Here are 100 books that God's Middle Finger fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up in a small town in the days before the internet and cable television, so books were my escape, and through them, I traveled to faraway places and learned about different customs and cultures. Later, I studied Chinese cultural anthropology and lived and worked in Asia for many years. Now, I write a series about a Chinese police inspector in the brutally cold far north province of Heilongjiang and use mystery stories to unpack some of the more fascinating and essential aspects of Chinese society, politics, and religion.
This is an autobiographical tale by an American journalist on the crime beat in Tokyo.
It’s not only a riveting tour of the underbelly of Japanese society – hostess bars, yakuza gangs, murder, and mayhem – it’s a fascinating cultural journey.
The author, Jake Adelstein, studied at a Japanese university and fell into journalism almost as an afterthought.
His description of the stringent procedures for getting hired, the brutally hierarchical nature of working for a major Japanese daily, and his growth as an intrepid investigative reporter is a must-read for anyone interested in Japanese culture, society, media, and crime.
A riveting true-life tale of newspaper noir and Japanese organised crime from an American investigative journalist. Soon to be a Max Original Series on HBO Max
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EITHER ERASE THE STORY, OR WE'LL ERASE YOU. AND MAYBE YOUR FAMILY. BUT WE'LL DO THEM FIRST, SO YOU LEARN YOUR LESSON BEFORE YOU DIE.
From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club: a unique, first-hand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.
At nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. What he got was a…
I grew up in a small town in the days before the internet and cable television, so books were my escape, and through them, I traveled to faraway places and learned about different customs and cultures. Later, I studied Chinese cultural anthropology and lived and worked in Asia for many years. Now, I write a series about a Chinese police inspector in the brutally cold far north province of Heilongjiang and use mystery stories to unpack some of the more fascinating and essential aspects of Chinese society, politics, and religion.
The White Tigeris a witty and searing portrayal of a “self-made” man who has risen from the depths of abject poverty to a position of wealth and influence.
The India portrayed is far from the glitz and romantic notions of Bollywood. It is a desperately poor place where the “haves” live like kings and the “have-nots" live like slaves.
In addition to shedding light on some of the harsh realities of class, economics, and corruption in India, The White Tigersomehow manages to subvert expectations and coax the reader into rooting for a murderer and thief who justifies his actions, not entirely convincingly, by describing himself as a sort of working-class hero.
Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he…
I grew up in a small town in the days before the internet and cable television, so books were my escape, and through them, I traveled to faraway places and learned about different customs and cultures. Later, I studied Chinese cultural anthropology and lived and worked in Asia for many years. Now, I write a series about a Chinese police inspector in the brutally cold far north province of Heilongjiang and use mystery stories to unpack some of the more fascinating and essential aspects of Chinese society, politics, and religion.
Ryu Murakami is a musician, writer, and film director. He deals in surrealism and the dark side of a rigid Japanese society – drugs, sex, alienation.
In this book, Murakami relates the tale of Kenji, a young man who makes his living guiding foreigners through Tokyo’s red-light district. Kenji’s new client is an extremely odd American named Frank.
As Kenji leads Frank through a labyrinth of hostess bars and peep shows, he comes to suspect that Frank may be the serial killer who has been on a rampage, murdering and dismembering teenage girls.
From postmodern Renaissance man Ryu Murakami, master of the psychothriller and director of Tokyo Decadence, comes this hair-raising roller-coaster ride through the nefarious neon-lit world of Tokyo's sex industry. In the Miso Soup tells of Frank, an overweight American tourist who has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's sleazy nightlife. But Frank's behavior is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion-that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It is not until later, however, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how…
I am the MD of a Hong Kong-based software and AI consulting company, keeping me on top of all the latest AI technological developments. Previously, I worked in Hollywood, writing scripts, adapting novels, and working in production. My scripts have won awards at several prestigious screenwriting festivals throughout the world. However, wanting to expand my creative horizon, I wrote my first novel, The Dead Chip Syndicate, and quickly found a traditional publisher for it in 2022. Release is set for July 2023. It's the first in my Exotics series, which follows the exploits of an ex-pat navigating the Asian gambling world as he gets embroiled in one scandal and scam after another.
