Fans pick 87 books like Random Sh*t Flying Through The Air

This is a memoir about being a writer—and failing. With scholarly rigor and tenderhearted sympathy, Specktor excavates the lives of artists forgotten (Carol Eastman, Eleanor Perry), underappreciated (Thomas McGuane, Hal Ashby), and notorious (Warren Zevon, Michael Cimino), while always circling back to his own benighted Hollywood upbringing, complete with a lovely tribute to his mother, a failed screenwriter. This is an angry, sad, but always somehow joyful book about not hitting it big, and I've never read anything quite like it.

This is a personal favourite as it’s the Ellroy novel that carries the biggest emotional punch. Although it didn’t match the sales of its predecessor The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere is a more accomplished novel. The setting is LA, 1950. A murder plot is interweaved with the politics of the Red Scare, and a Hollywood milieu at the height of the film noir age. This is the novel that proved Ellroy was a literary writer, and not just a genre one.

What can you say about the book that kicked off a whole new genre?

Widely regarded as the first ‘cyberpunk’ novel, reading Virtual Light today is beyond eery. It takes place in the dystopian future year of 2006 (the book was written in 1994) and is set in San Francisco during a time when the middle class has disappeared and the only people left are either disgustingly rich or living on the street. And as I look around at what San Francisco, and many other cities have become, it makes me think that Gibson might be the Cassandra of the modern world. 

I absolutely loved this book. One of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read, it’s heartfelt and hilarious. After running his own bookshop in Seattle, Andrew Bloomfield moves to Hollywood to become a screenwriter and discovers a colony of feral cats living in his backyard. He was not a cat person. After witnessing one too many raccoon and coyote attacks and hungry, crying kittens, he and his two female housemates intervene and start caring for these wild yet vulnerable cats who transform his life. With his sharp wit and keen eye for detail, Bloomfield is a brilliant storyteller. I got completely caught up in the soap-opera dramas and death-defying moments of these cats, along with the heartaches and triumphs of rescuing them.

Great writing on cities is rarer than it should be. The late Mike Davis, using Los Angeles as his muse, showed me—and so many others—new ways of thinking about cities through his vividly and passionately argued prose. Weaving together strands of architecture, urban history, social justice, and ecology, Davis has inspired me like no other author to examine cities critically, from unexpected perspectives and with a fierce point of view. Underlying his outrage at the injustices of the unravelling metropolis is a mordant sense of humor—making him an unbeatable guide as we all ride shotgun through desperate times. 

Elroy wrote many other books before he took on this epic noir crime novel (one in a quartet). He made his bones in writing, and it's evident in his skill level, story, and prose. Elroy excels in this novel (and the other three) in voice. And voice is the Big Kahuna in writing, it’s the everything in writing and Elroy has it in spades.

Another great addition to the above is the length (because you don’t want this book to ever end) and that it’s a historical novel that absolutely captures the time period and adds the historical nuance to all the characters.

A film noir in book form, Davis’ astute, visceral, and impassioned chronicle of Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium offers a dystopian view of future urban society.

I was recommended this book by my secondary school geography teacher shortly before starting university. Although my teacher did not know it, I had been questioning whether I’d made the right choice in choosing Geography for my degree, but this book captivated me like no other and assuaged my academic concerns. 

Los Angeles is a world-famous city that means very different things to different people. Davis shows how Los Angeles is simultaneously a utopia and a dystopia, a place of gated communities and private police forces, where libraries look like fortresses and prisons, on the outside at least, resemble futuristic hotels.

Over three decades after the first edition’s publication, this book remains essential reading for anyone seeking a sobering peek into… show more.

The Alvarados are an unhealthy family with a very big communication problem. The patriarch turns into a shell of himself obsessed only with rainfall, the matriarch is hiding her own secrets, and their adult children are all in varying stages of trouble in their own relationships. 

I loved that this book was set in 2016, in California, centered around a Mexican-American family, and did not explicitly address immigration issues or Donald Trump—even if that was very much hinted at towards the end of the novel.

Aside from the family’s journey to healthier relationships with themselves and each other, it was refreshing to see another perspective of that moment in time. It was a good reminder to me that we all contain multitudes, and that no single story is the whole story.

Between 1954 and 1981, when this book was written, the number of cities in L.A. County nearly doubled from 45 to 81. Many of these new cities contracted with the county for their basic public services, and were consequently able to maintain low property tax rates. Homeowners "voted with their feet" by moving to these new cities, and previously middle-class places like Compton saw their tax bases plummet while their need for public services skyrocketed. As a native Angeleno, I found Miller's account of the fragmentation of Los Angeles fascinating and devastating.  A gem of a chapter entitled "Is the Invisible Hand Biased?" presents a withering critique of the argument—standard in economic theory—that more choices make people better off.

I read The Brick People when it was first published in 1988.

At the time, I was already familiar with Morales’ work, but this historical novel about the Simons Brick Factory in Southern California and the Mexican migrants who the Simons brother depended upon for their success seized my imagination.

The author blends folklore, history, myth, and magical realism into a novel that relates the story of Mexican migrants and their complicity with or rebellion against the Simons brothers and the mores of the early 20th Century Los Angeles region.

Morales shows how history from the ground up is manifested in people’s lives.  His characters work and play hard as they seek to build community and pursue dreams of social mobility even when customs and laws prohibit them.