Here are 100 books that City at the Edge of Forever fans have personally recommended if you like
City at the Edge of Forever.
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I’m a novelist who was first a reader. For me, books are windows, showing the world through lenses I haven’t experienced before. In difficult moments, they’ve been lifelines, proof that I’m not alone and happy endings (at least happier) are possible. What “feels good” in a book is a quality unique to each reader. Below are stories about imperfect characters who not only survive their pasts but succeed—in unwinding from the wounds, changing aspects of themselves that no longer fit who they choose to be now, and ultimately creating happier lives. That kind of success feels great to me. I hope it might for you, too.
Malibu Rising was the first book I read by Taylor Jenkins Reid. As soon as I finished, I read three more of her novels. All of them made me feel great. Hers are stories you can lose yourself in and come out feeling refreshed and optimistic.
Malibu Rising centers around the adult Riva siblings, children whose parents stopped parenting long before the kids were equipped to care for themselves. Particularly impacted is Nina, the oldest, who has spent her life making choices that prioritize the well-being of everyone except herself.
This is a book about dealing with old wounds, the kind that hide under the surface of successful lives. It’s a story that takes us on multiple journeys of self-discovery and healing. For me, a book doesn’t get more “feel good” than that.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today • From the author of Carrie Soto Is Back, Daisy Jones & The Six, and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo . . .
“Irresistible . . . High drama at the beach, starring four sexy, surfing siblings and their deadbeat, famous-crooner dad.”—People
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Time, Marie Claire, PopSugar, Parade, Teen Vogue, Self, She Reads
Four famous siblings throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer. But over the course of twenty-four hours,…
I am a creature of habitat. I can’t help but connect with my environment in every possible way. It’s physical, emotional. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Mexico City. Leaving was heart-wrenching, but the promise to fulfill a dream drew me to Los Angeles. During the next four decades I became a student of Los Angeles and the Latino community that populates it. I agree with Randy Newman: I love L.A.
If You Lived Here You’d Be Famous By Nowis a debut novel by Via Bleidner, a young writer who reports her experiences living in the L.A./San Fernando Valley enclave of Calabasas, attending the Calabasas High School. Calabasas, for those who have missed this essential chapter of contemporary lunacy, is home to the Kardashians. Bleidner writes about the world she has inhabited as a reporter. She participates, but she also is able to maintain a certain writer's detachment describing the shenanigans the natives engage in: lip surgery, social media, and dog celebrities. But there is humor in this slice of the L.A. experience. Bleidner not only describes, but also tries to understand and reflect.
If You Lived Here You'd Be Famous by Now is an insider's collection of funny and warmhearted stories about coming of age in the Los Angeles suburb famed for birthing the Kardashian-Jenners and the Bling Ring.
For Via Bleidner, transferring to Calabasas High from the private Catholic school she's attended since second grade is a culture shock, not to mention absolutely lonely. Suddenly thrust into an unfamiliar world of celebrities, affluenza, and McMansions, Via takes a page from Cameron Crowe and pretends she's on a journalism assignment, taking notes on her classmates and jotting down bits of overheard gossip.
I am a creature of habitat. I can’t help but connect with my environment in every possible way. It’s physical, emotional. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Mexico City. Leaving was heart-wrenching, but the promise to fulfill a dream drew me to Los Angeles. During the next four decades I became a student of Los Angeles and the Latino community that populates it. I agree with Randy Newman: I love L.A.
Kate Braverman lived in Los Angeles for years and set many of her stories in this city, like Frantic Transmissions To And From Los Angeles or Palm Latitudes.In Lithium for Medea, Braverman tells the sad and dark story of Rose and her dysfunctional family, a love-hate relationship with her mother, her dying father, and drugs, lots of them. It is a disturbing, cruel, and irreverently poetic story. I survived her writing workshop in the early nineties. A harsh and not very sympathetic teacher, Kate taught me the weight of words and I thank her for that. My copies of her books are yellow from the excessive use of my highlighter. If you enjoy reading poetic prose, Kate Braverman is the master to go to.