Another darkly comic thriller that is stunningly original and filled with cinema-worthy characters.
The book opens when an African American Marine meets a ghastly end inside a bolted-shut Mercedes that is filled with deadly cobras. Two cops arrive at the scene, but only one survives the ordeal. Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a devout Buddhist, watches his partner die from a cobra bite and vows revenge.
He teams up with an American FBI agent brought in to work the case. They chase a killer through the atmospheric streets of Bangkok, navigating through a world of illicit drugs, colorful prostitutes, and infinite corruption. Sonchai is a complex protagonist, filled with wry humor and a dogged determination that the reader will admire all the way to its intriguing end.
In surreal Bangkok, city of temples and brothels, where Buddhist monks in saffron robes walk the same streets as world-class gangsters, a US marine sergeant is killed inside a locked Mercedes by a maddened python and a swarm of cobras. Two policemen - the only two in the city not on the take - arrive too late. Minutes later, only one is alive.
The cop left standing, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, is a devout Buddhist and swears to avenge the death of his partner and soul brother. To do so he must use the forensic techniques of the modern policing and his…
I’m an herbalist, writer, and founder of Botanical Culture, a new compendium of plants and the people who cultivate them. I love helping people find the best herbs to support their health and well-being, whether by consulting, research and writing, or teaching workshops. After training at an herbalism school and more than a decade of growing and foraging, I’m still wonderstruck every time I walk into a garden or browse an apothecary. Great books about herbs inspire the same feeling of reverence for our oldest healing traditions and put the power of nature within reach.
Delving into the most significant herbs among Indigenous peoples of North America, Dr. Salmón revels in the stories that stitch plants into the memory of a culture. The result is an engaging repertoire of 80 beloved and well-illustrated herbs. Dr. Salmón, an ethnobotanist and professor, has marinated each entry in this beautiful book in a lifetime of learning from people who have profound knowledge of their homelands. Its title is inspired by his own tribe, the Rarámuri (Tarahumara) of the Mexican Sierra Madres, whose concept of iwígarareflects the understanding that all of life is interconnected and “shares the same breath.” I love the spirit of this book with its focus on narrative and come-sit-by-the-fire storytelling. If you’re hungry for the action and poetry of a good story heaped onto a plate of botanical legend and lore, this book is for you.
Iwigara, when translated, means the kinship of plants and people. And that is exactly what Enrique Salmon explores in this important book. Iwigara shares culturally specific information about 80 plants, addressing their historical and modern-day uses as medicine, food, spices, and more. Iwigara includes plants entries derived from many different American Indian tribes and seven geographic regions across the United States. Each plant entry includes the names commonly used by different tribes, a colour photograph, a short description, rich details about how the plant is used, and tips on identification and ethical harvest. Traditional stories and myths, along with images…
Having driven a motorbike around Africa, walked through parts of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and ridden a horse along the Silk Road, which culminated in three travel books, a Discovery Channel film, and Wild Frontiers the award-winning travel company I set up, I think it’s fair to say I know a thing or two about travel. With over 100 countries under my belt, discovering new places and meeting new people has always been my passion. The books I have chosen here are ones that I think best communicate both a physical and a mental journey, that draw you into a story with a beginning a middle, and an end, and leave you knowing more about both a region of the world and human nature.
Recently divorced and looking for meaning in middle age, this endearing traveller retraces the journey he made as a wide-eyed 19-year-old that saw him drive a car from California into the heart of Mexico in the hope of making a quick buck. The naivety and optimism of adolescence, beautifully juxtaposed against the reality of age, this is a poignant tale of lost youth and unfulfilled dreams that ultimately leads the author to a peaceful conclusion.
'Try this tequila oil, Hugito. Just as the alcohol hits your stomach, the chilli will as well and blow it back into your brain. It will take your head off.' Explorer Hugh Thomson takes on Mexico.
It's 1979, Hugh Thomson is eighteen, far from home, with time to kill - and on his way to Mexico. When a stranger tells him there's money to be made by driving a car over the US border to sell on the black market in Central America, Hugh decides to give it a go.
