100 books like One of Us

This book kept me on the edge of my seat, biting my nails, and err… made me forget to go to sleep. This book to me is the epitome of books that make you go wait, what??

I want to highlight the menacing ambiance and constant edge in the tone of the story by giving the character such vulnerability that made me squirm. I loved the pacing of this story as the main character is hurled from the one bad situation into another.

Yet again, this book taught me to re-think assumptions, because it proved all of them wrong. I love the uniqueness of this trope especially when it first came out but the originality of it captivated me entirely.

I am fascinated with “made families,” those connections of strangers who pass into such intimate friendships that they become de facto, chosen families.

While the core premise of The Housekeeper and the Professor will seize your imagination—the “professor” has suffered a traumatic brain injury that leaves him with only 8 minutes of short-term memory—it is the beauty of the friendship that emerges between him, the “housekeeper” hired to care for him, and her ten-year-old son that will stay with you.

In the present-tense living of having to reintroduce themselves anew to this math genius every morning, all the characters learn the value of a moment, and together they experience the “curious equations that can create a family.”

This thin, lovely, uplifting novel helped me re-learn the potency of fleeting moments and the enduring lessons of unexpected love.

This one is a bit of a cheat as It doesn’t fall into the category of memory and forgetting as easily but I think it is definitely about past trauma, trying to reinvent yourself, ignoring parts of your true nature, which for me, is a form of forgetting. In this tense novel, three women must uncover the truth about a tragic incident, one of whom is a probation officer trying to decide if a prisoner should be released on parole. It’s told from dual perspectives and it keeps twisting throughout. The last twist really threw me and I wanted to go back and read it again.

I loved this book because it has mathematics to the nth degree! Some of it in the form of inside jokes like “easy to use partial differential equations” that made me laugh out loud. Some of it, such as “equations that had sadness as a constant,” are in a “techno-poetic” style that I strive to achieve in my own writing. But this “meta-science fiction” novel is also filled with musings on writing and creativity. The self-referential recursion of a book within a book within a book makes the paradoxes of time travel even more interesting. The “reality portions” in which the main character pursues his quest to “find his father” are as deep and well done a theme as any I have read in sci-fi.

A solid police procedural that influenced my own book, the novel explores race relations in Los Angeles amid the 1992 Uprising spurred by the beating of motorist Rodney King. Detective Charlotte Justice not only is tasked with solving the murder of a man responsible for killing her family but also contends with the misogynistic, racist, and overall toxic good old boy culture of the LAPD. The novel delivers a twisty mystery and deconstructs an event that should have served as the tipping point for police reform in America.

Gerald Petievich must have used a crystal ball when writing Earth Angels in 1989, because only nine years later, all the basic elements of the story would hit the headlines, as rogue elements within the LAPD were exposed in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy known as the Rampart scandal. The book’s eerie prescience is only one reason it’s a modern classic. Its depiction of police procedure is almost unmatched in accuracy and detail, and it perfectly captures the dark, gritty side of Los Angeles, far away from the bright lights of movie premieres. If I ever need to remind myself why I left L.A. after twelve years, I only need to revisit Petievich’s open-eyed exposé of official corruption, casual lawlessness, and random violence. 

Michael Connelly continues to hit it out of the park when it comes to police procedurals. The Dark Hours is the fourth of his five novels about a young LAPD detective, Renee Ballard, who works “the late show” (the nighttime hours) and catches a midnight murder. She seeks assistance from a friend—the semi-retired detective, Harry Bosch—in working the case. I’ve read every one of Connelly’s Bosch Series books and have loved them all. Once you become involved and engrossed—usually by the third page—you cannot stop reading! Connelly’s novels are that good. 

This book is laugh-out-loud funny. The rich socialite heroine is quite intelligent in some things and ridiculously stupid in others. The whole book is absolutely unbelievable, but utterly delightful – and way beyond society's terms of approval for women in 1907 Los Angeles. Sometimes a book doesn’t have to be anything but a joy to read. This one delivers.

Evidence, published in 1977, is a book of black-and-white pictures culled by these two artists from the archives of government agencies, public utilities, university laboratories, and private corporations. The anonymous photographs were made to document actual fires, land sites, crime scenes, product testing, and scientific experimentation. In Evidence, the pictures are removed from their context of origin and printed, one to a page, without caption information. Individually, the pictures take on surrealist properties subject to endless narrative interpretation; collectively, the sequencing creates a running narrative with no coherent story. Since the pictures so closely resemble the black-and-white documentary images that came to define art photography in the 1970s, Evidence was among the early postmodern works to contest the growing acceptance of photography as art, photographer as artist-author, photographic documentation as fact, and the truth-telling capability of the medium as unwavering.

The Harry Bosch series has been long and often predictable.

Bosch has a strong belief that if everybody doesn’t count, nobody counts. He has to hold up his image of justice against an LAPD that plays politics, and a city populace easily swayed by the latest headlines.

What I love about The Last Coyote is that it’s a very personal novel where Bosch examines his relationship with his deceased mother Marjorie Phillips Lowe, a prostitute who was brutally murdered. While on psychiatric leave, Bosch takes on the case of his mother’s unsolved murder.

It’s a wonderfully nuanced exploration of the relationship between a mother and son, a cop and his own psyche, and a city and its most reviled citizens.