100 books like Flaneuse

By Lauren Elkin,

Here are 100 books that Flaneuse fans have personally recommended if you like Flaneuse. Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

Daniel Brook Author Of A History of Future Cities

From my list on read cities unconventionally.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated by cities ever since I was a teenager without a driver’s license on Long Island and my parents let me take the train into Manhattan (“Just be back by midnight!”). In college, I studied architecture and urbanism and learned how cities churned and changed. Today, having written about places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Mumbai and Berlin for publications including Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in my books, I know I’ll be walking, riding, and eating my way through cities forever. And reading through them, too!

Daniel's book list on read cities unconventionally

Daniel Brook Why did Daniel love this book?

I remember the first time I realized I was in a city without addresses—Dubai, as it happened—and I was dumbfounded that such a place could exist, let alone succeed. In this book, Deirdre Mask unearths the hidden history of street addresses—a relatively recent invention from the Age of Enlightenment—and notes how many places ranging from rural West Virginia to hyper-modern Tokyo and Seoul do just fine without them.

In this wild ride from addressless ancient Rome to meticulously gridded and numbered Chicago, Mask explains how addresses have been used to keep track of citizens (for both good and ill) and how street names allow urban communities to define themselves by, say, changing Robert E. Lee Avenue into Martin Luther King Boulevard.

By Deirdre Mask,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Address Book as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Award 2020

'Deirdre Mask's book was just up my Strasse, alley, avenue and boulevard.' -Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type

'Fascinating ... intelligent but thoroughly accessible ... full of surprises' - Sunday Times

Starting with a simple question, 'what do street addresses do?', Deirdre Mask travels the world and back in time to work out how we describe where we live and what that says about us.

From the chronological numbers of Tokyo to the naming of Bobby Sands Street in Iran, she explores how our address - or lack of one - expresses…


Book cover of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

Daniel Brook Author Of A History of Future Cities

From my list on read cities unconventionally.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated by cities ever since I was a teenager without a driver’s license on Long Island and my parents let me take the train into Manhattan (“Just be back by midnight!”). In college, I studied architecture and urbanism and learned how cities churned and changed. Today, having written about places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Mumbai and Berlin for publications including Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in my books, I know I’ll be walking, riding, and eating my way through cities forever. And reading through them, too!

Daniel's book list on read cities unconventionally

Daniel Brook Why did Daniel love this book?

This book takes something so in-your-face yet so often ignored about New York and other 21st-century global metropolises—their polyglot nature—and makes it the focus. I know when I arrive in a major city, the cacophony of myriad languages stands out on that first subway, bus, and tram ride. But soon enough, it all becomes background noise.

By foregrounding this phenomenon, arguing that it’s peaking today as global migration swells, and telling the stories of several tenacious language communities in New York’s outer boroughs, Perlin reads NYC through the alphabets that cover its bodega awnings.

By Ross Perlin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Language City as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and - because many have never been recorded - when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York.

In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin…


Book cover of Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York

Daniel Brook Author Of A History of Future Cities

From my list on read cities unconventionally.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated by cities ever since I was a teenager without a driver’s license on Long Island and my parents let me take the train into Manhattan (“Just be back by midnight!”). In college, I studied architecture and urbanism and learned how cities churned and changed. Today, having written about places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Mumbai and Berlin for publications including Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in my books, I know I’ll be walking, riding, and eating my way through cities forever. And reading through them, too!

Daniel's book list on read cities unconventionally

Daniel Brook Why did Daniel love this book?

I’ve read more books than I care to remember that treat cities solely as markets, using an economic lens that reduces urbanites to mere maximizers of their own economic self-interest. This book does the opposite, and that’s why I found it so refreshing.

Urban observer and activist Jeremiah Moss chronicles New York City during the pandemic, a time when there’s literally nothing to buy—no stores to shop in, no restaurants to eat in, and no fashion trends to keep up with. With the market shut down, Moss finds that neighbors reconnect with neighbors on a human level, and a creative, festival-like atmosphere sweeps the city. This book helped me remember what’s great about living in a big city despite the many obvious cost-of-living drawbacks.

