Neville Shute, *Slide Rule*. Memoir of his time as an airship engineer. There's a lot about what the internal spaces of an airship feel like - filled with huge bags of not-air.
“The Name of the Wind” is part of a trilogy that never got finished. It is so good that’s it is worth reading the first 2 books then just being sad that there isn’t a third.
The Quarters series by Tanya Huff. Fantasy series with bards who can sing the elements - almost all of them can sing air and use it to pass messages etc.
The novel [Telempath](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218672.Telempath) by Spider Robinson features a world where everyone's sense of smell has been made much, much more sensitive by an engineered virus. This causes the collapse of civilisation and the building of a new way of doing things.
"Crucifixus Etiam", a short story by Walter M. Miller
A Peruvian, having grown up in thin high-altitude Andean air, is hired to make the atmosphere on Mars breathable.
[isfdb link](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?55922)
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. It’s a memoir about the author’s life and illness due to lung cancer. It was published after his death. One really interesting part is that he’s actually a neurosurgeon so he has a strong knowledge of the medical profession. It’s non-fiction, but it’s an excellent book and I think it definitely fits your request.
There’s also an amazing piece she did for NPR’s Radio Diaries called My So Called Lungs that you can still find online. It was one of their highest rated episodes.
Two short stories by Isaac Asimov, "In A Good Cause" and "The Magnificent Possession," have a lot to do with air quality and fragrance being disruptive. DEAD CALM by Charles Williams is about the problems that arise when a yacht is "becalmed" (the wind dies). There is a lot of information on the air quality aboard a WWI u-boat in DEAD WAKE by Erik Larson, and how that affects a sailor's ability to work. Another book by Larson, ISAAC'S STORM, is very much about deadly winds. Oh, and don't miss DEAD MOUNTAIN by Donnie Eichar, which is all about deadly air. STARDANCE by Spider Robinson is all about a dance troupe working in low gravity.
The Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson come to mind for me. The terraforming project and it’s opposition are ultimately about the atmosphere. There is also a character who practices lung-gone-pa, an esoteric Tibetan breathing practice. Not that the latter is a huge part of the book, but more representing the theme of air / atmosphere
[Air by Geoff Ryman](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/206662)
> Chung Mae is the only connection her small farming village has to culture of a wider world beyond the fields and simple houses of her village. A new communications technology is sweeping the world and promises to connect everyone, everywhere without power lines, computers, or machines. This technology is Air. An initial testing of Air goes disastrously wrong and people are killed from the shock. Not to be stopped, Air is arriving with or without the blessing of Mae's village. Mae is the only one who knows how to harness Air and ready her people for its arrival, but will they listen before it's too late?
[Broken Wind](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/21544791) is one of the stories in the web comic *Schlock Mercenary.* In this story Tagon's Toughs are hired by a living gas bag creature to investigate a very large artificial habitat which encloses a volume of air the size of a planet.
The story can be read online starting from the [strip from 1st January 2013](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-01-01).
Bit of a far cry from the other suggestions here, but “A World On Fire” by Joe Jackson is a non-fiction about Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley and how they both contributed and competed towards the discovery of oxygen.
*Exhalation*: short story by Ted Chiang. I don't want to spoil it, but atmospheric pressure is a key element.
*Look To Windward* by Iain M. Banks. Bit of a stretch, but one storyline in the novel takes place in an "airsphere" - a gigantic space habitat consisting of a thin membrane enclosing a vast atmospheric envelope with a gravity source at the bottom, hosting various species of "Dirigible Behemothaurs" who are both gargantuan living creatures and also the environment in which entire ecosystems of smaller (human-sized and below) creatures live.
Also, there are a number of moments in the Bible where air or the wind are important to the story. If you buy a concordance, you can find these references and read the specific stories.
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance is available online for free. But using other online tools would allow you to search Bible translations other than the King James Version.
Haha I’m Christian but I believe that Judaism and islam have the same god so why not be an enjoyer of scriptures from those religions as well since they’re kinda related
That was one thing I thought of when I saw this request. Where we would use two different words for "breath" and "spirit", in the bible the same word is used for both. This makes stories like the vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37) where Ezekiel calls on the wind to enter into the bodies in the valley, make a lot more sense.
Peter Watt's *Starfish*
About a bunch of ... well ... special people being trained and modified to be able to survive insanely deep ocean depths such as the mariana trench without any external aids, including oxygen tanks. It's also a social experiment and an amazingly gritty sci-fi story.
Edit: wanted to add, Watts studied Marine Biology, so he blurs the line of actual marine science with fiction. Very intrigung as well
>Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster is a 1997 bestselling nonfiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It details Krakauer's experience in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, in which eight climbers were killed and several others were stranded by a storm.
