Fans pick 12 books like Basal Ganglia

A very dark turn in my list, indeed. A hole opens up in their apartment, who knows who or why? It doesn’t matter. They dub it the funhole, and would do what any of us would do, and start sticking things inside of it. Things get dark, fast.

If you want to be up all night, unable to sleep, give this book a whirl.

I read Olivia Laing’s book at the height of my own loneliness: isolated, in lockdown, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part memoir, part art history, part cultural criticism, the book managed to be both intimate and expansive—just what I needed as I sat by myself in front of a computer, anxiously refreshing virus graphs.

I became absorbed by the lives of Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, artists I’d heard of but knew nothing about, and by the various aspects of loneliness I’d never previously considered. It’s the perfect example of the type of hybrid writing that I find truly magical.

A bracing slap to the face, this book. Or maybe a punch to the gut. The conceit is the series of portraits of hoarders based on the reality show of the same name, and the recipe is to combine their testimonials—“I save old soda cans and turn the tin snips into flowers,” say, or “I want desperately to change”—with lists of objects, described as though in a slow camera pan across a filthy room. But the alchemy is the way Durbin mashes the two together, not quite at random but not correctly either. It’s a harrowing litany of fragments, so specific that the unspoken point is all too clear: what’s broken is much bigger than any of these individual people or things.

A polarizing book for sure, Ballard was an early influence of mine, probably because I’ve always viewed reality from behind a sociological lens and Ballard famously (or infamously?) tackled increasingly dire sociological topics like technology, isolation, and repression. In High-Rise, which just might be his best novel, Ballard turns a high-rise apartment block into ground zero of a class war wherein the floors themselves are demarcated and stratified according to property values, which leads to all kinds of scenes readers get to tear apart and inspect like a social scientist. 

I have a longstanding professional relationship with Debra Prinzing, who was a regular contributor when I was an editor at Romantic Homes magazine. Her stories and photos brought flowers to life in any issue she was in. She is also the founder of the Slow Flowers movement, which promotes growing and buying seasonal flowers locally. Prinzing’s newest book is a wonderful odyssey through the shops, studios, campers, and (yes) sheds of passionate growers and designers. Once again, by exploring the creative spaces of others, you’ll find a rich supply of ideas for your own space. Somehow, these floral artisans and their spaces create a synergy that’s impossible to resist.

This book should be considered the bible of women’s artistic expression. Built on the idea of physical spaces and how they nurture the creative endeavor a woman does there, Where Women Create introduces you to dozens of extraordinary artists, textile designers, mixed media artists, book producers, entrepreneurs, and product designers. You get lost in their stories and inspired by their ingenious outlook on organization, clutter, and ways to keep the artistic spark alive.

This rich album of peeping in the windows of intensely private spaces may have been published in 1997 but its message of calm and possibilities burns just as brightly today. The lives of beloved personalities like Maya Angelou, Jessica McClintock, and Oprah Winfrey are opened so that you feel privy to what makes them who they are, or were. You can tell that Madden, one of HGTV’s first hosts, knew all of these women personally and was given great latitude so that we could have a real sense of the spaces these women run to for respite. Some may surprise you – a spartan bathroom with killer views, a guest room that was carved out of a living room – but all of them have a similar message theme of quiet triumph over stressful living. We all need a room of our own and there is more than one way… show more.

My son’s first-grade teacher used this book to help him learn about his “hula-hoop” of personal space, and she recommended we read it at home (which we did.) This book was a fun way to explore the meaning of giving space to our friends (such as keeping hands to ourselves), and the outer-space theme cleverly woven throughout helped keep my son’s attention.

I really appreciated the author’s unique approach to teaching young kids about personal space, which can be touchy (pun intended!).

This series is set 6 million years in the future. In a universe entirely peopled by humanity and various iterations of human evolutions. Only one of which seems to be immune to the inevitable failure of their society that plagues literally every other outpost of humanity in existence. This world is rich, layered, and complex. It makes you wonder about what it means to be human and makes you fear. It definitely makes you fear. Shatterlings, man just typing the word makes me clench my teeth. I enjoyed this book and loved the rich world and vastness of the thought put into the creation of a universe that is empty but full at the same time. If you’ve made it this far down my list and have liked the others so far this is definitely in your lane.

Young Dane Thorson signs on to the Solar Queen as an apprentice cargo handler. The crew of the independent ship pools all their resources to buy trading rights to a planet in an auction, hoping to strike it rich. But Limbo turns out to be more than they bargained for.

Rich with vivid imagery, weird aliens, ancient artifacts, remnants of a lost civilization, space pirates, and a whole lot more, Sargasso of Space has been one of my favorite books since I was a teen. No list of Female SF authors would be complete without Andre Norton. Her vision of aliens and space travel has been a huge influence on my own writing.