Lithium for Medea is as much a tale of addiction—to sex, drugs, and dysfunctional family chains—as it is one of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Here is the story according to Rose—the daughter of a narcissistic, emotionally crippled mother and a father who shadowboxes with death in hospital corridors—as she slips deeply and dangerously into the lair of a cocaine-fed artist in the bohemian squalor of Venice. Lithium for Medea sears us with Rose’s breathless, fierce, visceral flight—like a drug that leaves one’s perceptions forever altered.
I am a creature of habitat. I can’t help but connect with my environment in every possible way. It’s physical, emotional. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Mexico City. Leaving was heart-wrenching, but the promise to fulfill a dream drew me to Los Angeles. During the next four decades I became a student of Los Angeles and the Latino community that populates it. I agree with Randy Newman: I love L.A.
Born in Los Angeles and with profound connection to this city’s psyche, Wendy Ortiz delivers a map of Los Angeles transformed into words, a fragmented memoir of hurt, love, loss, and reinvention. What does a young writer (one of thousands) living in this city and trying to make it worry about? Joblessness. Rent. Bills. Riding the metro. Alcohol. And yes, sex and publishing too, of course. This book proves that it’s not always 72 and sunny in Los Angeles.
Hollywood Notebook is a prose poem-ish memoir of fragments. Ortiz takes us through the streets of Los Angeles and the internal maps she's charting as she moves from her twenties to her thirties in a studio apartment in Hollywood. A cartography of love, loss, and transformation, Hollywood Notebook is a portrait of the author's psyche overlaid on a map of the city she makes her home.
My writing takes readers behind the scenes of major moments in pop culture history and examines the lasting impact that our favorite TV shows, music, and movies have on our society and psyches. I investigate why pop culture matters. I have written eight books, including the New York Times bestseller Seinfeldia, When Women Invented Television, Sex and the City and Us, and my latest, So Fetch. I’ve chosen books here that share my mission not only by going behind the scenes of major films but also by chronicling their effects on people’s real lives as well as culture and society at large.
This book looks at the ways the pop culture of 1974 reverberated throughout history. I must admit that one of the reasons I love it is that I was born in 1974. Another is that I am enamored of the culture of the ‘70s, which might be evidenced by this list.
Brownstein, a political reporter for The Atlantic and a commentator for CNN, takes pop culture seriously here, and I cannot help but be excited by that. In this book, he looks at the ways that movies, music, TV, and politics interacted in this critical year, and my favorite thing about it is the way he brings them all together.
Brownstein makes the case that this was the year when conservatives lost the culture war and have been playing catch-up ever since.
In this exceptional cultural history, Atlantic Senior Editor Ronald Brownstein-"one of America's best political journalists" (The Economist)-tells the kaleidoscopic story of one monumental year that marked the city of Los Angeles' creative peak, a glittering moment when popular culture was ahead of politics in predicting what America would become.
Los Angeles in 1974 exerted more influence over popular culture than any other city in America. Los Angeles that year, in fact, dominated popular culture more than it ever had before, or would again. Working in film, recording, and television…
I’ve been fascinated by musicians almost my entire life, but I always wanted more than the slick on-screen video, profile on the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, or interview. I wanted to know the whys and hows: why they wrote a certain way, what made them want to be a musician first, and where the inspiration and determination came from. What are they like when they’re hanging out at home, not in the spotlight? This research led me to the music and musicians of Laurel Canyon in particular and how one small area of Los Angeles has managed to create music still influential today.
I love this book for its deep dive into the music and time period of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a wonderful discovery of the bands that made this era of music so wonderful and how Laurel Canyon was in the center of it.
There are great behind-the-scenes stories and interviews with the people who were there, in the industry and making the music. It’s a great glimpse into the vision, values, and freedom of the time and how it all got funneled into that fantastic music I so love.
Michael Walker’s Laurel Canyon presents the inside story of the once hottest rock and roll neighborhood in LA.
In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughly as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had before them. Thirty years later, the music made in Laurel Canyon continues to pour from radios, iPods, and concert stages around the world. During the canyon's golden era, the musicians…
I am an author, illustrator, and award-winning creative director. I have loved to draw and make things since a young age, mostly wacky contraptions (inspired by my love of the Hanna-Barbera Wacky Races cartoons). I’m also passionate about mazes, having spent many family holidays drawing mazes on a small whiteboard for my two boys to complete.
