Here are 100 books that The Secret of Chanel No. 5 fans have personally recommended if you like
The Secret of Chanel No. 5.
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I’m the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once. I often say it’s a book about being a mess in your twenties, but to speak more personally, writing it was a necessity, a way to make sense of both the intensity and mundanity of my own experiences. I love a book where you can palpably feel the author working to make sense of their own life, through language—and, in turn, sorting out what it is for any of us to be a person. Books like these are essential reading when life feels thorny, beautiful, and impossible to make sense of, and all you can do is try to write it down.
I still remember, in the year 2010, reaching the end of the essay "Goodbye to All That" where the date of publication is noted—1967—and how startled I was to realize something that feels so contemporary and alive had been written decades earlier. As in so much of her work, in this collection Didion offers vivid details from her life and brings her extraordinary powers of analysis to understanding their meaning.
As she once put it herself—in another essay, "Why I Write"—"Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”
Joan Didion's savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were
In her non-fiction work, Joan Didion not only describes the subject at hand - her younger self loving and leaving New York, the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion…
I am an author, film composer, guitarist, multimedia artist, and perfumer. As a music journalist, I’ve written extensively for many major U.S. and international guitar publications before launching the website, The Guitar. My music has been featured on National Public Radio and worldwide at major U.S. and international art and design museum festivals. Part of being a writer is about expressing one’s curiosity through constant delving and engaging in the ongoing process of discovery. What compels me is the attempt to understand the inspiration that drives an artist to create a distinctively beautiful melody, fragrance, or artwork—one that grabs your attention with a mesmerizing, transfixing, and soulful quality.
Gary Lucas is best known for his guitar wizardry in Captain Beefheart and for his dazzling guitar riffs that create the spine for Jeff Buckley’s hits, “Grace” and “Mojo Pin,” but I know him personally as an intelligent, highly-observant raconteur who has a mordant way of conveying the absurdity that exists within the music business. He deftly captures the lifeblood and pulse that comes with writing, collaborating creating music, which, itself, is always the joy. Touched by Grace offers a glimpse into his unforgettable collaboration with the charismatic singer Jeff Buckley in his band Gods & Monsters, from their first performance together in 1991 on through the stunning news of the singer’s tragic drowning in Memphis in 1997.
We're going to do this tribute in St Ann's Church in Brooklyn - a wonderful space. Oh, by the way, we've been contacted by Tim Buckley's son, Jeff. Touched By Grace is an up-close-and-personal account by the legendary guitarist and songwriter Gary Lucas of the time he spent with his friend and collaborator, Jeff Buckley, during Jeff's early days in New York City. It describes their magical performance together at the Greetings From Tim Buckley concert at the Church of St Ann in 1991 - the event that first introduced Jeff to the world at large; the creation of their…
I am an author, film composer, guitarist, multimedia artist, and perfumer. As a music journalist, I’ve written extensively for many major U.S. and international guitar publications before launching the website, The Guitar. My music has been featured on National Public Radio and worldwide at major U.S. and international art and design museum festivals. Part of being a writer is about expressing one’s curiosity through constant delving and engaging in the ongoing process of discovery. What compels me is the attempt to understand the inspiration that drives an artist to create a distinctively beautiful melody, fragrance, or artwork—one that grabs your attention with a mesmerizing, transfixing, and soulful quality.
A famous painter’s cookbook? If you didn’t think artists eat, think again, and start by Googling images of Monet’s kitchen at his house in Giverny. (I said eat, not cook.) Written by the wife of Madame Monet’s great-grandson, this book offers you beautiful photographs of this artwork along with diary accounts of his family life and an opportunity to understand one of the great Impressionist artists through the dishes that his wife and family prepared, including his favorite, richly green-hued pistachio cake.
I am an author, film composer, guitarist, multimedia artist, and perfumer. As a music journalist, I’ve written extensively for many major U.S. and international guitar publications before launching the website, The Guitar. My music has been featured on National Public Radio and worldwide at major U.S. and international art and design museum festivals. Part of being a writer is about expressing one’s curiosity through constant delving and engaging in the ongoing process of discovery. What compels me is the attempt to understand the inspiration that drives an artist to create a distinctively beautiful melody, fragrance, or artwork—one that grabs your attention with a mesmerizing, transfixing, and soulful quality.
