Here are 100 books that House Lessons fans have personally recommended if you like
House Lessons.
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I love writing books that feature buildings and construction as a backdrop to life. I’ve worked as an interior designer for over 30 years, and now I teach design at a university in Sydney. Our homes offer so much more than four walls and a roof. They provide us with comfort and shelter. They offer security and stability. They help us stay sane and grounded in a sometimes confusing and turbulent world. I don’t think the importance of our homes can be underestimated.
Most romance readers know that this story is about a run-down villa in Tuscany and a heartbroken heroine (Frances Mayes) struggling to build a life after her divorce. But read the book for the beautiful descriptions of the countryside, the delicious food and wine, and the gorgeous accounts of village life—the markets, the frescos, the fading sunlight!
This memoir is not just a restoration journey; it’s a book about finding yourself.
Discover the New York Times bestseller that inspired the film. The perfect read for anyone seeking an escape to the Italian countryside.
When Frances Mayes - poet, gourmet cook and travel writer - buys an abandoned villa in Tuscany, she has no idea of the scale of the project she is embarking on.
In this enchanting memoir she takes the reader on a journey to restore a crumbling villa and build a new life in the Italian countryside, navigating hilarious cultural misunderstandings, legal frustrations and the challenges of renovating a house that seems determined to remain a ruin.
I love writing books that feature buildings and construction as a backdrop to life. I’ve worked as an interior designer for over 30 years, and now I teach design at a university in Sydney. Our homes offer so much more than four walls and a roof. They provide us with comfort and shelter. They offer security and stability. They help us stay sane and grounded in a sometimes confusing and turbulent world. I don’t think the importance of our homes can be underestimated.
There’s a lot to love about this book. An alpha heroine who knows what she wants. A large extended family. An angry ghost. An old house with hidden passages and a long-established, much-loved bar/restaurant renovation.
There’s also a very spicy love affair. Curl up with this after a long day renovating.
"A sexy, emotional, and pitch-perfect romance." —NPR on Lush Money
Opposites attract in this rivals-to-lovers romance from Lush Money author Angelina M. Lopez
Guapo pobrecito her grandmother calls him. The “poor handsome man.”
Professor Jeremiah Post, the poor handsome man, is in fact standing in the way of Alejandra “Alex” Torres turning Loretta’s, her grandmother’s bar, into a viable business. The hot brainiac who sleeps in one of the upstairs tenant rooms already has all of her Mexican American family’s admiration; she won’t let him have the bar and building she needs to resurrect her career, too.
I love writing books that feature buildings and construction as a backdrop to life. I’ve worked as an interior designer for over 30 years, and now I teach design at a university in Sydney. Our homes offer so much more than four walls and a roof. They provide us with comfort and shelter. They offer security and stability. They help us stay sane and grounded in a sometimes confusing and turbulent world. I don’t think the importance of our homes can be underestimated.
If you’re in the middle of renovating and feel like you’ve lost your way, you might need a new perspective. This book will get you back on track.
Easy for laypeople to understand—the writing is simple and elegant—it’s philosophical and wise. It might even change how you look at the world, or at least the way you look at architecture. Hopefully, you’ll remember why you’re renovating in the first place.
What makes a house beautiful? Is it serious to spend your time thinking about home decoration? Why do people disagree about taste? Can buildings make us happy? In The Architecture of Happiness Alain de Botton tackles a relationship central to our lives. Our buildings - and the objects we fill them with - affect us more profoundly than we might think. To take architecture seriously is to accept that we are, for better and for worse, different people in different places. De Botton suggests that it is architecture's task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be. Turning…
I love writing books that feature buildings and construction as a backdrop to life. I’ve worked as an interior designer for over 30 years, and now I teach design at a university in Sydney. Our homes offer so much more than four walls and a roof. They provide us with comfort and shelter. They offer security and stability. They help us stay sane and grounded in a sometimes confusing and turbulent world. I don’t think the importance of our homes can be underestimated.
