Books like Strange the Dreamer
What should you read after Laini Taylor’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Laini Taylor
- 2017
- 536 pages
- Fantasy
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Strange the Dreamer
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Starless Sea
Erin Morgenstern
Another bookish dreamer who finds the place his reading promised him. Morgenstern matches Taylor sentence for sentence and cares as little about conventional plot.
- A librarian dreaming of a lost city
- Prose that stops you mid-page
- Wonder taken completely seriously
- Plot deliberately diffuse
Best for the atmosphereThe Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
If you read Laini Taylor mainly to sit inside her descriptions, this is the same pleasure — a world assembled out of colour, scent and slow inevitability.
- Prose that stops you mid-page
- Wonder taken completely seriously
- A romance conducted inside dreams
- Very little happens
Great matchThe Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
A boy raised on stories talks his way into the archive that holds them. Lazlo's temperament exactly, with a longer education and a bigger ego.
- A librarian dreaming of a lost city
- Prose that stops you mid-page
- Wonder taken completely seriously
- Series still unfinished
Great matchThe Golem and the Jinni
Helene Wecker
Two beings who should not exist learning what they owe the people around them. Slower than Taylor and just as good on the loneliness of being made different.
- Gods, monsters and their children
- Prose that stops you mid-page
- Historical New York
Great matchUprooted
Naomi Novik
A girl taken by a wizard into a tower, and a wood that wants the valley back. Fairy-tale logic and violence arriving without warning, in Taylor's manner.
- Slow build then sudden violence
- Prose that stops you mid-page
- Gods, monsters and their children
- Romance is contentious
Best for the proseThe Ten Thousand Doors of January
Alix E. Harrow
Harrow writes with the same intoxication Taylor does and cares about the same thing: whether the story you were told about the world is the accurate one.
- Prose that stops you mid-page
- A city whose name was stolen
- A romance conducted inside dreams
- Early 1900s Earth setting
Great matchThe Hazel Wood
Melissa Albert
A girl discovers her family's stories are a real and hostile place. Shares Taylor's sense that myths have owners and the owners are not kind.
- Gods, monsters and their children
- Slow build then sudden violence
- Colder tone
Great matchThe Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
Old gods, a girl who can see them, and a village that would rather she could not. Folklore written with the patience Taylor's readers already have.
- Gods, monsters and their children
- Prose that stops you mid-page
- Wonder taken completely seriously
- Slow first hundred pages
Worth a look — with a warningNeverwhere
Neil Gaiman
A dreamer finds the hidden city under the one he lives in. Same wish fulfilled, but Gaiman plays it for adventure rather than for awe.
- A city whose name was stolen
- A librarian dreaming of a lost city
- Comic register
Great matchA Darker Shade of Magic
V.E. Schwab
Parallel Londons, one of them ruined and hungry, and a magician who moves between them. Faster than Taylor, with the same appetite for strange cities.
- A city whose name was stolen
- Wonder taken completely seriously
- Action over lyricism
Best for the dreamlike registerThe Gracekeepers
Kirsty Logan
A floating world, a girl who buries the dead at sea, and prose that behaves like a myth being remembered. The closest thing here to Taylor's tone.
- Prose that stops you mid-page
- Wonder taken completely seriously
- A romance conducted inside dreams
- Almost no plot
Great matchThe City of Brass
Djinn, a city closed to outsiders, and a heroine who discovers what her blood makes her. Weep's politics of gods and their descendants, in a Middle Eastern key.
- Gods, monsters and their children
- A city whose name was stolen
- Title truncated in the catalogue
Worth a look — with a warningThe Bone Clocks
David Mitchell
A girl whose dreams are a doorway for immortals arguing over her. Mitchell's ambition matches Taylor's, though he is far more interested in the ordinary world.
- A romance conducted inside dreams
- Gods, monsters and their children
- Prose that stops you mid-page
- Six voices, six eras
What should you read after Strange the Dreamer?
Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern — another bookish dreamer who finds the place his reading promised him. Morgenstern matches Taylor sentence for sentence and cares as little about conventional plot.
If what stayed with you was prose that stops you mid-page, read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern instead: if you read Laini Taylor mainly to sit inside her descriptions, this is the same pleasure — a world assembled out of colour, scent and slow inevitability. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is the other strong option — a boy raised on stories talks his way into the archive that holds them. Lazlo's temperament exactly, with a longer education and a bigger ego.
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