66 books like Shaky Town

I’ve lived in Wisconsin since 1985, and somehow I had no idea there used to be a thriving Playboy resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

After the book came out I learned I even have a family member who worked security there—that’s how little people around here talk about this juicy history. Christina Clancy’s book is set in the 1980s in both Lake Geneva and the smaller community of East Troy, and she does an excellent job of balancing the celebrity and historical elements with the young Wisconsin women themselves and the complex relationship so many of them had with the seedy perception of Playboy. A lot of them were from farms and rural towns, and their families didn’t even know they worked there.

This particular Playboy resort was even known as a family-friendly destination. I loved learning about a world I had no idea existed, set against one I thought… show more.

An early favorite for my top book of 2023 is Napolitano’s latest, set almost entirely in and around Chicago. Sports fans will particularly enjoy a narrative thread that tracks a basketball player turned trainer from Northwestern to the United Center, but the entire book is steeped in the city, from its murals and libraries to its gentrifying neighborhoods. As a former resident of Evanston, I love it when someone gets the details right. Exquisite and perfectly structured, you’ll miss Napolitano’s vibrant Windy City family drama long after it’s over. 

Hilarious, ingenious, and moving, this wonder of a novel is the funniest book of the last few years, and takes place in a realm unknown to most—the world of cowboy poetry. It won’t matter if you weren’t aware such a thing existed, because a few chapters in, you’ll be eagerly lost in the world, its stakes, and its dreamers. Set across varying venues and states, this isn’t so much about nailing a certain place so much as an incredibly specific scene. It’s a ride you’ll be grateful you took, even if some horses expire along the way.

Perhaps it says something about where I live now that the best novel I’ve read that takes place in the San Fernando Valley is largely told through an unreliable and chemically addled narrator. Through a self-medicating veteran named Shep and the people he encounters – from a convenience store clerk to an actress he believes to be his daughter – Kinney conjures an often bleak but never hopeless vision of the Valley. In her hands, familiar sights to us Valley residents take on unnerving new contexts, and for any readers unfamiliar with the 818, her brilliant, hypnotic, and compassionate writing will be an exemplary guide.

Nearly a century earlier, people relied on their own feet to travel long distances. These often solo efforts were known as “vagabonding”. A classic from this era was the transcontinental walk of Charles Fletcher Lummis, recounted in his A Tramp Across the Continent. Lummis, who eventually became the first City Editor at the Los Angeles Times, took up with an abused greyhound named Shadow, whom he had rescued from a group of immigrant miners in Colorado. Shadow and he had a number of adventures on the way to California. Unfortunately, the dog, whom Lummis loved dearly, contracted rabies, and Lummis had to shoot him. Lummis’s account of the shipment of Apache from their homes in the southwestern desert to the swampy morass of Florida is particularly wrenching and the mindless slaughter of Apache dogs by white settlers is deeply disturbing.

Evelyn Waugh’s 1947 visit to Hollywood to negotiate a movie deal for Brideshead Revisited was a failure. But a trip to Forest Lawn Cemetery provided the gist for The Loved One, his last great satire. Waugh transforms Forest Lawn into Whispering Glades, a grandiose Disneyland of Death where cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos puts the finishing touches on elite Los Angelenos under the lustful eye of mortician Mr. Joyboy. The naïve Aimée meets Dennis Barlow, a British expat and failed writer who passes off the works of Tennyson and Keats as his own. When she discovers Barlow works at the Happy Hunting Ground Pet Cemetery, even advice columnist Guru Brahmin can’t console her. Waugh’s piercing prose exposes the pretense and hypocrisy of the American Way of Life (and Death). 

In this book by Jennifer J. Chow, I loved how the differences between Yale Yee, the sleuth, and her cousin, Celine, not only created tension throughout the book but ultimately played on each of their strengths to solve the mystery. 

The two cousins are thrown together when quiet Yale is tapped by her dad to run the family bubble tea stand at L.A.’s night market. Loud and flamboyant Celine, a social media influencer, arrives in L.A. and gets tasked with helping Yale out.

Chow does a great job of showing the two girls' very different personalities and adding in that family tension. On top of that, the L.A. night market is fascinating! I hope this will be a long-running series!  

As a mom of six, I must say that I’m in a constant state of balancing motherly duties with other obligations—so Lucy Heron has my sympathy as a fellow native of Los Angeles, who juggles her kids, a bakery, and apparently her job as “Agent 485,” fighting supernatural crime.

Lucy works for a secret organization that wants to keep magic in the realm of myth and humanity none the wiser to its existence. Well, that will be tough as a tribe of ancient witches gets thrown into the mix, some unscrupulous magical beings, and the fact that this mom of three has to get this all done in time for dinner. This is definitely a fun read to check out!

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 list wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t add a superhero comic. But instead of Spiderman or Captain America, I want to introduce you to Runaways. A middle-grade graphic novel comic series about six Los Angeles teenagers who join together after discovering that their supervillain parents are planning on destroying the world. What could be more fun than a bunch of random teenagers banding together to try and save the world while trying to grapple with their place in it? Dinosaurs, aliens, mutant powers, grocery shopping, crushes, and turning eighteen, it’s a lot to handle and is certainly very fun to read – even for a someone who doesn’t like reading. Plus, if a reader makes it to the end, they’re rewarded with unforeseen plot twists.