Frey’s book is a vivid account of the fin-de-siecle French painter who was born into aristocracy but did not fit in, due to hereditary dwarfism. Lautrec devoted himself to studying painting in Paris, where he fell in with the cabaret theatre and dancehall crowd, along with its contingent, shadier side of sundry misfits, whom he embraced wholly. In the milieu that permitted a laundress (La Goulue) to become a can-can star, Lautrec put himself on the map with his spectacular cabaret posters. I chose this book because though I do not draw portraits, I can relate to my enjoyment of capturing artistic photographs of musicians.
Debauched aristocrat, cabaret painter or accidental dwarf: Julia Frey's definitive biography uses meticulous research to strip away the myth of Toulouse-Lautrec and reveal for the first time the tortured man beneath. 'The book deals seriously and sensitively with Lautrec's progress as an artist, his academic training and the audacious use he put it to. Equally, readers in search of the ooh-la-la side of Paris during the Belle Epoque won't feel short-changed. Almost everyone from Manet to the young Picasso crosses the stage. It is of course a tragic story, but a triumphant one also' George Melly, Mail on Sunday
I am a historian of science who just completed a book on the role of perfume in the quest for the secret of life and vitality. While writing it, I became fascinated with the challenge of translating scent into language. While our nose can recognize a virtually infinite number of odors, there are only a few basic categories of description (“floral,” “woody,” “citrus,” etc.). To fully describe them often requires a poet’s touch – invoking a tapestry of memories, associations, and feelings to create the experience in the reader’s mind. These are some of the best books I’ve encountered for talking about the complex world of scent, and the importance of perfume in human history.
A classic of cultural history that shows how thoroughly smell shapes our lived experience.
Corbin details how different (and generally worse) France smelled in the past, and how this world of miasmas and insalubrious airs dictated hygiene practices and social interactions. More recent works, like Jonathan Reinarz’ Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell have further built on the treatment of odor as a powerful cultural force.
In a book whose insight and originality have already had a dazzling impact in France, Alain Corbin has put the sense of smell on the historical map. He conjures up the dominion that the combined forces of smells--from the seductress's civet to the ubiquitous excremental odors of city cesspools--exercised over the lives (and deaths) of the French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I am a historian of science who just completed a book on the role of perfume in the quest for the secret of life and vitality. While writing it, I became fascinated with the challenge of translating scent into language. While our nose can recognize a virtually infinite number of odors, there are only a few basic categories of description (“floral,” “woody,” “citrus,” etc.). To fully describe them often requires a poet’s touch – invoking a tapestry of memories, associations, and feelings to create the experience in the reader’s mind. These are some of the best books I’ve encountered for talking about the complex world of scent, and the importance of perfume in human history.
A gruesome story of murder and desire that also happens to have the most vivid olfactory descriptions of any genre.
Suskind’s preternatural ability to summon odor from the page makes you feel as if you are there beside him, walking through the flowered hillsides of Provence, or in the back room of a perfume shop on the Pont au Change. His twisted use of classic perfume techniques is as accurate as it is chilling.
An erotic masterpiece of twentieth century fiction - a tale of sensual obsession and bloodlust in eighteenth century Paris
'An astonishing tour de force both in concept and execution' Guardian
In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name has been forgotten today.
It is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, wickedness, but because his gifts…
I have loved fairy tales since I was a little girl and watched my first Disney movie. Over the years, I’ve read many fairy tale retellings, as well as the original versions. I love how writers can see a story like Beauty and the Beast and find ways to make an almost completely new story, but still hold true to the original concepts of the fairy tale. Fairy tales connect us to our childhood and when we read these new versions, it lets us relive a part of our childhood. Not many books can do that!
Beauty and the Beast is my favourite fairy tale, so not only do I read every retelling I can get my hands on, but I’m quite particular about how I rate them. Stalking Shadowsexceeded all expectations. I loved how she changed the genders of her Beauty and Beast (or Beasts). I love when women are allowed to be beastly and monstrous. Panin also didn’t shy away from talking about tough subjects in her book, another reason I loved it so much. I especially liked how she tackled racism and Lord Sebastian’s experiences as a biracial child growing up in the village.