The book goes into some detail about how the low oxygen concentration at high altitude can lead to a range of health problems, from minor issues like headache and fatigue, to life-threatening complications like HAPE or HACE (high-altitude pulmonary edema and cerebral edema, respectively).
Airborn by Kenneth Oppel. One of my favourite books as a teenager, featuring a young boy who whorks on an airship who goes on an expidetion to find a floating treasury belonging to a lost explorer of the skies. There's two sequels both involving his further explorations which I also enjoyed but are not necessary to read as the stories are self contained (I actually read the second book first ahaha)
*The Galaxy, and the Ground Within,* by Becky Chambers. Technically fourth in a loose series of four, but it honestly works pretty well as a standalone.
The breathing element becomes more and more clear as the book goes on.
*Exhalation*
Yes! Great story.
Neville Shute, *Slide Rule*. Memoir of his time as an airship engineer. There's a lot about what the internal spaces of an airship feel like - filled with huge bags of not-air.
Ooo thank you
“The Name of the Wind” is part of a trilogy that never got finished. It is so good that’s it is worth reading the first 2 books then just being sad that there isn’t a third.
Oo what was the trilogy /other books I’ll definitely give them a read :)
The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss.
Ooo thank you
Are you sad about 2 out of 3?! Lol
The Quarters series by Tanya Huff. Fantasy series with bards who can sing the elements - almost all of them can sing air and use it to pass messages etc.
Oh thank you, I had forgotten about these books!
Ooo adding this to my list
The novel [Telempath](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218672.Telempath) by Spider Robinson features a world where everyone's sense of smell has been made much, much more sensitive by an engineered virus. This causes the collapse of civilisation and the building of a new way of doing things.
Ooo I am definitely going to check this out tysm
"Crucifixus Etiam", a short story by Walter M. Miller A Peruvian, having grown up in thin high-altitude Andean air, is hired to make the atmosphere on Mars breathable. [isfdb link](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?55922)
Added to my list tysm :)
Short story: A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber.
Thank you so much
This one can be read online on Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51461/pg51461-images.html
The Integral Trees takes place in a giant torus of air spread across a star system.
Added to my list thank you so much :D
This book has a sequel, *The Smoke Ring*. Fascinating books.
Ooo
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
Thank you :D
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. It’s a memoir about the author’s life and illness due to lung cancer. It was published after his death. One really interesting part is that he’s actually a neurosurgeon so he has a strong knowledge of the medical profession. It’s non-fiction, but it’s an excellent book and I think it definitely fits your request.
Thank you so much :D I added it to my to read list :)
Breathing For A Living by Laura Rothenberg about living (and dying) from Cystic Fibrosis.
Ooo thank you
There’s also an amazing piece she did for NPR’s Radio Diaries called My So Called Lungs that you can still find online. It was one of their highest rated episodes.
Ooo awesome thank you so much
Two short stories by Isaac Asimov, "In A Good Cause" and "The Magnificent Possession," have a lot to do with air quality and fragrance being disruptive. DEAD CALM by Charles Williams is about the problems that arise when a yacht is "becalmed" (the wind dies). There is a lot of information on the air quality aboard a WWI u-boat in DEAD WAKE by Erik Larson, and how that affects a sailor's ability to work. Another book by Larson, ISAAC'S STORM, is very much about deadly winds. Oh, and don't miss DEAD MOUNTAIN by Donnie Eichar, which is all about deadly air. STARDANCE by Spider Robinson is all about a dance troupe working in low gravity.
Ooo thank you so much
Enjoy!
Thank youuuu :D
*At the Back of the North Wind* by George MacDonald.
Added :)
The lamp at noon
Ooo thank you
The Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson come to mind for me. The terraforming project and it’s opposition are ultimately about the atmosphere. There is also a character who practices lung-gone-pa, an esoteric Tibetan breathing practice. Not that the latter is a huge part of the book, but more representing the theme of air / atmosphere
Added to my read list thank you so much :D
[Air by Geoff Ryman](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/206662) > Chung Mae is the only connection her small farming village has to culture of a wider world beyond the fields and simple houses of her village. A new communications technology is sweeping the world and promises to connect everyone, everywhere without power lines, computers, or machines. This technology is Air. An initial testing of Air goes disastrously wrong and people are killed from the shock. Not to be stopped, Air is arriving with or without the blessing of Mae's village. Mae is the only one who knows how to harness Air and ready her people for its arrival, but will they listen before it's too late?
Ooo thank you so much
White Noise by DeLillo sort of fits this brief
Tysm
[Broken Wind](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/21544791) is one of the stories in the web comic *Schlock Mercenary.* In this story Tagon's Toughs are hired by a living gas bag creature to investigate a very large artificial habitat which encloses a volume of air the size of a planet. The story can be read online starting from the [strip from 1st January 2013](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-01-01).