Throwing himself on the mercy of Mexicans he meets or…
I grew up on Southern California beaches—Manhattan Beach, Venice Beach, Ocean Beach, La Jolla—but first experienced Baja as an adult. It was like a different world. Returning repeatedly over the next decade, I came to know the stunning shorelines and quiet bays of the peninsula’s midriff as intimately as my home state’s beaches. Swimming and diving Baja’s clear blue waters and hiking its dusty trails and palm-studded mountains, I have admired the many moods of this unique desert peninsula. A writer and editor, I have read extensively from the vast selection of books about Baja, both new and classic works.
My favorite memoirs blend personal observations with some history and natural history and this book delivers on all those fronts.
I enjoyed how Berger’s essays ranged from the microcosm to the macrocosm, focusing on subjects as diverse as the dogs who lived on the rooftops of La Paz neighborhood, to the joy and the business of chasing eclipses.
An amateur natural historian who previously wrote about the environmental effects of the Glen Canyon Dam in “There Was a River” Berger obviously loves Baja, but more importantly, he is fascinated by the unique desert peninsula. His book drew me in from its first page and fascinated me in repeated readings.
Long frequented by pirates and haunted by pariahs, Baja California has become a favorite destination for whale watchers, hikers, and scuba divers. For Bruce Berger it has been more. In Almost an Island, he takes readers beyond the Baja of guidebooks and offers a wildly entertaining look at the real Baja California.
Eight hundred miles long, Baja California is the remotest region of the Sonoran desert, a land of volcanic cliffs, glistening beaches, fantastical boojum trees, and some of the greatest primitive murals in the Western Hemisphere. In Almost an Island, Berger recounts tales from his three decades in 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.
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.
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.
I grew up on Southern California beaches—Manhattan Beach, Venice Beach, Ocean Beach, La Jolla—but first experienced Baja as an adult. It was like a different world. Returning repeatedly over the next decade, I came to know the stunning shorelines and quiet bays of the peninsula’s midriff as intimately as my home state’s beaches. Swimming and diving Baja’s clear blue waters and hiking its dusty trails and palm-studded mountains, I have admired the many moods of this unique desert peninsula. A writer and editor, I have read extensively from the vast selection of books about Baja, both new and classic works.
A formerly comfort-seeking Brit takes a very difficult walk around Baja and learns a lot about himself, and of course, about this “desert place.”
What’s not for me to like in a story like that? There is adventure and struggle, but also plenty of humor, and the thread that binds it all together is the author’s dawning love for a land that became his special place.
Mackintosh is still living much of the time in Mexico and has written five more books about Baja, burros, beer, and even dogs, but this adventurous paean to the peninsula will always have a special place in my heart, because I read it when I was newly in love with Baja myself.
"I had never been particularly good at anything except catering to my own comfort and safety," begins Graham Mackintosh with cheerful frankness in this engaging, suspenseful, and finally stirring travel adventure.
An Englishman, Mackintosh fell in love with Baja California on a visit and, despite a glaring shortage of both experience and money, determined to walk its entire coast. Into a Desert Place is his account of how he equipped himself, what he saw and learned, and how he survived on this harsh and beautiful journey. The book was first published in England and then by Mackintosh himself in the…
My father introduced me to the world as we paged through his old pre-WWII atlas. We traced borders and rivers with our fingers and he spoke names that were magical incantations and invitations to a world more exciting and mysterious than our midwestern home. As a reader, I was drawn to books about travel and as a budding writer, I was inspired by the adventures of “Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter” featured in the Sunday comics of my youth. I packed my bags early and my passport is never out of date. I continue to read traveloirs, and I write in my journal every day. Oh! The places I will go.
With this “traveloir,” Mary Morris showed me how to do it: How to travel alone as a single woman when you didn’t have a plan or an agenda; how to write about people and places that bring them alive; how to find your own story in your travels and in your writing.
Mary Morris published this book in 1989, the year before I set off on my own—a (much older) single woman traveling without a plan or agenda. As I opened the yellowed pages again, after many years, I read this line: “I settled into loneliness once again.” Next year I’ll be traveling to San Miguel de Allende, one of the settings in Nothing to Declare. I may take this book with me and read it again.
Chronicling her travels throughout Central America, the author offers an unvarnished view of the precarious realitie's of everyday life in a harsh and ruthless land
