100 books like The City of Palaces

I really enjoyed this novel for several reasons. For one, Jess Walter is a fantastic storyteller. As a history geek, this book gives a fascinating retro look into an era I otherwise would’ve ignored: Hollywood during the making of the movie Cleopatra. One of the strengths of fiction is fleshing out a historical personality by putting him or her on stage, giving them voice, emotion, and substance that would be difficult to do in nonfiction.

We meet Richard Burton in all his self-centered, boozy, womanizing splendor, and you can’t help but feel disappointed that you never got to spill drinks with him. But the guy who steals the show is Hollywood producer Michael Deane, a narcissistic schemer who tramples over everyone to get his way, on the surface self-absorbed, yet inwardly fully aware of the effect he’s having. 

The murder of Leon Trotsky remains one of those historical events that didn’t change much yet reveals a lot about its time and the people. Since Trotsky was by then marginalized as a has-been in international communism, his death was simply an act of Joseph Stalin tying up loose ends. If you already know something about this period, what with Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, the assassin Ramón Mercader, the Spanish Civil War, and the brewing of the Second World War, the author, Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, will still deliver an eye-opening and disturbing read.

The top of my reading pile always has a book in Spanish, and it was this way that I became familiar with Padura, famous for his crime noir novels set in Habana. I admire his scholarship in digging through what had to be vast mines of documents, but also his huevos for shaping a well-documented narrative… show more.

What I loved most about this book was the voice. Woodrell did a fantastic job presenting the period Biblical lyricism through the narrator, Jake Roedel, a reluctant Confederate soldier.

The scene is the largely overlooked Kansas-Missouri front of the US Civil War, where bloody vendettas were just as much of the fighting as were skirmishes between the blue and the gray. We ride with the young men, boys really, as they raid and pillage, hide and survive, and there’s nothing romantic about the loss and pointless savagery. 

If you’ve never heard of the Saint Patrick’s Battalion—the Irish soldiers who deserted the US Army to fight for Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1847—with this novel, Reyna Grande will fill in the blanks in grand style. She pulls you in using the trope of a romance between Ximena, a curandera, and John Riley, an Irish-American artilleryman, both pawns in a gigantic land grab now regarded as one of the US’s forgotten wars.

We listen to the big personalities—Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna and US General Zachary Taylor—give their version of events even as the book provides an unflinching eye at the plight of the common people caught in the chaos and bloodshed.

This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican history.

I didn't realize a book could get the zoomies. América del Norte has instilled in me such great wonder and vicious prose envy that I may never recover. Rambunctious, bombastic, and sprawling, this work of autofiction left me saying things like, “No way!” and “What the hell?!” out loud like a complete buffoon. Sometimes because of the story and sometimes because of the audacity of the sentence structures.

Medina Mora weaves history, literature, politics, translation, and much more into a grand chronicle. Amid devastating historical narratives and global tragedy, I still laughed out loud at some parts and startled my little cat, who then also got the zoomies.

Valeria Luiselli dissects the odd systems and networks of our world’s cities and reveals in their hidden corners and corridors strange and magical identities. Luiselli’s essays further interrogate a city’s relationship to the bodies, cultures, artifacts, and languages that inhabit its spaces. In the essay, “Flying Home,” Luiselli journeys to Mexico City, the place of her birth, and, staring out of her airplane window, considers the city’s layout from this great height. This act of “mapping” according to her extraordinary vantage (suspended in flight), allows for a greater, incantatory meditation on our various perceptions of “home,” and how said perceptions depend as much on the imagination and on ephemeral memories as they do on reality.   

Juan Villoro’s memoir takes readers on a tour of contemporary Mexico City that is also a meditation on chilangos’ (Mexico City residents) relationship with the past. The book bounces between the author’s childhood in the neighborhoods of Mixcoac and Del Valle and the present day, traversing the sprawling metropolis and giving readers a sense of its scale and complexity. Through Villoro, we meet the sewer cleaners and tire repairmen who keep the city humming. We visit monuments like the Angel of Independence and Chapultepec Castle and the bustling spaces of Santo Domingo Plaza and Tepito—places that seem to hover between past and present and myth and reality. At once spry and erudite, the book is an immensely satisfying rumination on the city and its people. 

I think that we should all make an effort to understand people who are not from our cultural stew; people who seem different, but wind up being like us; once we get to know them.

Patrick Oster is not a sociologist, a psychologist, or an ugly American. He could be Joe Blow from down the block who decides to go to Mexico, to get to know the Mexican people. He does not make an effort to know all the people, he simply makes friends with those who are friendly, and leaves the others alone; just the way he would do in America.

I feel that this book is a wonderful example of what can come from an honest exploration and a warm writing style.

Few scholars have done more to demystify the nature of crime in Mexico than Pablo Piccato. His book City of Suspects is a nuanced history that reveals that the very meaning of crime was contested in early twentieth-century Mexico City. While Mexican elites tried to define criminals as a social class, the urban poor, who experienced crime as a part of their everyday lives, saw crime as an individual phenomenon. This book, like the others on this list, is also a story about the ways people used and thought about public space. At a time when Mexico’s government sought to transform the capital into a modern metropolis along the lines of Paris or New York, the poor resisted efforts to exclude them from that future.