Here are 95 books that If You Lived Here You'd Be Famous by Now fans have personally recommended if you like
If You Lived Here You'd Be Famous by Now.
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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.
I fell in love with Los Angeles in 1983 when I immigrated from Mexico, young, penniless, and ignorant, to start an ad agency for the Latinx community. As the years went by, I succeeded in the business, raised a family, and wrote three novels. It is after you read a book like Peter Lunenfeld’s that you understand why such an improbable story like mine could ever materialize. As in the movies, L.A. is not what it seems. Go behind the scenes with City at the Edge of Forever, Los Angeles Reimagined and debunk some myths.
An engaging account of the uniquely creative spirit and bustling cultural ecology of contemporary Los Angeles
How did Los Angeles start the 20th century as a dusty frontier town and end up a century later as one of the globe's supercities - with unparalleled cultural, economic, and technological reach? In City at the Edge of Forever, Peter Lunenfeld constructs an urban portrait, layer by layer, from serendipitous affinities, historical anomalies, and uncanny correspondences. In its pages, modernist architecture and lifestyle capitalism come together via a surfer girl named Gidget; Joan Didion's yellow Corvette is the brainchild of a car-crazy Japanese-American…
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.
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.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
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.
I never had a particular interest in birds until I heard about David Wingate and the cahow; I’m just a reporter who was smitten by a compelling story. I often write about science and the environment, as well as travel and other topics, for publications including the Boston Globe, Archaeology, and Harvard Medicine, and while working on Rare Birds I got hooked on these extraordinary creatures and the iconoclastic obsessives who have become their stewards in the Anthropocene era. You don’t have to care about birds to love their stories — but in the end, you will.
GQ writer Flynn and his wife and two kids are minding their own business on their surburban Durham “faux farm” when a friend calls to ask if they want to add a peacock to the two chickens that wander their yard. They end up with three of the kaleidoscopic birds, and Flynn’s chronicle of the family’s first year with Carl, Ethel, and Mr. Pickle takes readers on an implausibly relatable journey from the bird’s place in history, culture, and myth through its evolutionary biology and breeding habits to its endangered status in the wild, offering sardonically hilarious and harrowingly poignant life lessons along the way.
An acclaimed journalist seeks to understand the mysterious allure of peacocks-and in the process discovers unexpected and valuable life lessons.
When Sean Flynn's neighbor in North Carolina texted "Any chance you guys want a peacock? No kidding!" he stared bewilderedly at his phone. He had never considered whether he wanted a peacock. But as an award-winning magazine writer, this kind of mystery intrigued him. So he, his wife, and their two young sons became the owners of not one but three charming yet fickle birds: Carl, Ethel, and Mr. Pickle.
In Why Peacocks?, Flynn chronicles his hilarious and heartwarming first…
Graeme Brooker is a Professor and Head of Interior Design at the Royal College of Art London. He has written and published fifteen books on the histories and theories of inside spaces, many of which focus on the reuse of existing artefacts, buildings, and cities. Apart from teaching and writing, when he isn’t cycling, he is often staring intently at the sea in Brighton, where he currently lives.
This is a revelatory, timely book that details the afterlives of the numerous discarded and recycled objects from around the world. It gave me great insights into where stuff goes once we decide that these are things that we no longer need or want and who are the people and the places who find value in what we leave behind.
From the author of Junkyard Planet, "an anthem to decluttering, recycling, making better quality goods and living a simpler life with less stuff." -Associated Press
Downsizing. Decluttering. Discarding. Sooner or later, all of us are faced with things we no longer need or want. But when we drop our old clothes and other items off at a local donation center, where do they go? Sometimes across the country-or even halfway across the world-to people and places who find value in what we leave behind.
In Secondhand, journalist Adam Minter takes us on an unexpected adventure into the often-hidden, multibillion-dollar industry…
The Truth About Unringing Phones
by
Lara Lillibridge,
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket.
Poems irritated me as a child. They seemed parodies of counting, chants of rhythm, and repetition. I included them in my moratorium against reading fiction. On the other hand, I respected the alphabet, a kind of poem of pure form. It was orderly for no good reason and didn't mean anything. So I concluded that poems were meaningless forms that had their uses, but were not serious. I changed my mind, but it took a while—studying math and science, theology, and then philosophy and literature. I'm now a professor who studies and teaches modern literature and philosophy. I got my Ph.D. from Harvard, became a professor at Stanford, and teach at the University of Dallas.
A photograph gives me the form of the bird, but it remains up to me to see the bird as a bird. And that can be difficult. What do we see when we see a bird?
