100 books like Anonymouse

A bombastic start that leads to a gentle beautiful ending. Nothing works how you expect it to in this novel. The graffiti is woven through the story like broad brush strokes of a Van Gogh painting. Abrupt and yet conveying of most delicate feelings. Open the first page, leave all your expectations to the side and let yourself be taken on the ride. The less I tell you the better.

There is no escaping that name when broaching the subject Graffiti. Banksy is the king. In Wall And Piece you get a broad study of his creations. You can leaf through and enjoy the pictures, but I highly recommend that you invest the time to read the witty and through-provoking text accompanying them. I am not saying that a comparison to Tolstoy immediately came to mind. All I am saying is that I continued to think about the book days and weeks after reading it.

My interest in graffiti started during a visit to Ramallah, Palestine. Since there is no functioning government that can remove graffiti, the city walls are covered in layers upon layers of graffiti. Anything reachable by human hand is decorated in paint. From the profound to the vulgar. Political to benign. It suddenly occurred to me that in the city of Ramallah no one needs to wonder: “What are people thinking? What is on their mind?” The writing is on the wall. Simply open your eyes and absorb the order within the chaos. Against the Wall reminds me of that moment of inspiration that later informed my novel.

The World Atlas of Street Art is a treasure trove of Graffiti from all four corners of the earth. From hurried random scribbles on a wall to intricate creations worthy of Da Vinci, you can get lost inside this book only to emerge with a new appreciation of this puzzling art form. Some might insist on calling graffiti a form of vandalism. I am certain that none of them had the privilege of perusing this beautiful book.

To understand cities today, you also have to understand why and how they were built to begin with. After all, our environment contains the materialization of previous decisions – we should know why those were made! Through the story of over a dozen global cities, historian Ben Wilson demonstrates how cities are concentrations of hopes, dreams, power, and conflict. While many great historians like Lewis Mumford and Stephen Hall have preceded him with excellently detailed urban history books of their own, this book stands out in its readability, attention to detail, and especially its coverage of global cities. After all, the urban future of most of the world lies beyond the Global North, and this broad survey shows the vast differences in urbanism between cultures.

Historians of Greece and Rome have been arguing about how to describe ancient cities on and off since the eighteenth century and some of their debates have got stuck deep in the mud. This little book offers the best way out of these impasses. It is super clear, really up to date and incorporates the very latest research. Especially good on economy and society.

No one writes more compellingly about the multi-sensory experiences of living in America’s past environments than Dell Upton. His book Another City deals with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century city—a century before the time period in my book—but he weaves together narratives of urban experience from America’s first decades as a republic to offer surprisingly contemporary commentary on city politics today. His chapter called “Smell of Danger,” to offer just one example, demonstrates that America’s urban elite mobilized their belief that disease was caused by “miasmas” rising up from foul-smelling waste to justify segregation along with class and racial lines. In the era of yellow fever and cholera, Upton argues that “the physical geography of disease became a human geography of fear.” 

Cities take a long time to make. Can you make or remake them quickly, like you make instant coffee or assemble fast food? Turns out you can… but you better be a czar or have a similar claim to authority and it may take some time for the product to mature into something worth visiting and living in. David Brook’s A History of Future Cities is one of the most informative and intriguing books on this topic. Beautifully written, the book examines four landmark cases of cities with strong utopian streaks, where powerful political regimes tried to compress time in space and celebrate their glory. The four cases are St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Bombay, and Dubai. Read and dream of visiting. The book will leave you wishing to read about other cities of the same type, among them Washington DC, Brasilia, and Astana.

The Dead Ladies Project follows Crispin’s inner and outer journey across Europe following her suicide attempt. As a way of trying to make sense of her own fragile condition, Crispin researches the lives of other artists who also fled abroad in order to find themselves. 

I first read The Dead Ladies Project while researching my own hybrid memoir. It was a revelation and an inspiration, this elegant weaving of Crispin’s personal story with the stories of those she imagines traveled a similar path as herself, both geographically and emotionally. 

At this time of overly curated, highly sanitized social media depictions of our lives, Crispin’s unflinching humanity is not just brave, but like water poured on arid soil.

We can understand cities not only through their societies, their experience, and their history, but also by studying their physical form. Spiro Kostof describes how cities across the world have distinct yet still interrelated patterns of streets, blocks, plots, and buildings. Rather than taking a chronological approach, Kostof illustrates the form of cities through time and space through four main types of urban form, from organic shapes and grids to diagrams and grand interventions. If you look at your own city, you will likely find a combination of all of the above! This is one of the first books on cities I bought as a teenager, and it really inspired me to study and improve the form of our urban environments.