77 books like Still Life with Bread Crumbs

An interesting thing about reading this book is that I had read a novel about Dorothea Lange only months earlier. But when Darznik’s publicist reached out and asked me to read it, I couldn’t resist! Why? Because I love Dorothea and can’t get enough of her.

Dorothea is exactly the kind of woman I want to be BFFs with. But whose story would give me the intimate connection I was looking for? Jasmin Darznik, in her enchanting new novel, The Bohemians, that’s who.

On page one, I stepped into the relationship of two daring and talented women who seem different as night and day. Dorothea, a blond from New York and Caroline Lee, a black-haired Chinese American, raised in an orphanage.

I love to read about artists in Paris in the 1930s. And this book is about a woman who tries to leave the world of modeling to become a photographer, and then she morphs again into one of the only WW2 journalists.

Lee Miller was a real person and she fell in love with Surrealist Man Ray in Paris. 

My first choice (and my favourite of the selection) introduces us to two of the pioneers of photography. Not only did In the Blink of an Eye teach me about the link between Robert Adamson and William Henry Fox Talbot (inventor of the calotype process), but I realised that I had stayed at one of the novel’s key settings – Rock House, on the slopes of Edinburgh’s Carlton Hill. 

In 1843, the artist David Octavius Hill was tasked with painting the portraits of 400 ministers of Scotland’s Free Church, a commission so daunting it seemed almost impossible. It would take years to capture the likenesses of so many men. Only when Hill met Robert Adamson, a pioneering photographer, did a solution present itself. 

Bacon doesn’t only give us Hill and Adamson, but brings to life some of the women whose names have been forgotten by history to life: names that… show more.

I loved the ambitious concept behind William Boyd’s novel. Take seventy-five ‘found photos’ and construct a life around them.

At the age of seventy, Amory Clay is reflecting on her long photographic career, which took her from London, where she photographed the smart set, to Berlin where she captured its nightlife. Like Lee Miller, Amory Clay transitioned from New York fashion shoots to photojournalism, reporting on war-torn Normandy, and, much later, in the Vietnam war. Now, she’s about to embark on a personal mission—to track down her daughter, Blythe.

Boyd seamlessly weaves fact with fiction. This was one of those books that had me Googling the names of characters, thinking that there must be two photographers I had overlooked, only to conclude that they were fictional. (I shan’t give the game away and tell you which!)

Cold Sassy Tree is unabashedly naughty and funny and innocent all at the same time. Will comes of age in the early 1900s, and along the way we’re introduced to his family and friends who see him through exploits that rival anything Mark Twain ever cooked up for Tom Sawyer. It’s cooky, crazy, and completely enchanting. This is the spot-on antidote to a crummy week. We all have ‘em, so keep this special novel handy and pick it up when you most need to smile. It will bring you happiness as it does me.

This book is leisurely, reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s works (such as North and South or Wives and Daughters); it reads and feels like a warm summer day. It takes place in a small English town in the tense and uncertain months leading up to the war and a little beyond, featuring family dramas, romantic entanglements, spunky schoolteachers, Belgian refugees, underage recruits, life, and death, and love.

This is a brilliant book for any life transitions, not just careers. Simple yet mind-blowingly effective, this is a process I have applied many times throughout my life, from starting businesses to closing them, getting new jobs as well as personal difficulties. We aren’t really taught how to manage change and yet it is a constant in our lives. This book helps you gain practical insight for when you are moving from one life experience to another. Life is all about changes and this book will help you manage them in a more effective and hopeful way.

What’s better than a humorous and sexy read about two sisters in the throes of personal growth after the unexpected death of their grandmother?

Hannah and Libby are in charge of the family’s PR Agency and are hemorrhaging clients to the point of closing the company’s doors. When an eccentric self-help guru enters the office searching for a new PR team, the sisters believe they have found their miracle; only there’s a catch. Both sisters must complete Lou’s “Crush Your Comfort Zone” 12-week program or no deal.

This delightful tale is about the love between siblings set in one of my favorite cities to visit my extended family—Chicago!

Dara Horn is a fabulous writer. A recent work, People Love Dead Jews, won the National Jewish Book Award, and for good reason. She is an exquisitely profound, solidly intellectual writer in Guide for the Perplexed. In All Other Nights, she proves herself as a master storyteller on matters of the heart and soul. Set during the Civil War, a young Jewish man volunteers for not-so-patriotic reasons in the Union Army and is set upon a mission of spying and assassination at the bosom of his Southern family. It’s a brilliant story of lovers and enemies separated and reunited with the tragedies of war in between. Beyond all that, it’s a meditation on loyalty and the cruel duplicity of man. Our hero faces innumerable moral choices that attempt to answer the question: What’s a nice Jewish boy doing in a war like this? Horn’s answers do not… show more.

A lower-middle-class girl grows up in provincial England, and we follow her from early childhood through middle age. That’s it. She has a few relationships, a few kids, and some friendships. She fights with her mother, she works, and she thinks about her life, but only in passing because she’s busy living.

The kind of book that’s not supposed to work, except it does. It was technically marketed as a novel but exists on the disputed border between connected short story collections and novels. Each section can be read by itself and is a world unto itself. This book is full of moments that express how strange it is to have consciousness, how we are caught, suddenly, in the midst of ourselves, unable to believe we are here.