Pierre the Maze Detective is a series of books, that, unlike my four other recommendations, combines maze solving with a narrative. I could have picked any book from the series, but I particularly liked the Mystery of the Empire Maze Tower. Each spread is a beautifully detailed illustration, somewhat similar to Where’s Waldo?, at first glance, the maze is not obvious, but on closer inspection, through the busyness, you can spy a series of paths subtlety woven into the illustration. I think this book (and the others in the series) offers a wonderful extra dimension to a slightly older solver, someone who can immerse themselves in the story, solve the mazes, and solve the crime!
Mr X the Phantom Thief is back, with a new evil plan! He wants to steal the shining light from the top of the Empire Maze Tower, New Maze City's greatest treasure.
Pierre and Carmen are called to New Maze City, along with others of the world's best Maze Detectives, to help solve the puzzles, protect the treasure and stop Mr X. But can you help them make it in time?
A thrilling new maze challenge adventure for Pierre the Maze Detective, for all detectives aged 8+.
That’s a terrible question that gives
me spiritual anxiety. But to get right down to it, I’m just someone who loves
culture. I’m fascinated by why people do the things they do, from ethics to
aesthetics. As a music journalist, I have interviewed everyone from local bands
to Grammy award-winning artists for publications like Alternative Press,
Kerrang!, Revolver, and Loudwire. My work as a freelance
entertainment writer carried me to other types of lifestyle writing, including
food and travel. I am a regular contributor for Reader’s Digest.
Culture critic Chuck Klosterman is
essentially the next-gen Hunter S. Thompson. This book is a stream of
consciousness foray into contemporary pop culture, ranging from essays on
sports to music to reality TV. It’s an odd, brilliant, self-indulgent take on
the American zeitgeist. Feel smart and have a laugh at the same time.
With an exhaustive knowledge of popular culture and an effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks the entire spectrum of postmodern America: reality TV, Internet porn, breakfast cereal, serial killers, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real difference between apples and oranges (of which there is none). Sex, Drugs and Coca Puffs is ostensibly about movies, sport, television, music, books, video games and kittens, but really it's about us. All of us.
Memory is capricious and impacts our view of the past. That’s why I do what I do! I am a twenty-year museum professional who began my career at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, worked at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for almost ten years, and am now part of the Arts & History department at the City and County of Broomfield. I have designed and developed programs and events, as well as managed teams in each of these stops. I seek to illuminate stories, elevate critical voices, and advocate for equity through the unique pathways of the arts, history, and museum magic.
Born in 1979, I’m part of the final gasp of Generation X. Klosterman uses pop culture trends and the rise of the internet and cellphones as framing for understanding how Generation X formed its view of the world and its place in it.
A fun musing on the profound changes to society and communication that took place over the decade of the 1990s, The Nineties reminds us that it wasn’t all that long ago that we got most of our news from the TV, magazines, or the newspaper, and that the 90s shaped my generation in a multitude of ways.
From the bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history.
It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a…
I’ve been fascinated by celebrities and heroes ever since I was a child. That compulsion became something I wanted to understand. I got my chance as the head editor of People magazine. Over the years, I met more than my share of celebrities – Ronald Reagan, Tom Hanks, Malcolm X, and Princess Diana, to name only a few. I began to take notes about my brushes with fame and think about celebrities in history and why they have recently become so dominant in our culture. Celebrity Nation is the result. Enjoy it!
Daniel Boorstin’s The Image is an amazing study by the former Librarian of Congress that first set in place many of the ideas about celebrities that are still with us today.
“The celebrity is a person who is known for [their] well-knowness,” Boorstin wrote. He describes “pseudo-events”, the manufactured illusions that we mistake for reality in a media-saturated world.
Drawing on examples like Charles Lindbergh, Boorstin shows how we come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety. Thus, the heroes of the past are blurred before our eyes and eventually disappear.
The Image is the first book I read about celebrity and it remains one of the best.
First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of “pseudo-events”—events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported—and the contemporary definition of celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Since then Daniel J. Boorstin’s prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.
