Here are 75 books that Bobos in Paradise fans have personally recommended if you like
Bobos in Paradise.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I grew up around a lot of suffering over status. I didn’t want to suffer, so I kept trying to understand why everyone plays a game that they insist they don’t want to play. I found my answer when I studied evolutionary psychology. This answer really hit home when I watched David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries. I saw the social rivalry among our mammalian ancestors, and it motivated me to research the biology behind it. I took early retirement from a career as a Professor of Management and started writing books about the brain chemistry we share with earlier mammals. I’m so glad I found my power over my inner mammal!
It’s hilarious and cringey at the same time to read this honest look at status anxiety. It’s hilarious to watch others seek status. As for yourself, you hopefully relieve your cringing because you see how status has obsessed people throughout history.
The author says we seek the love of the world as well as the love of a partner. The quest can ruin an otherwise good life, so he offers solutions. I love his explanation of the original “Bohemians.” They were the hipsters of the 19th century! They created those impressionist paintings we love because they were aching for status.
The author is a famous British philosopher who inherited a fortune. He sees that money does not relieve status anxiety. But he misses the real reason: because we’ve inherited the brain of status-seeking animals (as explained in all of my books).
From one of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life - Alain de Botton sets out to understand our universal fear of failure - and how we might change it
'De Botton's gift is to prompt us to think about how we live and how we might change things' The Times
We all worry about what others think of us. We all long to succeed and fear failure. We all suffer - to a greater or lesser…
I grew up around a lot of suffering over status. I didn’t want to suffer, so I kept trying to understand why everyone plays a game that they insist they don’t want to play. I found my answer when I studied evolutionary psychology. This answer really hit home when I watched David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries. I saw the social rivalry among our mammalian ancestors, and it motivated me to research the biology behind it. I took early retirement from a career as a Professor of Management and started writing books about the brain chemistry we share with earlier mammals. I’m so glad I found my power over my inner mammal!
“Envy is the only one of the 7 deadly sins that isn’t fun.”
The author is a great observer of the snobbery that surrounds you in daily life, from fashion snobs to intellectual snobs. He’s a “snobographer,” according to one reviewer.
This book invites you to laugh at the snobs, not to change your thinking. Pointing fingers feels good in the short run, but my books show that it hurts you in the long run. We all have the one-upping impulse because we’re all mammals. If you hate people who do this, you end up hating yourself. You may insist that you don’t care about status, but moral superiority is just more one-upping.
Observations on the many ways we manage to look down on others, from “a writer who can make you laugh out loud on every third page” (The New York Times Book Review).
Snobs are everywhere. At the gym, at work, at school, and sometimes even lurking in your own home. But how did we, as a culture, get this way? With dishy detail, Joseph Epstein skewers all manner of elitism as he examines how snobbery works, where it thrives, and the pitfalls and perils in thinking you’re better than anyone else.
Offering arch observations on the new footholds of snobbery,…
I grew up around a lot of suffering over status. I didn’t want to suffer, so I kept trying to understand why everyone plays a game that they insist they don’t want to play. I found my answer when I studied evolutionary psychology. This answer really hit home when I watched David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries. I saw the social rivalry among our mammalian ancestors, and it motivated me to research the biology behind it. I took early retirement from a career as a Professor of Management and started writing books about the brain chemistry we share with earlier mammals. I’m so glad I found my power over my inner mammal!
This 1950s view of status-seeking is fun because it’s far away yet eerily familiar. The small details that reveal a person’s social class are explored. Your sex life and social life are scrutinized, along with religion, education, politics, and “the totem poles of job prestige.”
Packard wrote many popular sociology books in the 1950s. I loved his book The Human Side of Animals. It shows how animals compete for social dominance because it helps their genes survive. So why does the author blame society for status-seeking in this book? He knows the truth: all societies have status-seeking because we’re all mammals. I think this book has a bitter tone because the author is appealing to bitter readers. Fortunately, we have a choice about playing the game.
I grew up around a lot of suffering over status. I didn’t want to suffer, so I kept trying to understand why everyone plays a game that they insist they don’t want to play. I found my answer when I studied evolutionary psychology. This answer really hit home when I watched David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries. I saw the social rivalry among our mammalian ancestors, and it motivated me to research the biology behind it. I took early retirement from a career as a Professor of Management and started writing books about the brain chemistry we share with earlier mammals. I’m so glad I found my power over my inner mammal!
