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                  A small tribe of Neanderthalians suddenly comes in contact with modern Homo sapiens, which leads to mutual incomprehension : the former's awe and fear in front of "the new people" has for counterpart the horror and disgust for these forest-dwelling devils they inspire to the latter. Golding opposes, in his usual, pessimistic way, the doomed, slow-witted but gentle and unselfish Homo neanderthalensis to their "inheritors", more intelligent and inventive, but already affected by inner quarrels, jealousy and violence.

                • Cover of The Testament of Yves Gundron
                  The Testament of Yves Gundron

                  Emily Barton · standalone novel · 2000

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                  Set in an unnamed country, in the village of Mandragora, this novel opens with a description of a harsh, rural existence that sounds like something out of the dark ages. Then one day, farmer Yves Gundron invents the harness and life begins to change. Yves's manuscript, which bears witness to these changes, has been prepared for publication by an academic named Ruth Blum—her notations supplement Yves's story. But what at first seems a historical document proves to be something else entirely. Yves's brother, Mandrik le Chouchou, the town mystic, regales his fellow villagers with exotic tales of his travels to "Indo-China." And when Yves recalls the words of a song that is recognizably a blues lyric, we know that either Ruth Blum is up to something or Mandragora is not what it seems.

                • Cover of Orsinia
                  Orsinia

                  series · 16 books · 1961

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                  Orsinia is Ursula K. Le Guin's invented Central European country, used as the setting for character-driven historical fiction rather than her more famous science fiction and fantasy: the linked short stories of Orsinian Tales and the novel Malafrena, set among failed 1820s revolutionaries. There's no ongoing plot connecting the pieces; Orsinia functions more as a shared place and history than a series with continuing characters.

                • Cover of Utopia Avenue
                  Utopia Avenue

                  David Mitchell · standalone novel · 2020

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                  Utopia Avenue is a 2020 novel by David Mitchell. It is his eighth published novel, and his first since Slade House (2015). It was published by Sceptre on 14 July 2020. The novel tells the story of the fictional 1960s British psychedelic rock band Utopia Avenue.

                • Cover of Todd Family
                  Todd Family

                  series · 2 books · 2013

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                  Kate Atkinson's Life After Life gives Ursula Todd, born on a snowy night in 1910, a strange gift: whenever she dies, she's born again into a slightly altered version of the same life, gradually piecing together enough intuition across her many deaths to try to change the course of the twentieth century's worst events. The companion novel A God in Ruins turns to Ursula's brother Teddy, a bomber pilot, following his one, single life forward from the war through old age. The two books share a family and a set of preoccupations -- memory, war, chance -- without forming a conventional sequential series.

                • Cover of Blackberry Wine
                  Blackberry Wine

                  Joanne Harris · standalone novel · 2000

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                  Blackberry wine is a magical realism novel by Joanne Harris, published in 2000. This story, which is narrated by a vintage bottle of wine, uses her typical split-narrative technique and follows two separate timelines. One is set in Yorkshire, and follows several formative events in the adolescence of Jay Mackintosh, as he meets Joe Cox, the man who is to become the main influence of his life and literary career. The other, which continues in the present day, is set in the fictional village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, the setting of Harris' previous book, Chocolat, and follows Jay's attempts to recapture the magic of those early years, and cure his writer's block.

                • Cover of The Martian
                  The Martian

                  George du Maurier · standalone novel · 1897

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                  The Martian, by George du Maurier, is a largely autobiographical novel published in 1898 and the author's third. It describes the life of Barty Josselin as told by his close friend Robert Maurice, starting from their school days in Paris in the 1850s. Written in long descriptive passages with very little dialogue and many digressions, the book had considerably less success in its time than its predecessor, the popular Trilby.

                • Cover of Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
                  Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

                  Kurt Vonnegut & Jr. · standalone novel · 1969

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                  Vonnegut opens in his own voice, describing the twenty years it took him to face writing about surviving the firebombing of Dresden as a POW. He then hands the story to Billy Pilgrim, an awkward, fatalistic American chaplain's assistant swept into the Battle of the Bulge and captured by German forces alongside a soldier who dies blaming him for it. Imprisoned in a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden, Billy survives the firebombing that follows, and, we're told upfront, has also come 'unstuck in time,' living his life out of order, including a stretch on the alien world of Tralfamadore. Vonnegut's best-known novel folds war memoir into science fiction and black comedy.

