Here are 74 books that Pictures of You fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have always been a romantic at heart, although it took time for me to realize and act on this as I was conditioned from an early age to be scholarly and rational (life-allowing). One of my favorite silent films as a teenager was a love story that focuses on a forbidden relationship between a British girl and a Chinese man at the turn of the twentieth century, called Broken Blossoms; it left an indelible impression. Eventually, I myself became involved in a life-changing romantic relationship with a Chinese man. I now love exploring the vicissitudes of the human heart at the crossroads of cultural differences in my writing.
This book is indeed a “creation of comic genius,” as Nick Hornby blurbed. The movie didn’t do anything for me; I found Renée Zellweger quite blah, and Hugh Grant was playing the British cad as usual. However, the book was so funny I had a hard time putting it down.
Basically, it is about Bridget, a British “Everywoman” who falls into the clutches of her slimy boss, Daniel, while on a quest for the traditional Holy Grail of womanhood—true love. One of the things I most enjoyed about this chick-lit classic was the rather graphic booze-and-smoking sessions, as well as the eccentric minor characters, especially Bridget’s mother. My mother is also a maverick and very much a free spirit, so this really resonated with me.
A dazzlingly urban satire on modern relationships? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?
As Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), she turns for support to four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.
Welcome to Bridget's first diary: mercilessly funny, endlessly touching and utterly addictive.
Helen Fielding's first Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, sparked a phenomenon that has seen…
My life is one of two halves; I spent the first half living in the industrial West Midlands, at school and then training to become a doctor, and the second half living in rural bliss in the southwest of England. For the day job, I’m an anesthesiologist, but my true passion, thanks to my mother being an English teacher, is reading romance and writing my own. I am well-travelled and spend a quarter of each year in France, so my books often have characters from all over Europe as well as characters working in the medical profession or overcoming/ living with a variety of health conditions.
I loved the uniqueness of this book, centred around the novelty of email in 1999. I love the idea of a nerdy guy whose job it is to read other folks' emails as he struggles with young adulthood approaching the dreaded Y2K. I loved how his POV is beautifully interspersed with cute epistolary exchanges.
From the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wayward Son, Fangirl, Carry On, and Landline comes a hilarious and heartfelt novel about an office romance that blossoms one email at a time....
Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder know that somebody is monitoring their work e-mail. (Everybody in the newsroom knows. It's company policy.) But they can't quite bring themselves to take it seriously. They go on sending each other endless and endlessly hilarious e-mails, discussing every aspect of their personal lives.
Meanwhile, Lincoln O'Neill can't believe this is his job now—reading other people's e-mail. When he applied to…
My life is one of two halves; I spent the first half living in the industrial West Midlands, at school and then training to become a doctor, and the second half living in rural bliss in the southwest of England. For the day job, I’m an anesthesiologist, but my true passion, thanks to my mother being an English teacher, is reading romance and writing my own. I am well-travelled and spend a quarter of each year in France, so my books often have characters from all over Europe as well as characters working in the medical profession or overcoming/ living with a variety of health conditions.
I loved this book because it’s tough, hard, and very, very real. I think it is a timeless reminder that AIDS has no cure and that in the 1990s, HIV was a death sentence. I love this author’s gritty writing; he’s a gay survivor of that era who never pulls his punches.
Winner of the 2013 EPIC eBook Award for Best Contemporary RomanceIt's 1991, and Dan Calzolaio has just moved to Florida with his lover, Mark, having fled Chicago and Mark's addictions to begin a new life on the Gulf Coast. Volunteering for the Tampa AIDS Alliance is just one part of that new beginning, and that's how Dan meets his new buddy, Adam.Adam Schmidt is not at all what Dan expected. The guy is an original - witty, wry, and sarcastic with a fondness for a smart black dress, Barbra Streisand, and a good mai tai. Adam doesn't let his imminent…
My life is one of two halves; I spent the first half living in the industrial West Midlands, at school and then training to become a doctor, and the second half living in rural bliss in the southwest of England. For the day job, I’m an anesthesiologist, but my true passion, thanks to my mother being an English teacher, is reading romance and writing my own. I am well-travelled and spend a quarter of each year in France, so my books often have characters from all over Europe as well as characters working in the medical profession or overcoming/ living with a variety of health conditions.
As a Brit, I love books set in the US; I love exploring our cultural differences. This one is an angsty emotional journey with a very strong female character, which isn’t always successfully pulled off in romance novels. Love isn’t always rainbows and sunshine, and I think this is one of those stories reminding us that it needs to be worked at.
Twenty-one year old Laura Sedgwick is a rebel without a cause. Her only plans for life are to make no plans She revels in her fascination of the unexpected as she navigates her way through mid-nineties' Dallas nightlife. One very bad night brings her face to face with the one man likely to change her mind about…well...everything.