By Jeremiah Moss,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Feral City as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Author, social critic and "New York City's career elegist" (The New York Times), Jeremiah Moss felt alienated in a town that had become suburbanised and sanitised. Then lockdown launched an unprecedented urban experiment: What happens when an entire social class abandons the city? In the streets made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss found a sense of freedom he never thought possible. Participating in a historic explosion of protest, resistance and spontaneity. From queer BLM marches to exuberant outdoor dance parties, he discovers that, without "hyper-normal" people to constrain it, New York can be more creative, connected, humane and…


Book cover of Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism

Daniel Brook Author Of A History of Future Cities

From my list on read cities unconventionally.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated by cities ever since I was a teenager without a driver’s license on Long Island and my parents let me take the train into Manhattan (“Just be back by midnight!”). In college, I studied architecture and urbanism and learned how cities churned and changed. Today, having written about places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Mumbai and Berlin for publications including Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in my books, I know I’ll be walking, riding, and eating my way through cities forever. And reading through them, too!

Daniel's book list on read cities unconventionally

Daniel Brook Why did Daniel love this book?

I love this book because it was so ahead of its time. Written during San Francisco’s first bout of hyper-gentrification—the 1990s dot-com boom—it is a chronicle of and tribute to the economically marginal but culturally central communities that got squeezed out: SRO denizens, Black activists, and queer refugees from Middle America.

In this 2001 book, a yet-to-be-discovered Solnit, in league with photographers Susan Schwartzenberg and Kate Joyce, records it all through the bulldozed and whitewashed spaces where these urbanites once lived. Most indelible is Joyce’s photo essay on San Francisco Starbucks outlets, each with a line below marking the storefront’s former life (“New Manila Restaurant, 1964-1994”; “Melody Video & Sound, 1936-1992”) showing how a flood of corporate money washed away so much that was unique in a great American city.

By Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg (photographer),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Hollow City as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

California's Bay Area is home to nearly a third of the venture capital and internet businesses in the United States, generating a boom economy and a massive influx of well-paid workers that has transformed the face of San Francisco. Once the great anomaly among American cities, San Francisco is today only the most dramatically affected among the many urban centers experiencing cultural impoverishment as a result of new forms and distributions of wealth. A collaboration between writer-hiostorian Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg, Hollow City surveys San Francisco's transformation-skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit…


Book cover of Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

Laura Davis Author Of The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story

From my list on the mother-daughter relationship.

Why am I passionate about this?

We all have obsessions in life and one of mine has been my mother and the great love and enmity that ricocheted between us for fifty-seven years. Throughout the decades, my mother went from protector to controller to betrayer to ogre to human to an elderly woman in my care. The love and hate, distance and intimacy, estrangement, and reconciliation that we experienced made me a lifelong student of the mother-daughter bond. I‘ve written about my mother for more than 30 years, and love reading mother-daughter stories, not saccharine sweet ones, but complex multi-layered dramas where there’s no villain and no hero—just two humans struggling to love and understand each other.

Laura's book list on the mother-daughter relationship

Laura Davis Why did Laura love this book?

There are so many things I loved about Motherland, it’s hard to know where to begin. For starters, Elissa Altman is a brilliant writer and a great storyteller. Her portrayal of her dramatic, narcissistic mother created a flawed, human, larger-than-life character I will never forget. Elissa moves us through time effortlessly, at one moment vividly portraying herself as a child and in the next, seamlessly bringing in the voice of wisdom—her adult voice now—as we watch her struggle to make peace with the past. I deeply resonated with the love and hate, attachment and resentment that ricocheted between this unforgettable mother-daughter pair. I love books that grab me and don’t let me go. Motherland definitely had me hooked all the way from beginning to end. I hated leaving Altman’s world behind. I didn’t want the book to end.

By Elissa Altman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Motherland as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“I’m reading this book right now and loving it!”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild

How can a mother and daughter who love (but don’t always like) each other coexist without driving each other crazy? 

