12 books like The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

When I first read this book over twenty years ago, I thought, finally, someone who sees what I see in classic Hollywood films—dynamic and exciting women. She traces American women onscreen: from the flappers of the 1920s (It girl Clara Bow) to the European goddesses Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to the sultry Mae West in the 1930s, to the fast-talking Dames Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, and to Marilyn Monroe and her postwar millionaire-seeking pals.

Her multi-decade analysis contemplates what changed in the 1970s-80s; as American women earned greater equity in real life, their onscreen representation paled compared to their pre-WWII sisters. A quarter into the twenty-first century, female star-driven Hollywood films remain an anomaly. Read this book to find out why it was the inverse more than ninety years ago.

If I had to pick the two most basic, and most enthralling, essays for understanding American movies, they would be Warshow’s "The Westerner" and "The Gangster," both included in this book. Warshow, who died tragically young, also gives us the two finest pieces ever written about Chaplin, in which he argues that the flaws and stresses in Chaplin’s film art somehow make it more, not less, impressive. Add Warshow’s properly skeptical account of Soviet cinema—he is appreciative, but also aware of how Communist ideology distorted Soviet film—and you have the very best from a star among the New York intellectuals.

With the exception of the prefatory material, which one can skip, this is one of the very best books on Hitchcock.

It is beautifully written and attentive to cinematic details and larger themes. It offers rich interpretations of several central films, with the first half focused on close interpretation and the second half, written later in Wood’s career, more orientated toward Marx, Freud, and gay studies.

Though the book is uneven, it contains some of the best analyses one will ever read of Hitchcock’s major films.

Virtually any volume in the BFI Film Classics series—now sadly defunct--is worth recommending. But I’m especially fond of this one, about Jean Renoir’s masterpiece The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu)--my favorite movie along with Kubrick’s 2001 (a very different kind of film!). Perkins explores each of the film’s characters, bringing out the full dimensions of Renoir’s humanism, his grand comic flair, and the bittersweet aura of this great movie completed as World War II was about to engulf Europe.

Of this set of books, the first two are my faves. Who needs horror when it’s right here in St. Aubyn’s horrific childhood with his creepy father?

It becomes perfectly understandable why the young Edward dove into a life of utter self-destruction. When he becomes a drug addict, his sheer self-obliteration reaches epic proportions. I have to admit, I was awed. It’s not so much the stories of his sick father and oblivious mother or his gleeful romp through degradation that compelled me to keep reading. It’s the writing. These are the best descriptions of drug use that I’ve ever come across.

The writing reminded me of my favorite movie, Trainspotting, which managed to visually convey the effects of heroin addiction in a similar way. 

I can not praise Edward St Aubyn highly enough. He is one of my favourite authors; I love his writing because it is heart-stoppingly true and affecting.

He portrays dysfunctional family dynamics with blistering accuracy, and I felt less alone reading this because I have been haunted by my own ancestral patterns repeating themselves through generations. I not only find St Aubyn laugh-out-loud funny, but he is also a brilliant observer of social mores.

Somehow, this book manages to be anti-spiritual while being one of the most spiritually aware books I have read. I love that St Aubyn does not try to make himself likable as a writer. There’s a ruthless fearlessness to his truth that I admire, which adds to his humanity.  

This is another book I came to via teaching; looking for new ecofictions, I put out a call on twitter and this title kept being mentioned by people I trust. When I read it, I was blown away by Hunter’s slim, powerful novel.

With the South of England underwater, Britons are forced to flee north to displacement camps, suddenly finding themselves fighting in supermarkets for supplies and walking the roads with their children.

I first read it for its depiction of eco-catastrophe and refugee crisis and its fascinating echoes of the fuel and food shortages of the pandemic. But as I reread it each year, I more insistently see it as a book depicting new motherhood as a crashing, overwhelming flood from which one emerges perhaps a year later, a haunted, dazed survivor.

This was the first ‘grown-up’ book I ever read. I was seven. I can still remember the green Penguin Books cover and the smell of old paper that accompanied it. I immediately became captivated by Sherlock Holmes and this mystery on the lonely moors. I still get goosebumps when I read that line, “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of an enormous hound!” Yikes! 

I love Holmes’s brilliance and his friendship with ‘my friend and colleague, Dr Watson.’ I love his wry sense of humor, his untidy habits, and his Victorian manners. I’m a grandmother now, and I still love Holmes and this book as much as I did when I was a child. 

Who wants to live forever? Or, as in this contemporary novel, for 500 years or more? In his unique style and wit, Matt Haig explores the many pitfalls and heartaches that living an extra-long life poses along with some of the positives his central character Tom must endure. Yes, it is a time-travel story, if at times a little too long and with much inward-self psychology, but one that brings elements of history, real-life characters, and at times shocking revelations by creating a scenario reversing a real human genetic condition, making the reader think: what if? We’ve all thought at times how wonderful it would be to live forever. After reading this novel, I know what my answer will be.

I’m usually all about the hero, but in this sweet book, it was the heroine whom I fell for. Lacey Pope plays Princess Sweet Pea at a fairytale theme park, and she takes her role seriously. She has a list of royal rules that include: “Always make friends with birds and butterflies, and always, always be kind.” When she shares them with two visitors to the park, she doesn’t realize that she’s talking to a real—and grumpy—prince and his daughter. 

Lacey lives by her royal rules in real life, too—like Amy Adams in the movie Enchanted—and the prince falls in love with her bright spirit. 

This delicious book is like the featherlight meringue of the macarons that Lacey nibbles on when she travels to Henry’s home country, Bella-Moritz.