20 Fun Books for Men {That You’ll Like, Too}

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter.

His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew.

But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car.

In boyhood, Louis Zamperini was an incorrigible delinquent.

As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics.

But when World War II began, the athlete became an airman, embarking on a journey that led to a doomed flight on a May afternoon in 1943.

I chose this WWI book set in northern Italy as our book club pick not realizing how much action and drama would be involved. While it was not in line with our usual lighthearted picks, it was an excellent book that several members reported sharing with their husbands.

SUMMARY:

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He’s a normal Italian teenager―obsessed with music, food, and girls―but his days of innocence are numbered.

When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior.

Both my husband and I strongly recommend reading this book in audiobook format. The narration is one of the best we've ever heard.

Jake's friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958.

And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

So begins Jake’s new life in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere.

Every turn leads eventually to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore.

Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying

Atlanta judge Rachel Cutler loves her job and her kids, but her life takes a dark turn when her father dies under strange circumstances, leaving behind clues to a secret about one of the greatest treasures ever made by man.

Forged of the exquisite gem, the Amber Room inexplicably disappeared sometime during World War II.

Determined to solve its mysteries, Rachel takes off for Germany with her ex-husband, Paul, close behind.

It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die.

The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.

The prophecies inform their next five decades.

The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next.

Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn't know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life.

And died again.

And lived again and died again -- in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle -- each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market.

The best part about reading Dune together is that you could also turn it into a movie night when you're done.

SUMMARY:

Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the “spice” melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness.

Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for....When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined.

A small community tucked deep in the forest, Beartown is home to tough, hardworking people who don’t expect life to be easy or fair.

No matter how difficult times get, they’ve always been able to take pride in their local ice hockey team.

So it’s a cruel blow when they hear that Beartown ice hockey might soon be disbanded.

What makes it worse is the obvious satisfaction that all the former Beartown players, who now play for a rival team in the neighboring town of Hed, take in that fact.

It was an unlikely quest from the start.

With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler.

The emotional heart of the tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a real place for himself in the world.

Jasmine Bashara never signed up to be a hero. She just wanted to get rich. 

Not crazy, eccentric-billionaire rich, like many of the visitors to her hometown of Artemis, humanity’s first and only lunar colony.

Just rich enough to move out of her coffin-sized apartment and eat something better than flavored algae.

So when a chance at a huge score finally comes her way, Jazz can’t say no.

Sure, it requires her to graduate from small-time smuggler to full-on criminal mastermind.

But Jazz has never run into a challenge her intellect can’t handle.

My name is Kvothe. I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon.

I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in.

I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day.

So begins a tale unequaled in fantasy literature—the story of a hero told in his own voice.

It is a tale of sorrow, a tale of survival, a tale of one man’s search for meaning in his universe, and how that search, and the indomitable will that drove it, gave birth to a legend.

My husband insists any Star Trek fans out there need to read this!

SUMMARY:

Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456.

Life couldn’t be better…until Andrew begins to realize that (1) every Away Mission involves a lethal confrontation with alien forces, (2) the ship’s senior officers always survive these confrontations, and (3) sadly, at least one low-ranking crew member is invariably killed.

Unsurprisingly, the savvier crew members belowdecks avoid Away Missions at all costs.

Then Andrew stumbles on information that transforms his and his colleagues’ understanding of what the starship Intrepid really is…and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives.

My husband loved this modern retelling of Dante's Inferno.

SUMMARY:

After being thrown out the window of his luxury apartment, science fiction writer Allen Carpentier wakes to find himself at the gates of hell.

Feeling he's landed in a great opportunity for a book, he attempts to follow Dante's road map.

Determined to meet Satan himself, Carpentier treks through the Nine Layers of Hell led by Benito Mussolini, and encounters countless mental and physical tortures.

As he struggles to escape, he's taken through new, puzzling, and outlandish versions of sin—recast for the present day.

STOP. You should not have touched this flyer with your bare hands.

NO, don't put it down. It's too late. They're watching you. 

My name is David. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours.

You may not want to know about the things you'll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrok, about the invasion, and the future.

But it's too late. You touched the book. You're in the game. You're under the eye.

His birth was marked by wonder and tragedy. He sees beauty and terror beyond our deepest dreams. His story will change the way you see the world. 

Bartholomew Lampion is born on a day of tragedy and terror that will mark his family forever.

All agree that his unusual eyes are the most beautiful they have ever seen.

On this same day, a thousand miles away, a ruthless man learns that he has a mortal enemy named Bartholomew.

He embarks on a relentless search to find this enemy, a search that will consume his life.

Welcome to 97-hour weeks.

Welcome to life and death decisions.

Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter.

Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships.

Welcome to the life of a first-year doctor.

Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights, and missed weekends, comedian and former medical resident Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the front lines of medicine.

An ancient secret brotherhood. A devastating new weapon of destruction.

When world-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a mysterious symbol—seared into the chest of a murdered physicist—he discovers evidence of the unimaginable: the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati...the most powerful underground organization ever to walk the earth.

Another fun book to television date night idea!

SUMMARY:

This is the exciting—yet little known—story of the making of England in the 9th and 10th centuries, the years in which King Alfred the Great, his son and grandson defeated the Danish Vikings who had invaded and occupied three of England’s four kingdoms.

The story is seen through the eyes of Uhtred, a dispossessed nobleman, who is captured as a child by the Danes and then raised by them so that, by the time the Northmen begin their assault on Wessex (Alfred’s kingdom and the last territory in English hands) Uhtred almost thinks of himself as a Dane.

Enger tells the story of eleven-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy who has reason to believe in miracles.

Along with his sister and father, Reuben finds himself on a cross-country search for his outlaw older brother who has been controversially charged with murder.

Their journey is touched by serendipity and the kindness of strangers, and its remarkable conclusion shows how family, love, and faith can stand up to the most terrifying of enemies, the most tragic of fates.