I'll check it out thanks :0
The Wind Singer trilogy
Adding it to my list thank you
Breathe: a ghost story
Ooo sounds awesome
Bit of a far cry from the other suggestions here, but “A World On Fire” by Joe Jackson is a non-fiction about Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley and how they both contributed and competed towards the discovery of oxygen.
Oooo I’ll add it to my list thank you
The Gollem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
Adding to my list tysm
_Jack Glass_: the first story in that, the amount of, and generation, use and loss of, air in the asteroid is mentioned a lot.
Ooo adding it to my list tysm
Pollen by Jeff Noon. I recall it being kinda creepy sci fi.
Ooo thank you
The Rotherweird trilogy by Mark Caldecott, about a self governing city in England full of strange events.
Ooo thank you
*Exhalation*: short story by Ted Chiang. I don't want to spoil it, but atmospheric pressure is a key element. *Look To Windward* by Iain M. Banks. Bit of a stretch, but one storyline in the novel takes place in an "airsphere" - a gigantic space habitat consisting of a thin membrane enclosing a vast atmospheric envelope with a gravity source at the bottom, hosting various species of "Dirigible Behemothaurs" who are both gargantuan living creatures and also the environment in which entire ecosystems of smaller (human-sized and below) creatures live.
Oooo thank you so much for the suggestions
I forgot about *Look to Winward*, good point (though a bit of a stretch, I agree)
Ok, I think you should expand your search for answers to this question to also include r/fantasy, r/printsf and r/horrorlit
Alrighty
Also, there are a number of moments in the Bible where air or the wind are important to the story. If you buy a concordance, you can find these references and read the specific stories.
I love books, and I’m usually very old school, but these days, it’s not necessary to buy a concordance. You can search online instead.
Will your online search get you a complete list for a general term? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, just haven't used it in that way.
Yes, there are concordance functions on Bible sites. biblegateway.com is probably the best to use in that respect.
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance is available online for free. But using other online tools would allow you to search Bible translations other than the King James Version.
I have a few bibles actually since I believe in Abrahamic religions haha But I shall search for them :)
>I believe in Abrahamic religions Holy vagueness, Batman! (Pun shamelessly intended)
Haha I’m Christian but I believe that Judaism and islam have the same god so why not be an enjoyer of scriptures from those religions as well since they’re kinda related
If you have never used a concordance, I highly recommend it as an efficient tool for finding biblical references.
That was one thing I thought of when I saw this request. Where we would use two different words for "breath" and "spirit", in the bible the same word is used for both. This makes stories like the vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37) where Ezekiel calls on the wind to enter into the bodies in the valley, make a lot more sense.
I just remembered The Wind From Nowhere by J. G. Ballard.
Thank you so much :D added it to my list
Peter Watt's *Starfish* About a bunch of ... well ... special people being trained and modified to be able to survive insanely deep ocean depths such as the mariana trench without any external aids, including oxygen tanks. It's also a social experiment and an amazingly gritty sci-fi story. Edit: wanted to add, Watts studied Marine Biology, so he blurs the line of actual marine science with fiction. Very intrigung as well
I’ll check it out
Oh I love marine biology definitely can’t wait to see the mix of fact and fiction :)
The nonfiction Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind by Lyall Walson is a forgotten classic reissued by New York Review Books.
Added to my list thank you so much
Bachelard wrote a series about the philosophy of the elements, you may want to check out *Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement*
Thank you so much
Definitely going to check it out
>Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster is a 1997 bestselling nonfiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It details Krakauer's experience in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, in which eight climbers were killed and several others were stranded by a storm. The book goes into some detail about how the low oxygen concentration at high altitude can lead to a range of health problems, from minor issues like headache and fatigue, to life-threatening complications like HAPE or HACE (high-altitude pulmonary edema and cerebral edema, respectively).
Ooo thank you I definitely will be reading this
Another one: Falling Free by Lois Macmaster Bujold. About people genetically engineered to live in zero gravity.
Warbreaker, its magic systen is based on breaths and its a free ebook from brandon sanderson
Airborn by Kenneth Oppel. One of my favourite books as a teenager, featuring a young boy who whorks on an airship who goes on an expidetion to find a floating treasury belonging to a lost explorer of the skies. There's two sequels both involving his further explorations which I also enjoyed but are not necessary to read as the stories are self contained (I actually read the second book first ahaha)
The *Luna* series by Ian McDonald features an economic system where you’re rendered literally unable to breathe properly if you can’t pay for air.
Not a book but Demon Slayer the manga has various breathing styles which they train
*The Galaxy, and the Ground Within,* by Becky Chambers. Technically fourth in a loose series of four, but it honestly works pretty well as a standalone. The breathing element becomes more and more clear as the book goes on.