“Vibrating with emotion, this deeply honest account strikes a chord.”—People
“A wry and moving meditation on aging and the different kinds of love between women.”—O: The Oprah Magazine 

After surviving a traumatic childhood in nineteen-seventies New York and young adulthood living in the shadow of her flamboyant mother, Rita, a makeup-addicted former television singer, Elissa Altman has managed to build a very…


Book cover of The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

Stephen Trimble Author Of The Capitol Reef Reader

From my list on Utah Canyon Country.

Why am I passionate about this?

Long ago, in college in Colorado, I discovered Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—the classic that grew from journals he kept while a ranger at Utah’s Arches National Park. I’d grown up in the West, visiting national parks and revering park rangers. Abbey gave me the model—live and write in these wild places. After graduating, I snagged jobs myself as a seasonal ranger/naturalist at Arches and Capitol Reef national parks. I was thrilled. Since then, I’ve spent decades exploring and photographing Western landscapes. After working on 25 books about natural history, Native peoples, and conservation, Capitol Reef still remains my “home park” and Utah Canyon Country my spiritual home.  

Stephen's book list on Utah Canyon Country

Stephen Trimble Why did Stephen love this book?

Ellen Meloy just might be my favorite Utah writer. She’s smart and witty. She’s laugh-out-loud funny. She’s self-deprecatory and never preachy. She gets her natural history right. And her writing is gorgeous. She died far too young, at 58, in 2004, and I miss her. As she wanders outward across Bears Ears National Monument from her home in Bluff, Ellen’s musings apply equally to the slickrock spine of the Waterpocket Fold in Capitol Reef. So I was determined to include her in my own book. I chose an excerpt from The Anthropology of Turquoise—a terrific piece on sensual canyon country wildflowers, “slickrotica.” In her book, Ellen follows turquoise to the ends of the earth, but she always brings us back to her home territory in the canyons. 

By Ellen Meloy,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Anthropology of Turquoise as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape.

From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains, turquoise seas, and even motel swimming pools. She introduces us to Navajo “velvet grandmothers” whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of…


Book cover of Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Emma Darwin Author Of This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin: a writer’s journey through my family

From my list on failing to write a book.

Why am I passionate about this?

Alongside writing, I’ve been running workshops, teaching and mentoring writers for nearly twenty years, helping people get unstuck and keep going. So I spend most of my working life thinking about creativity and writing—then suddenly I, too, couldn’t write the book I needed to write. Every book in this list is about not-writing for different reasons, in different circumstances, but between them they tell us so much about how we write, why we write, how we get writing to happen—and what’s happening when we can’t. These very different stories resonate with each other, and I hope some of them resonate with you.

Emma's book list on failing to write a book

Emma Darwin Why did Emma love this book?

First, because it’s incredibly funny. Geoff Dyer set out—he says—to write a sober, serious study of D. H. Lawrence, but life, travel arrangements, random people and his own inertia kept getting in the way. The story of his odyssey doesn’t just evoke all the things about writing that we’ve always suspected (that it’s hard; that it’s easy; that we often wonder why on earth we do it; that we never question that we want to do it). It also, by stealth, evokes and explains an amazing amount about Lawrence, and why he’s a writer that so many people love—or hate—so passionately. 

By Geoff Dyer,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Out of Sheer Rage as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Recounts the author's experiences visiting the places D.H. Lawrence lived while actively not working on a book about Lawrence and not writing his own novel.


Book cover of The Blazing World

Phoebe Hoban Author Of Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty

From my list on genre-bending artists: inside and out.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in a creative family. My father was an illustrator before becoming a children’s book author and novelist. My mother, a trained dancer, became my father’s collaborator, illustrating their internationally-known Frances books. They inspired me and encouraged me to develop my own talent. I started writing at nine, and have never stopped since. I became a journalist, writing about culture and art for The New York times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue, among others. I am also the author of three well-received artist biographies: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art; Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open; and Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty.

Phoebe's book list on genre-bending artists: inside and out

Phoebe Hoban Why did Phoebe love this book?