A gothic YA fantasy debut about a young woman striving to break her sister's curse and stop the killing in her small French town—now in paperback
Seventeen-year-old Marie mixes perfumes to sell on market day in her small 18th-century French town. She wants to make enough to save a dowry for her sister, Ama, in hopes of Ama marrying well and Marie living at the level of freedom afforded only to spinster aunts. But her perfumes are more than sweet scents in cheap, cut-glass bottles: A certain few are laced with death. Marie laces the perfume delicately—not with poison, but…
As a travel writer, author, broadcaster, speaker, and producer, I’ve reported from over 100 countries on 7 continents for major print and digital publications worldwide and networks like National Geographic and Travel Channel. I kicked off my career with a solo, 12-month round-the-world backpacking adventure, largely inspired by the formative books I read below. Embracing the world with insatiable curiosity, an open heart, an open mind, a sense of humour, and enthusiasm to share my stories clearly resonated. Here I am, two decades later, author of a half-dozen bestselling books that focus on my own eclectic travels, which will hopefully inspire others as these books inspired me.
Nobody writes like Tom Robbins, although admittedly, his wild wit, metaphorical overkill, and commitment to not taking anything too seriously might not appeal to everyone.
Put me on a long train ride or a slow ship with a worn paperback copy of any of his books, and I can happily lose myself in his zany, funny, thought-provoking, and sexy world. Exotic locations are baked into most of his books, and you can burn your retinas on each page’s creative flair.
Put down this book, and you’ll never look at beets, immortality, or life in quite the same way again. Tom Robbins inspired me to read more, write more, and, most importantly, live more.
Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight [Paris time]. It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is…
I’m obsessed with the exploration of what it means to be a human being. We’re coming into an era where we see more characters who aren’t good or evil but both—they possess the potential to save someone from jumping off a bridge one day and beating someone the next. We’re all capable of the greatest acts of kindness and the most abominable atrocities imaginable. I believe we need to be reminded of that fact so that when there comes a time when we can decide whether to hurt or to help someone, we become the better version of ourselves and make the right decision.
Michael Faber is one of my favorite writers of all time, and the same author of Under the Skin, another wonderful book with a female protagonist you’ll hate yourself for loving. Faber’s range as a storyteller is incredible, and along with his mastery of horror and science fiction, he shows that he can put together a Victorian epic that is gorgeously written, with a main character, Sugar, who is a complicated character—a sex worker by trade who sometimes makes bad choices but is admirable in how she has to navigate the world of pompous, detestable men to survive.
'Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them . . .'
So begins this irresistible voyage into the dark side of Victorian London. Amongst an unforgettable cast of low-lifes, physicians, businessmen and prostitutes, meet our heroine Sugar, a young woman trying to drag herself up from the gutter any way she can. Be prepared for a mesmerising tale of passion, intrigue, ambition and revenge.
I am a historian of science who just completed a book on the role of perfume in the quest for the secret of life and vitality. While writing it, I became fascinated with the challenge of translating scent into language. While our nose can recognize a virtually infinite number of odors, there are only a few basic categories of description (“floral,” “woody,” “citrus,” etc.). To fully describe them often requires a poet’s touch – invoking a tapestry of memories, associations, and feelings to create the experience in the reader’s mind. These are some of the best books I’ve encountered for talking about the complex world of scent, and the importance of perfume in human history.
Ellena is a legendary perfumer, who has devoted his life to the creation of evocative scents.
In this book, he invites the reader into his process. We learn a lot about the inner workings of the perfume industry. But even more interesting are the insights into Ellena’s own mind as he navigates memory, imagination, and pleasure in the pursuit of new scents both soothing and surprising.
To women the whole world over, perfume means glamour, and in the world of perfume, Jean-Claude Ellena is a superstar. In this one-of-a-kind book, the master himself takes you through the doors of his laboratory and explains the process of creating precious fragrances, revealing the key methods and recipes involved in this mysterious alchemy. Perfume is a cutthroat, secretive multibillion-dollar industry, and Ellena provides an insider's tour, guiding us from initial inspiration through the mixing of essences and synthetic elements, to the deluxe packaging and marketing in elegant boutiques worldwide, and even the increasingly complicated safety standards that are set…