The Peregrine, J. A. Baker’s masterpiece of descriptive prose, provides an answer, an answer that is as much about how we see as it is about what we see when we see birds. Sometimes we pull ourselves into the sight of others and the world emerges as more than its light. We see by being seen.
Baker achieves this kind of seeing both in his efforts to see a pair of peregrines and in his description of this achievement.
David Attenborough reads J. A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing.
The nation's greatest voice, David Attenborough, reads J. A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing, The Peregrine.
J. A. Baker's classic of British nature writing was first published in 1967. Greeted with acclaim, it went on to win the Duff Cooper Prize, the pre-eminent literary prize of the time. Luminaries such as Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez and Andrew Motion have cited it as one of the most important books in twentieth-century nature writing.
Despite the association of peregrines with the wild, outer reaches of the British Isles,…
I have always been fascinated by statistics (I’m a statistician by profession), and anything that tells a story of actual people and events has always captured my imagination. I have a particular affection for the quirky and offbeat, something that illustrates catastrophic failure, lack of common sense, a misplaced sense of entitlement and people who repeatedly tried but always fell short. I have a passion for black humour as it helps me to realise that, no matter how dark things look in my own life, there are others who have it much worse.
Far from being depressing, I found great perverse enjoyment in reading about the disasters that befell others. It is a treasure trove of well-written tales that I found hard to put down. I found the contents to be an absolute treasure-chest of absorbing, beautifully written stories.
If ever I was feeling down, this volume always lifted my spirits, knowing that my day could be a lot worse.
From Caligula's blood-soaked end to hotelier Steve Wynn's unfortunate run-in with a priceless Picasso, Bad Days in History delves into the past to present 365 delightfully told tales of historically bad days.
After teaching high school English for thirty-one years, I retired and began my second career in writing. I have published five novels and one collection of poetry. When I met Jane Tucker in 1974, she became a good friend, fellow church member, and my dental hygienist. I had no idea she had worked as a welder on Liberty Ships during World War II when she was only sixteen years old. After I learned this in 2012, I began my journey into learning all about the Rosies during World War II and writing my fourth novel Becoming Jestina. Jane’s story is an amazing one, and I still talk to her regularly.
Since I taught school for thirty-one years, this book was especially fascinating to me because it involved two young teachers spending their summer in 1943 working on a production line at a San Diego bomber plant. It enlightened me significantly on how difficult it often was for women during that time to be accepted in what was usually an exclusively male world of work.
In 1943 two spirited young teachers decided to do their part for the war effort by spending their summer vacation working the swing shift on a B-24 production line at a San Diego bomber plant. Entering a male-dominated realm of welding torches and bomb bays, they learned to use tools that they had never seen before, live with aluminum shavings in their hair, and get along with supervisors and coworkers from all walks of life.
They also learned that wearing their factory slacks on the street caused men to treat them in a way for which their "dignified schoolteacher-hood" hadn't…
I wondered, seven novels in, why I’d never written in the voice of a child, and it so happened that Our Picnics in the Sun, the eighth novel, required me to do just that. In doing my research I discovered an oddity. Writers of fiction assume the right to enter the head or consciousness or identity of their characters. The oddity is that you might expect a writer to write, without too much difficulty, from the point of view of a child: after all, the writer has been a child. But it turns out that childhood experience is often elusive, evades interpretation, and is the hardest to capture on the page.
A wonderful and slightly maddening memoir, this (it’s nonfiction, Jim, but not as we know it). Bayley survived her childhood by absorbing books. She evokes the worlds of David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, and everything Agatha Christie ever wrote, by ventriloquising and interweaving the voices of those stories with the story of her own parental neglect, thereby insisting, if dreamily, that the boundaries between her reliable book-land and her unstable real-life-land will remain blurred. It’s only slightly maddening (I did much the same as a child; part of me will always be Katie tumbling out of the swing). The book’s deliberate ambiguities suggest that Bayley is claiming sanctuary, reserving the right not to divulge what is still too unbearable to relate, and why shouldn’t she? It’s an amazingly honest, touching book.
'The word "mesmerising" is frequently applied to memoirs, but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Girl With Dove' Financial Times
'Reading is a form of escape and an avid reader is an escape artist...'
Brilliantly original, funny and clever Honor Clark, Spectator, Book of the Year
Growing up in a dilapidated house by the sea where men were forbidden, Sally's childhood world was filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies trailed through the kitchen looking for God - their leader was Aunt Di, who ruled the house with charismatic force. When Sally's baby brother vanishes from his pram, she…