Hustvedt creates a very compelling picture of the inner and outer life of a female artist in the contemporary art world, notorious for both its sexism and ageism. The protagonist comes up with a clever ploy for achieving the same success as a male artist: she takes on a male artist’s persona and name, and hires a male artist to impersonate her in public, a convoluted ploy with great potential to ultimately backfire. Don’t want to provide any plot spoilers!

By Siri Hustvedt,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Blazing World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of the Year ** Publishers Weekly’s Best Fiction Books of 2014 ** NPR Best Books of 2014 ** Kirkus Reviews Best Literary Fiction Books of 2014 ** Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Books of 2014 ** Boston Globe’s Best Fiction of 2014 ** The Telegraph’s Best Fiction to Read 2014 ** St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Best Books of 2014 ** The Independent Fiction Books of the Year 2014 ** One of Buzzfeed’s Best Books Written by Women in 2014 ** San Francisco Chronicle’s Best of 2014 ** A…


Book cover of The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72

Jennifer Horne Author Of Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author

From my list on nonfiction books on lesser-known but fascinating figures.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always loved reading biographies: we only get one life, but through stories of others’ lives we get to absorb into our own imagination their experiences and what they learned, or didn’t, from them. Having written poetry since childhood, I have long been an observer of myself and those around me, with a great curiosity about how people live and what motivates them. I’ve come to see that, no matter what genre I’m writing in, I’m driven to understand the connection between identity and place–for me, in particular, women in the southern U.S., and how each of us makes meaning out of the materials at hand.

Jennifer's book list on nonfiction books on lesser-known but fascinating figures

Jennifer Horne Why did Jennifer love this book?

This book was on the bedside table at a friend’s house where I was staying. I picked it up, started it, and stayed up much later than I had planned!

I was so engaged with the idea of an eighteenth-century woman who began making these botanical paper cut-outs and achieved attention for her work in late life, and I was drawn along by Peacock’s clear, lyrical prose and how she wove in aspects of her own life as a poet.

I loved Mary Delaney’s creativity, spirit, and grit, and she now feels to me like a friend from 250 years ago. 

By Molly Peacock,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Paper Garden as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Mary Delany was seventy-two years old when she noticed a petal drop from a geranium. In a flash of inspiration, she picked up her scissors and cut out a paper replica of the petal, inventing the art of collage. It was the summer of 1772, in England. During the next ten years she completed nearly a thousand cut-paper botanicals (which she called mosaicks) so accurate that botanists still refer to them. Poet-biographer Molly Peacock uses close-ups of these brilliant collages in The Paper Garden to track the extraordinary life of Delany, friend of Swift, Handel, Hogarth, and even Queen Charlotte…


Book cover of Memory and Dream

Jami Fairleigh Author Of Oil and Dust

From my list on fantasy featuring art-based magic.

Why am I passionate about this?

At heart, I believe every one of us is creative. It doesn’t matter if you express your creativity through words, notes, metal, wood, food, fabric, or paint. Personally, I love to sketch, paint, write, and sculpt. There is something magical about bringing your imagination to life and sharing it with the world! Our art allows us to share our emotions, dreams, memories, and culture with the world. As a fantasy author, I wanted to create a place where art can transform the physical world too. 

Jami's book list on fantasy featuring art-based magic

Jami Fairleigh Why did Jami love this book?

If you haven’t read any of Charles de Lint’s stories, you’re in for a treat!

Each of his stories feels so fresh and original. His characters jump off the page… but will also break your heart. This novel is about a young artist named Isabelle Copley (Izzy) whose whimsical paintings seem so real they could come to life. But is her art just… art? The writing is beautiful and lyrical, but also dark and scary.

Memory and Dream is also a great entry into de Lint’s story world of “Newford”.

By Charles de Lint,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Memory and Dream as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From her mentor, Rushkin, Isabell Copley had learned to paint creatures that come to life--literally--and years after these creatures have ruined her life, Isabelle returns to painting, haunted by memories, dreams, and the threat of her mentor's return.


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