                • Cover of Erewhon
                  Erewhon

                  series · 4 books · 1872

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                • Cover of The Unconsoled
                  The Unconsoled

                  Kazuo Ishiguro · standalone novel · 1995

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                • Cover of Kesh / Always Coming Home
                  Kesh / Always Coming Home

                  series · 10 books · 1984

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                  Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home imagines the Kesh, a society living in California's Napa Valley long after an unspecified societal collapse, presented not as a conventional novel but as a found archive of Kesh stories, poems, glossaries and 'anthropological' material assembled by a fictional visiting scholar-narrator. The book was originally released with a companion cassette, Music and Poetry of the Kesh, featuring original compositions by Todd Barton for instruments and songs described in the text. It's one of Le Guin's most formally experimental works, closer to an invented ethnography than a traditional science-fiction narrative.

                • Cover of Stone Book
                  Stone Book

                  series · 5 books · 1976

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                  series · 3 books · 1981

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                • Cover of The Thief of Time
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                  John Boyne · standalone novel · 2000

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                  Matthieu Zela's life is characterized by the fact that as he grows older through the 18th century, he discovers that his body has stopped ageing, and he is near immortal. At the end of the twentieth century, he looks back at a life lived as the thief of time..

                • Cover of Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
                  Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

                  Steven Millhauser · standalone novel · 1996

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                  Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer is a 1996 novel by Steven Millhauser. It won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. It follows the exploits of Martin Dressler, a young, optimistic entrepreneur, in late nineteenth-century New York City. It vividly evokes its time and place through elaborate description.

                • Cover of Mother Night
                  Mother Night

                  Kurt Vonnegut & Jr. · standalone novel · 1962

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                  Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American playwright who grew up in Germany, writes his memoirs from an Israeli prison cell awaiting trial for war crimes. As the Nazis rose to power, Campbell stayed on, married a German actress, and was recruited by an American agent to serve as a double agent, broadcasting Nazi propaganda over the radio while secretly passing coded intelligence to the Allies. The catch, as Campbell tells it, is that he became one of the war's most effective propagandists in the process, whatever his loyalties. Kurt Vonnegut's darkest novel asks what a person becomes when the mask he wears for a cause is indistinguishable from his face.

                • Cover of The Cemetery of Untold Stories
                  The Cemetery of Untold Stories

                  Julia Alvarez · standalone novel · 2024

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                  The Cemetery of Untold Stories: A Novel (2024) is a work of magical realism and the seventh novel by Dominican-American writer Julia Alvarez. The book follows Alma, a prolific author who, after retiring from her teaching job and writing career, inherits a plot of land in the Dominican Republic where she decides to create a cemetery for her unfinished manuscripts and notes.

                • Cover of Victory City
                  Victory City

                  Salman Rushdie · standalone novel · 2023

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                  Victory City is a novel by Salman Rushdie published in February 2023. It is Rushdie's fifteenth novel.

                • Cover of Station Eleven
                  Station Eleven

                  Emily St. John Mandel · standalone novel · 2014

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                  "Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time — from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains — this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet." (source: Goodreads.com)

                • Cover of Grendel
                  Grendel

                  John Gardner · standalone novel · 1971

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                  Between bouts of his war on the king of the Danish Norsemen, the monster philosophizes about life and fate.

                • Cover of Galileo's Dream
                  Galileo's Dream

                  Kim Stanley Robinson · standalone novel · 2009

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                  Galileo's Dream (2009) is a science fiction novel with elements of historical fiction, written by Kim Stanley Robinson. In the book, 17th-century scientist Galileo Galilei is visited by far-future time travelers living on the Galilean moons of Jupiter. Italicized portions of text within the novel are "mostly from Galileo's writing or that of his contemporaries."

                • Cover of As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel
                  As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel

                  Rudy Rucker · standalone novel · 2002

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                  About the artist {{A|Pieter Bruegel the Elder}}