I’ve read a lot of great books in my life. I think one of the luckiest finds you can have is to stumble across a book that makes sense and is entertaining, to boot. Here is my list of some great books.

The Mist. A novella. By Stephen King. Set in Bridgton, Maine in the aftermath of a violent thunderstorm, something has gotten knocked loose at the Arrowhead Project up the road. The government has been experimenting with other dimensions and releases a mist that spreads across the land, maybe across the entire Eastern Seaboard. There are two main menaces: internal and external. Externally, there are the things that go bump in the night and might break into the supermarket where the hero and the other people are sheltering and eat them all. Internally, there is Mother Carmody, an antiques store owner who has a sinister charisma about her. She gains psychological power over the group the longer they are trapped in the supermarket by the mist and starts talking about human sacrifice. The ending is unusual, and the story is the best thing King has ever written. Either written in 1978 after The Stand or in 1980, included in the short story anthology Skeleton Crew.

The Stand. A novel. By Stephen King. This epic 1,000 page book is about a man-made plague that gets loose from a California experimental lab and wipes out 99% of the world population. The survivors start to get dreams. One type of dream is from a kindly black woman of advanced age living in the Midwest. She is playing guitar and invites you to come through the corn to sit with her. It is always the same dream. The other type of dream varies from person to person. Sometimes it is a pimp beckoning from the shadows, sometimes a spooky fighter pilot all dressed up in gear; either way it is an evil force summoning you to his side. The survivors feel compelled to choose one or the other. If they choose the old woman, they go to Boulder, Colorado. If they choose the “Walkin’ Dude,” they go to Las Vegas. The Stand is a series of vignettes, little stories that stitch together wonderfully and hold the interest throughout. King enjoyed himself writing about the depopulation of America, although he paints it in a sad way in the book. The theoretical conflict between good and evil doesn’t really happen — and there is a somewhat disappointing ending — a literal deus ex machina — but it’s a great book nonetheless, King’s best.

The Lord of the Flies. By William Golding. During an atomic war, a group of boys being sent to safety on a plane crash-lands without adults on a tropical island. The three main characters — the villainous boy, the hero boy, and Piggy, the boy with the glasses and the nerdy attitude — joust for control. The villainous boy is supposed to set a fire and watch for help on the island; instead, he goes on a pig hunt and leaves the help sign unattended. The Lord of the Flies refers to the devil, but also to the severed pig head buzzing with flies. The smaller boys on the trip content themselves with following whoever is strongest. In the end, the villainous boy and his team hunt down the hero boy who was the former leader with the seashell conch and only the miraculous appearance of an English naval officer and his crew saves the day at the end of the book. Piggy meets a gruesome end. A great book.

Alternities. By Michael P. Kube-McDowell. An alien force, knowing that Earth is in a dangerous nuclear standoff, creates six parallel Earths with different histories, allowing one to survive if there is an exchange of ICBMs between the Soviet Union and the United States. This is the story of one alternity — or parallel Earth — where the Soviet Union is winning the Cold War because America restricted the flow of scientific papers and the American government in that alternity has plans to retreat to a newly discovered parallel America in the event of a war. The novel includes everything from the death of Eisenhower in a plane crash in one alternity to the accidental explosion of a nuclear weapon by hippie terrorists (detailed in a movie called The Jeweled Dagger by one alternity’s Stanley Kubrick). It’s an interesting read, with little details like a perfume that makes you feel love and arousal for your wife again in one alternity that another alternity’s couple is desperate to get more of. Little details like that make a great book.

The Domination of the Draka series. By S.M. Stirling. I’ve written about this before. In our timeline, exiled Americans who want to stay with the Empire, Empire Loyalists, go to Ontario in Canada and help found a new nation. In the Draka books, they go to Africa instead. Starting from a base in South Africa, they spread north throughout all of Africa, enslaving and plundering as they go along, and create a vicious society based on superior battle skills, cruelty, and being “under the yoke” — where the non-Draka bow down and serve the Draka on plantations and in cities like Virconium. The books start out during World War II, when Hitler exhausts the Europeans in a long war of conquest. The Draka move in on the weakened Europeans, putting fellow whites under the yoke for the first time. The other books in the series detail the Cold War between America and the Domination, with America leading a worldwide “Alliance for Democracy” of racially equal, democratic capitalists and the Domination being a small core of Drakon individuals around a vast number of serfs, some trained with skills, many others just serving like grunts in the fields and factories as the Draka fuck them whenever they want and create mixed race children who go on to serve the Race further. The winner of the Cold War will surprise you.

This is just the briefest sampling of great books I’ve read. By reading the plots and the highlights, you can get a sense of what makes a book compelling and worthwhile. Though the books are all very different, they succeed equally in grabbing the attention and imparting novel ideas upon you the reader, making you wish the story would never end.