A thick science book on envy is just what we need to help us release this feeling. The author looks at “Man the Envier” in an anthropological way. He shows how diverse cultures have struggled to manage this natural impulse, even using “black magic.” That may sound crazy, but my Italian ancestors did this. They believed that suffering is caused by malocchio—the evil eye from a person who envies you.
I like this book because it shows how humans create envy inside themselves. You may not want to see inside yourself. It’s easier to dream that the perfect society that will relieve your envy. But you make yourself powerless when you do that because you can’t control society. You are better off building your power over your emotions, as my books explain.
This classic study is one of the few books to explore extensively the many facets of envy—“a drive which lies at the core of man’s life as a social being.” Ranging widely over literature, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, Professor Schoeck— a distinguished sociologist and anthropologist—elucidates both the constructive and destructive consequences of envy in social life. Perhaps most important, he demonstrates that not only the impetus toward a totalitarian regime but also the egalitarian impulse in democratic societies are alike in being rooted in envy.
I love exploring old homes. Whether I’m on a historic house tour, an estate sale, or a real estate open house, I love seeing the glimpses of the people who once occupied the home. When my mom passed away, I hired an estate sale organizer to help me clear out her house and became fascinated with the estate sale business. What a great way to peek into other people’s houses and lives and perhaps discover their darkest secrets! That’s how I started writing my Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series.
A young woman desperate for a second chance accepts a position as a nanny which comes with lodging in the pool house behind the family’s main house. The pool house is nicer than any place she’s lived recently, but she soon starts hearing strange noises and the little boy she’s watching starts drawing pictures that become creepier and more detailed as time goes on. I loved the flawed but kind heroine and cheered for her to figure out what happened in that pool house and what’s going on with the seemingly normal family who hired her. A real page-turner!
NATIONAL BESTSELLER · OPTIONED FOR NETFLIX BY A PRODUCER OF THE BATMAN
“I loved it." —Stephen King
From Edgar Award-finalist Jason Rekulak comes a wildly inventive spin on the supernatural thriller, for fans of Stranger Things and Riley Sager, about a woman working as a nanny for a young boy with strange and disturbing secrets.
Mallory Quinn is fresh out of rehab when she takes a job as a babysitter for Ted and Caroline Maxwell. She is to look after their five-year-old son, Teddy.
Mallory immediately loves it. She has her own living space, goes out for nightly runs, and…
I was born and raised in Mississippi, where ink and river mud run through our veins in equal measure. My parents were readers, and thus, I followed in their footsteps. Before long, I was reading their library choices and mine and still running out of books before it was time to visit again. From the moment I laid eyes on Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series, I was hooked on historical mysteries. It took me forty years of life to realize I had stories of my own to share. I now live in Oxford, England, with my husband, two daughters, three cats, and lots of shadowy corners for inspiration.
I love a well-written underdog, and Ashley Gardner delivers in this book. Captain Gabriel Lacey acts as the bridge between the highest echelons of society and the poor at the bottom, humanizing every one of them while solving twisty crimes.
I adored the unexpected friendship between the retired military man and Grenville, a fashion-conscious man of high society. This long-running series remains one of my absolute favorites because of the mix of upstairs/downstairs intrigues and excellent character development.
London, 1816 Cavalry captain Gabriel Lacey returns to Regency London from the Napoleonic wars, burned out, fighting melancholia, his career ended. His interest is piqued when he learns of a missing girl, possibly kidnapped by a prominent member of Parliament. Lacey's search for the young woman leads to murder, corruption, and dealings with a leader of the underworld. At the same time, he struggles with his transition from a soldier's life to the civilian world, redefining his role with his former commanding officer, and making new friends--from the top of society to the street girls of Covent Garden.
I am a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and I am interested in global capitalism, financial elites, and all aspects of how people broker capital deals. I am a scholar of anti-heroes who studies all of the ways that people play in the gray. My first book, Dealing in Desire, is an ethnography where I embedded myself in several different hostess bars to study the relationship between sex work and financial deal-making. I grew up in California but have lived most of my adult life in Ho Chi Minh City, Houston, Boston, and Chicago.
This is one of my favorite new books that provides an on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship. I learned a tremendous amount about the “market” for passports.
Surak provides a window into the states and brokers who sell them and the billionaire/multimillionaire elites who can afford to buy them. With an incredible six years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, she shows the scale of a full-blown industry where buyers, brokers, and sellers all profit from the citizenship trade.