I love a good contemporary romance with a renovating premise. This one delivers all the tropes—an off-limits best friend, forced proximity, and a man with power tools.
Sometimes, you need an easy, joyful read, and I finished this in one day. It’s charming. The dialogue is witty and sparkling. Both main characters are so likeable. This is a funny, entertaining, and quirky novel.
Readers and critics alike raved over USA Today bestselling author Sally Thorne's smash hit debut novel, The Hating Game-which sold in over 20 countries. Now she's back with an unforgettable romantic comedy about a twin sister and brother struggling over an inheritance-and the sexy best friend who comes between them.
Crush (n.): a strong and often short-lived infatuation, particularly for someone beyond your reach...
Darcy Barrett has undertaken a global survey of men. She's travelled the world, and can categorically say that no one measures up to Tom Valeska, whose only flaw is that Darcy's twin brother Jamie saw him…
I am the oldest of four children and was always close to my mom. She was a trailblazer, earning her doctorate in educational psychology in 1963 and teaching at the college level. In her early 70’s her memory started to falter, and she lived with dementia for 10 years before she died. I was a reporter at The New York Times and had published three books by that point. My fourth became All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia. With Refreshments. I spent years in doctors’ and hospital’s waiting rooms and these are some of the books that helped make that time not only tolerable but sometimes, even joyful.
“I saw a little boy on the street today, and he cried so eloquently that I will never forget him.” Maeve Brennan wrote for the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section as ‘The Long-Winded Lady’ from 1954 to 1968. She roamed the city’s streets, bars, and restaurants, eyes wide open, weaving stories of vivid emotional detail from the most seemingly mundane moments. None of these are too long – in the waiting room concentration can be fleeting – but each sketch engages. Her story of the crying boy ends this way: “He might have been the last bird in the world, except that if he had been the last bird there would have been no one to hear him.”
“Of all the incomparable stable of journalists who wrote for The New Yorker during its glory days in the Fifties and Sixties,” writes The Independent, “the most distinctive was Irish-born Maeve Brennan.” From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote for The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column under the pen name “The Long-Winded Lady.” Her unforgettable sketches—prose snapshots of life in small restaurants, cheap hotels, and crowded streets of Times Square and the Village—together form a timeless, bittersweet tribute to what she called the “most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human…
Born in 1969 as the seventh of eight children to two Harlem-raised parents, I benefited from both the inner-city life of Queens, New York and childhood summers spent on a farm in rural upstate New York. Academic, professional, and physical accomplishments have punctuated my life. An adventurer by nature, I became the first African American to hike to the top of every mountain in the northeast US over 4,000' (115 of them) by September of 2000. At that time, less than 400 people had accomplished this feat; whereas thousands have scaled Mount Everest. My home city’s iconic landmarks create a psychological veil that blinds people to the vast open spaces that dominate New York State.
As books by academics are apt to be, this wonderfully rich account of the history of New York’s Finger Lakes region is replete with references, quotes, and poetic stories. Tall begins with the manner in which the Iroquois Confederacy was divided and driven out during the Revolutionary War, and progresses through the influences of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a heavily guarded military base, and struggles with blight in Geneva, New York. “Place” is explored through the lenses of the natural environment, language, religion, psychology, racism, and more. Indeed, Tall’s approach to understanding the community she adopted can be replicated on lands all over the world.
Why does a particular landscape move us? What is it that attaches us to a particular place? Tall's From Where We Stand is an eloquent exploration of the connections we have with places-and the loss to us if there are no such connections. A typically rootless child of several American suburbs, Tall set out to make a true home for herself in the landscape that circumstance had brought her-the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.