Twenty-three year old Seth Whitaker has every intention of seeing through with his well mapped out life. He is a hard working over-achiever that has no intentions of slowing his pace for anyone. With a fierce…
“You spend your first 18 years as a sponge and the rest of your life using those early years as material.” Martin Short said this to me when I collaborated with him on his memoir,I Must Say: My Life As a Humble Comedy Legend. My own writing bears this out. My nonfiction books The United States of Arugulaand Sunny Daysare not first-person books, but they examine two significant cultural movements that defined my formative years: the American food revolution led by the likes of Julia Child and Alice Waters and the children’s-TV revolution defined bySesame Streetand Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Much of my journalism finds me chasing down the cultural figures who captured and shaped my young imagination, e.g., Sly Stone, Johnny Cash, Charles Schulz.
An immersive, impressionistic snapshot of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as it was in the 1920s and early 1930s, when it was known not for hipsters, craft beer, and creative facial hair but as a Jewish slum rife with yentas and gangsters. Fuchs published this book in 1934 and swiftly followed it up with two more novels, Homage to Blenholt and Low Company. The books didn’t sell, but Fuchs catapulted himself out of the ghetto and into a respectable West Coast life as a Hollywood screenwriter. Only after Fuchs had all but stopped writing fiction did these early books receive a warm reassessment from the likes of John Updike and Jonathan Lethem. Full disclosure: Fuchs was my great uncle! He was the older brother of my maternal grandfather.
As a practicing clinical psychologist, teacher of psychotherapy theory and technique, and author (Barbarians at the PTA, Madmen on the Couch, Money Talks) who writes about the psychopathology of daily life for various online and print publications, I am a participant in/observer of mom culture. I love a juicy mother-child story.
One of my favorite novels is Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar, a coming of age story of Marjorie and Mrs Morgenster, a/k/a the original helicopter mom.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning author was male but managed to get into the head of both teenage girl and indomitable mother–and the results are funny and poignant. There’s all kinds of bonus detail about 1930s-1940s NYC: college, dating, and theater scenes.
As someone who is fascinated by mom culture, I like to recommend mother-daughter stories that illustrate how parenting styles and family relationships have changed over time. While it all started with Marmee, Louisa May Alcott (Jo’s) idealized supermom, I have a fondness for the ambivalently modern struggles between Mrs. Morgenstern and Marjorie, the female leads in Herman Wouk’s classic novel, Marjorie Morningstar.
This is a coming of age story that has it all: beautiful and ambitious heroine, handsome love interest, colorful best friend, and the…
"I read it and I thought, 'Oh, God, this is me.'" - Scarlet Johansson
Now hailed as a "proto-feminist classic" (Vulture), Pulitzer Prize winner Herman Wouk's powerful coming-of-age novel about an ambitious young woman pursuing her artistic dreams in New York City has been a perennial favourite since it was first a bestseller in the 1950s.
Sixteen-year-old Marjorie Morgenstern lives a quiet life in New York City. Her mother hopes for a glittering marriage to a good man, but Marjorie has other ideas.
When she falls desperately in love with Noel Airman, a musician as reckless as he is talented,…
I'm a contemporary romance writer with two novels: No Hard Feelings and Crushing, stories about complex, messy women making mistakes and learning from them. As I work on my third novel, I'm remembering how hard it is to write when you're in a reading rut. Sometimes every book I pick up is disappointing, and reading feels like a chore, and I risk losing momentum. Sometimes I need something familiar to get back on track and remember why I love my job. These books feel like a long exhale. I can come to them with an overloaded brain, bad moods and doubt and discontent, and turn the last page restored.
What comfort library would be complete without Emily Henry?
I’ll read anything she writes, but Poppy and Alex’s love story is the stuff of my dreams. Friends to lovers, split timelines, and more yearning than I know what to do with Seamlessly blending humour and heart and set between Palm Springs, New York, Italy, and somewhere in the sedate American midwest, You and Me on Vacation was the antidote to my mid-lockdown claustrophobia.
I like to read my fluff on the treadmill – it keeps my brain more occupied than music or podcasts, so I’m less likely to remember how much I hate working out – and it was so delicious I found myself looking forward to time at the gym. A true feat.
Two friends. Ten trips. Their last chance to fall in love...
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'One of my favourite authors' Colleen Hoover, It Ends With Us 'A gorgeous romance' Beth O'Leary, The No-Show 'Loveable characters, hilarious wit and steamy sexual chemistry' Laura Jane Williams, Our Stop
*Also known as People We Meet On Vacation*
12 YEARS AGO: Poppy and Alex meet. They hate each other, and are pretty confident they'll never speak again.
11 YEARS AGO: They're forced to share a ride home from college and by the end of it a friendship is formed. And a pact: every year, one vacation together.…
I’m an Australian writer with a passion for literary fiction, especially novels centered on complex and multi-layered power dynamics. To me, relationships between women are particularly ripe for this kind of exploration – my own friendships with other women have been influential and formative, but not always easy! My interest in these darker and more complex dynamics of close friendship eventually led me to write my own novel on the topic. I’ve also published a range of essays, reviews, criticism, and creative nonfiction.