"[A] fascinating study of how people and their capital seek to move around a world that is at once hugely interconnected and driven by inequities...definitive, detailed, and unusually nuanced." Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Foreign Affairs
The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the normalization of a once shadowy practice.
Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely…
There are many big problems in the world today–racism, war, climate change, unaccountable governments, exploitative corporations, and so on. But when you scratch the surface of almost any serious problem, what you find is that the root of the problem is inequality: a minority of people are rich and powerful, while those who suffer the most are typically poor and powerless. I’m so passionate about inequality because, in my eyes, it constitutes the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our world and the key to making things better.
Everyone is familiar with the idea of a minimum wage, but should there also be a maximum wage? Should there be an upper limit on the amount of wealth that anyone is allowed to possess? In this fantastic and easy-to-read book, Ingrid Robeyns convincingly argues yes. She shows why a society with billionaires is dangerous, unfair, unhealthy, and ultimately worse for everyone.
Like every brilliant book, this one starts off seeming radical but ends up seeming obvious.
"A powerful case for limitarianism-the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate. A must-read!" -Thomas Piketty, bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
An original, bold, and convincing argument for a cap on wealth by the philosopher who coined the term "limitarianism."
How much money is too much? Is it ethical, and democratic, for an individual to amass a limitless amount of wealth, and then spend it however they choose? Many of us feel that the answer to that is no-but what can we do about it?
Dinosaurs have been my passion in life since before I could even form complete sentences. For as far back as I can remember, I have been enthralled by these magnificent creatures and have been obsessed with their ability to ensnare the human imagination in a way few other topics can. As a child, I would go to the school library and read dinosaur books every day after school. I would also spend my summers planning trips to museums to see their bones for myself. The amount of dinosaur movies, books, video games, and television shows I have consumed cannot be understated.
A commonly discussed debate among dinosaur fans is whether or not Jurassic Park was influenced in any way by this book. Not only did the Carnosaur novel predate Jurassic Park but the film adaptations of both were released only weeks apart in 1993.
Regardless, this book did many of the same things in Jurassic Park several years before Jurassic Park’s release. The novel also features an eccentric billionaire cloning dinosaurs, but what I believe truly separates both stories is the fact that while Jurassic Park is set on a remote island, Carnosaur follows a sleepy little town where the primal creatures escape to and wreak havoc.
What follows is a gruesome series of attacks and mauling that send shivers down my spine each time I revisit this story. While this book is not as highly regarded as Jurassic Park, I believe it deserves to be remembered as a piece…
Nothing much ever happens in the sleepy English town of Warchester. So when a farmer is found savagely killed in some sort of animal attack, it’s a big story for local reporter David Pascal. The rich and eccentric Sir Darren Penward tells the police an escaped Siberian tiger from his private zoo is to blame, but Pascal isn’t so sure. Especially when one witness describes something impossible: an enormous and deadly creature that has been extinct for sixty million years. What exactly is Penward hiding behind the walls of his massive estate? And can Pascal uncover the truth before Penward’s…
As both a lifelong traveler and reader, I cannot start an adventure without a great book. Having owned a Kindle since 2008, I consistently carry a virtual library, curating an assortment of captivating reads for every journey. As a travel journalist, I fly multiple times a month, which amplifies my need and understanding of the perfect in-flight companions; stories that transport and captivate. As an author with a memoir to my name, I appreciate the transformative power of storytelling. This blend of literary passion, frequent travel, and personal authorship has led me on my search for engaging, unforgettable books that mesmerize the reader.
When I read this book, I felt like I was back walking on the streets of India. Alka Joshi's vivid storytelling will transport you to a world of vibrant colors, rich traditions, and compelling characters.
In this first book of the Jaipur Trilogy, Lakshmi, a skilled henna artist, navigates a complex society, unraveling secrets and defying societal norms. Joshi's exquisite prose and the book's engrossing plot offer the perfect blend of escapism and depth, making it an ideal companion for a journey.
As you soar through the skies, it promises to transport you to another time and place, making the flight feel like a brief detour into an enchanting literary world.
For fans of Balli Kaur Jaswal's Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows and Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us, Alka Josh's The Henna Artist by is lushly-rendered, emotional book club fiction set in post-Raj 1950s Jaipur about a young woman struggling to shape her own destiny in a world pivoting between the traditional and the modern.
After fleeing an arranged marriage as a fifteen year old to an abusive older man, Lakshmi Shastri steals away alone from her rural village to Jaipur. Here, against odds, she carves out a living for herself as a henna artist, and friend and confidante to…