In a mosaic of personal anecdotes, historical sketches, and lyrical meditations, she interweaves her own story with the story of this place and its…
I’ve been a reader since childhood and books have simply become a part of my life’s tapestry. They have comforted me in times of stress. They have provided me with ripples of joy. And simply kept me up almost all night. The books that I have recommended underscore the changing cultures of the human condition all centered around three universal themes, faith, mental illness, and family. When drafting my first novel I dived into simply capturing aspects of the human condition. As a mental health clinician I see the many tides of life and how the human condition has many times been couched within family dynamics.
This book is written by the late, great Maya Angelou and it is a must-read. As an African American woman the wisdom passed on by our matriarchs is not only needed but essential. Letter to My Daughter, is just that, a letter to me. It encompasses the wisdom of a well-lived life and a strong desire to pay it forward. This is not just a book it is a teaching tool that will leave its reader with a sense of grounding that only a long afternoon conversation with a wise elder can. Grab a glass of sweet tea and glean.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.
Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.
Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less…
I’ve been sketching the world around me since 2014 after discovering one or two of the books on this list and feeling inspired to do the same. I have travelled and sketched my way through many countries and in 2020, started a blog called Urban Sketching World, sharing tips and tricks I have learnt along the way. This expanded to a YouTube channel called Taria’s Sketchy Adventures, and I am proud to say I have taught hundreds (possibly thousands) of people how to pick up a sketchbook and start recording their own sketchy adventures. I now have my own book published called The Beginners Guide to Urban Sketching.
I think this could have been the book that made me want to sketch the world around me. It’s difficult to pinpoint but let’s just say this book had a huge impact on me, both at the time and my life subsequently.
This a graphic memoir. I am not sure if any other books even exist like this. But Danny shares what happened to his wife one fateful day, the subsequent impact on his family, and how he dealt with it through drawing. Danny’s drawings show that one does not need to be an amazing artist to sketch the world around you. His sketches are a record of a moment in time and not something made to hang on a wall. This was a major revelation to me.
In the tradition of Persepolis, In the Shadow of No Towers, and Our Cancer Year, an illustrated memoir of remarkable depth, power, and beauty
Danny Gregory and his wife, Patti, hadn't been married long. Their baby, Jack, was ten months old; life was pretty swell. And then Patti fell under a subway train and was paralyzed from the waist down.
In a world where nothing seemed to have much meaning, Danny decided to teach himself to draw, and what he learned stunned him. Suddenly things had color again, and value. The result is Everyday Matters, his journal of discovery, recovery,…
How did I – as a scholar of German literature – turn to economic topics? That had a certain inevitability. When I left for Paris in the early nineties, reading traces of anthropological knowledge in literature and aesthetics of the 18th century, I came across economic ideas on almost every page, in natural history, in medicine, in philosophy, in encyclopedias, in the theories of signs and in the teachings of beauty. There was circulation, communication, flows of exchange all over the place, and the Robinsons were the model. This reinforced the impression that the human being was engaged in aligning himself with homo oeconomicus. The question of modern economics has therefore become unavoidable for me.
With this grotesque odyssey of a hedge fund manager in New York, Don DeLillo’s novel takes us right into the arena of the modern financial market, touches on the question of whether that market lends itself to literary treatment, and offers a series of narrative and rhetorical figures to represent the riddle of the finance economy, its protagonists and their operations.
Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric's bodyguards are concerned that he may be a target . . .
An electrifying study in affectlessness, infused with deep cynicism and measured detachment;…
I moved to New York City right after college, hungry to escape from the homogeneity of a small New England town. I wanted nothing more than to be surrounded by people of all races and nations, languages, and walks of life, and to have easy access to some of the greatest cultural institutions of the world. New York can be hard and unforgiving, but there is no place like it. I love living here.
As much about ideas and the nature of friendship as it is about the city, this slim volume captures, better than any other I know, the visceral feel of living in New York. Fiercely independent, Gornick wanders the city’s streets in the “habit of loneliness,” ever watching, listening, and thinking. A child of working-class Jewish immigrants, she grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s, and writes in a funny, smart, rueful, and tell-it-like-it-is voice that is unmistakably New York.
A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments
A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness,…