Nothing Specialfollows Mae, a teenager in 1967, who drops out of school and becomes a typist in Andy Warhol’s Factory studio.
Transcribing taped conversations of Warhol and his contemporaries, Mae feels like she’s entered a new world – along with Shelley, a fellow typist who soon becomes a close friend. But is Shelley all she seems? This is a closely observed psychological novel exploring what it means to truly know another person, and how much we have the right to expect from our friends.
The writing zips along effortlessly, driven by Mae’s poised, ironic voice, which expertly captures the ersatz confidence of being young.
A 2023 HIGHLIGHT FOR: THE TIMES * TELEGRAPH * STYLIST * GQ * GUARDIAN * HARPER'S BAZAAR * GOOD HOUSEKEEPING * WATERSTONES * i-D * IRISH TIMES * HUFFINGTON POST UK
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'A blade-sharp coming-of-age novel' SPECTATOR
'Confirms Flattery as a bracingly original writer' IRISH INDEPENDENT
'In enviably elegant prose, she manages to be both arch and deadly serious' LOUISE KENNEDY
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A wildly original debut novel about two young women navigating the complex worlds of Andy Warhol's Factory, and coming of age in 1960s New York
New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her…
“You spend your first 18 years as a sponge and the rest of your life using those early years as material.” Martin Short said this to me when I collaborated with him on his memoir,I Must Say: My Life As a Humble Comedy Legend. My own writing bears this out. My nonfiction books The United States of Arugulaand Sunny Daysare not first-person books, but they examine two significant cultural movements that defined my formative years: the American food revolution led by the likes of Julia Child and Alice Waters and the children’s-TV revolution defined bySesame Streetand Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Much of my journalism finds me chasing down the cultural figures who captured and shaped my young imagination, e.g., Sly Stone, Johnny Cash, Charles Schulz.
My curveball choice. In the late 1970s, Stamaty drew a brilliant, phantasmagoric, visually dense comic strip for The Village Voice that captured the chaos, charm, and entropic scuzziness of Manhattan in that era. His protagonist, a bearded nerd named Malcolm Frazzle, travels on a very funny Joseph Campbell-like hero’s journey that involves a talking cow, the Zen of dishwashing, and overpacked subway cars. I’ve spent the last 40 years revisiting this compendium of Stamaty’s strips, whose every page is a loony, trippy world to fall into.
A collection of legendary absurdist comic strips about life in 1970s New York City, now available in print for the first time in over thirty years.
Every week, from 1978 to 1980, The Village Voice brought a new installment of Mark Alan Stamaty's uproarious, endlessly inventive strip MacDoodle St. Centering more or less on Malcolm Frazzle, a blocked poet struggling to complete his latest lyric for Dishwasher Monthly, Stamaty's creation encompassed a dizzying array of characters, stories, jokes, and digressions. One week might feature the ongoing battle between irate businessmen and bearded beatniks for control of a Greenwich Village coffee…
The heights of American literature are crowded with coming-of-age tales like Huckleberry Finn and Catcher and the Rye. It’s probably because for us, as Americans, figuring out what it means to be American is something that isn’t as clear as what it means to be from another country with thousands of years of existence behind it. Yet, the stories I was given rarely had people who looked like me (Asian) or lived lives that weren’t solely defined as being “foreign.” These books tell coming-of-age stories in different ways that I wish I had read when I was coming up to broaden my own mind with what was possible.
When I really started writing, I sought out books with punchy prose that connected to some of my experiences.
Don Lee’s Yellow was one of the few books of short stories I found that did that. What’s cool about the title story “Yellow” is that it talks about an Asian guy who learns to box who is known to be sexy, and grapples with issues of courage.
Growing up as a young Asian guy, I was never handed a story about an Asian guy struggling to be a man like all other guys growing up in America. Reading this collection changed that and changed my own perceptions of what stories are possible when you’re coming to age as an Asian in America.
As the Los Angeles Times noted in its profile of the author, "few writers have mined the [genre of ethnic literature] as shrewdly or transcended its limits quite so stunningly as Don Lee." Harking "back to the timeless concerns of Chekhov: fate, chance, the mystery of the human heart" (Stuart Dybek), these interconnected stories "are utterly contemporary,...but grounded in the depth of beautiful prose and intriguing storylines" (Asian Week). They paint a novelistic portrait of the fictional town of Rosarita Bay, California, and a diverse cast of complex and moving characters. "Nothing short of wonderful...surprising and wild with life" (Robert…
