Fans pick 100 books like Dime-Store Alchemy

I am married to an auction veteran and have written on art and antiques in an earlier life so Frayn’s satirical farce hits all the right notes for me. A farce without slamming doors but plenty of misunderstandings and self-inflicted confusion.

Martin Clay, a philosopher turned amateur art historian and art expert, tumbles down the rabbit hole of self-delusion as he convinces himself that a painting he barely glimpsed is a lost Bruegel. He searches countless documents to find the facts that he twists to prove his hunch leading the reader on a deep dive into Dutch political and art history. Moral equivocation, adultery, tax evasion, double-dealing, plot twists and turns—everything a good farce should be.

I was hungry for a great piece of comic writing when a friend handed me this book, and it delivered so much more than laughter.

Once I’d tuned in to the language, I ended up shambling through 30s London alongside impecunious painter Gulley Jimson. A humble man, driven by a holy need to make the sort of art which, it turns out, nobody wants, he encounters a world of squalor and beauty, both physical and moral.

I grew to love him and his daily observations on the play of weather and light on the Thames, which form a sort of sketchbook. As Jimson’s physical health declines, he grips beauty wherever he finds it. Theroux, Lessing, and Updike all rated this author.

For my high school sophomore history teacher, world history was only Greece under Pericles and England under Elizabeth I. I went to Greece under her spell, and ever since, I have been drawn to books about Greece—fiction and non-fiction.

This book is about a fictional Greek island at the end of the Ottoman empire, an English con man caught up in his archaeological con, a beautiful artist (played by a young Helen Mirren in the film version), greedy government officials, and an informer who fears for his life is our unreliable narrator. It makes for an engrossing novel of adventure and ideas that holds up on a second reading after over forty years. 

I have never been able to look at Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child the same after reading this brilliant and controversial book. I promise your eyes will be opened as well. These paintings were not simple religious decoration. Christ’s genitalia, exposed or covered, was a visible element in theological arguments in the Renaissance about the humanity of Christ. In our secular world, Steinberg argues, we have lost sight of the sexual component of these images. Steinberg’s breadth of learning is astounding, and the extensive footnotes are as stimulating as the text.  

This well-researched and in-depth account has been translated from French and discusses the various occult movements which inspired the art and ideas of the surrealists. It covers a diverse range of topics including divination, astrology, myth, voodoo, Gnosticism, freemasonry, alchemy, secret societies, and Celticism and shows how various artists and writers took inspiration from these systems. The book contains a selection of images, copious notes, a substantial bibliography, and a good index making this an indispensable research tool for aspiring scholars of surrealism and the occult.  

Ithell Colquhoun was a surrealist artist, writer, and an initiate of several magical orders. Her unique novel (first published in 1961) has a haunting and visionary quality in the way it blends surrealist imagery and occult symbolism. The hermetic plot symbolizes alchemical processes and transformations and reading it feels like being guided through an oneiric landscape, evoking myths tangled with bodily sensations and fragments of memories.

Not a novel in the usual sense of the word, but a philosophical and poetic meditation on dreams, desires, and the journey through life. This is a lovely edition, illustrated with a selection of Colquhoun’s watercolours which beautifully complement the text.

At first sight, the title evokes a certain Gallic hauteur, but it does not take long to see that this is simply a foretaste of the rich exploration of the myths of Paris – how the great city has been depicted, imagined, and perceived over time. This is the story of Paris as the capital of modernity, art, fashion, revolution, sex, pleasure, science, and crime. With writers, artists, poets, and visitors as witnesses, and lavishly illustrated, this is a colourful meander through the myths and illusions that have shaped the many images of Paris. 

Whatever the actual realities beneath these multiple faces, asks Higonnet at one point, ‘who could, in our culturally unanchored world, imagine life without this city?’    

If you’re looking for a darker, more violent set of short stories, look no further. Another running theme in this collection I loved is the cleverness that goes into the plots, many of which deal with revenge and murder in unique ways. I liked how the things doing the killing were varied and utilized in unexpected styles. Whether that was a truck driver seeking revenge on a gang of bikers or carousel horses coming to life to terrorize teens, or a faun doling out justice to a group of hunters, these stories left me unsettled yet creatively satisfied. 

I loved this collection of short stories primarily for the characters that Kevin Wilson created. The humanity and eclectic traits that he puts into them connected with me on a personal level. It’s almost as if the characters could live in a Wes Anderson film. While the people shine in these stories, the plots still have that inventive odd twist that left me smiling. And the story from which the collection takes its name was a melancholic surreal tale that left me thinking about its layers of meaning long after I finished reading it.

This book is one of my all time favorite reads. Mount Analogue is a short poetic novel. Daumal’s rich descriptions and symbolism engaged my imagination and made me think deeply about the story’s meaning. The author takes readers on a journey to a mystical place with an unusual set of characters and strange circumstances. The story revolves around an adventurous sailing and climbing expedition to a mystical mountain hidden from the world’s inhabitants which is believed to link the earth to a higher sphere of reality. It’s full of intrigue and packed with pithy philosophical statements worth pondering. Daumal’s words and descriptions are so thought-provoking, that I used a quote from this book as the opening to my memoir, If I Live Until Morning.