Here are 100 books that The Slide Area fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a child, finding reality both overwhelming and boring, I was drawn to movies. My father, a New York City disc jockey also at odds with reality, had contacts at a sixteen-millimeter movie rental company. He often brought films home, shown in a makeshift screening room he set up in our basement. Singin’ in the Rain, the classic musical, made a great impression there. Its funny first scene at a movie premiere featured a pompous star’s ennobling account of his early days, comically contradicted by the tacky, scrounging, painfully undignified truth. What lay behind Hollywood's glamor, smiles, and success soon became as interesting to me as what was on the screen.
An excellent nonfiction account of an actual Hollywood killing, this is a well-written and researched investigation of the (as yet) unsolved 1922 shooting of director William Desmond Taylor. The murder was committed right when scandals, including Fatty Arbuckle’s, besieged an ascendant Hollywood.
Also of interest: A Murder in Hollywood by Casey Sherman, which recaps the killing of Johnny Stompanato, Lana Turner’s gangster boyfriend, supposedly by her teenage daughter, Cheryl. This crime inspired entertainment from Harold Robbin’s potboiler, Where Love Has Gone, to Woody Allen’s self-serious movie, September.
New York Times Bestseller Edgar Award winner for Best Fact Crime The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story: an addictive true tale of ambition, scandal, intrigue, murder, and the creation of the modern film industry. By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America's new favorite pastime, and one of the nation's largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood's glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies-including the murder of William Desmond…
As a child, finding reality both overwhelming and boring, I was drawn to movies. My father, a New York City disc jockey also at odds with reality, had contacts at a sixteen-millimeter movie rental company. He often brought films home, shown in a makeshift screening room he set up in our basement. Singin’ in the Rain, the classic musical, made a great impression there. Its funny first scene at a movie premiere featured a pompous star’s ennobling account of his early days, comically contradicted by the tacky, scrounging, painfully undignified truth. What lay behind Hollywood's glamor, smiles, and success soon became as interesting to me as what was on the screen.
It lacks the film version’s famous, freakish appeal, including Bette Davis's wild, classic performance. Yet Henry Farrell’s horror novel about a weird, washed-up child star and her wheelchair-bound sister powerfully captures the lazy, languid midday atmosphere of Los Angeles, in which a person’s career and sanity can dry up in the sun.
The literary classic that inspired the iconic film - the story of two sisters and the hell they made their home.
Once an acclaimed child star of vaudeville, Baby Jane Hudson performed for adoring crowds before a move to Hollywood thrust her sister, Blanche, into the spotlight. As Blanche's film career took off, a resentful Jane watched from the shadows as her own career faded into obscurity - until a tragic accident changed everything.
Now, years later, the two sisters live in a decaying mansion, isolated from the outside world. Crippled by the accident, Blanche is helpless under the control…
As a child, finding reality both overwhelming and boring, I was drawn to movies. My father, a New York City disc jockey also at odds with reality, had contacts at a sixteen-millimeter movie rental company. He often brought films home, shown in a makeshift screening room he set up in our basement. Singin’ in the Rain, the classic musical, made a great impression there. Its funny first scene at a movie premiere featured a pompous star’s ennobling account of his early days, comically contradicted by the tacky, scrounging, painfully undignified truth. What lay behind Hollywood's glamor, smiles, and success soon became as interesting to me as what was on the screen.
A leading man in the fifties and early sixties (I Married a Monster from Outer Space is a good, suburbs-set science fiction movie), Tom Tryon became an acclaimed horror writer with his novel The Other.
His collection of stories and novellas about Hollywood is gamy, gruesome, and sometimes ugly (his story, Willie, based on the brutal murder of silent film star Ramon Navarro, borders on torture porn) but also feels authoritative and true. Fedora, his sub-Sunset Boulevard story about a faded movie star, came full circle and was one of Billy Wilder’s last and least successful films.
The pasts and presents of four onetime and still-going Hollywood movie stars interweave in a world of mystery and memories, publicity and reclusiveness, legend and loss
As a child, finding reality both overwhelming and boring, I was drawn to movies. My father, a New York City disc jockey also at odds with reality, had contacts at a sixteen-millimeter movie rental company. He often brought films home, shown in a makeshift screening room he set up in our basement. Singin’ in the Rain, the classic musical, made a great impression there. Its funny first scene at a movie premiere featured a pompous star’s ennobling account of his early days, comically contradicted by the tacky, scrounging, painfully undignified truth. What lay behind Hollywood's glamor, smiles, and success soon became as interesting to me as what was on the screen.
With strange echoes of today’s New York City, Irwin Shaw’s 1962 novel starts with a once-famous actor being punched in the face for no reason after arriving in Rome to do a looping job. While the overwritten story goes downhill from there, it takes a riveting look at Italy’s La Dolce Vita atmosphere, with characters reportedly based on Tyrone Power and Darryl Zanuck.
I have always had a thirst for mystery and puzzle-solving, which has expanded into books as I've grown. For me, emotions play an important role in any tale. Suspense novels that bring a personal element allow the puzzle to unfold meaningfully. Like slotting the last piece of a jigsaw in place, I want to feel their emotions—the fear that makes their hearts pump in rapid beats. Their sorrow and happiness. I want to know I have been on a journey when I finish. And one, I didn’t travel alone. I hope you, too, go on a journey with the books I have recommended.
While this may not be classed as a suspense novel, it is just that for me. It is a brutal, honest, and heartbreaking story that lived on long after I finished reading it. Touching on dementia and Down Syndrome, the author weaves a magic web of true understanding and heartfelt emotions.
Irene's strength, sense of responsibility, family, and love for her husband, Sam, make this a beautiful read. For Irene, it isn’t only about coming to terms with the loss of her sister, Rose, but finding out what happened the night that Rose died… and the truth is very different from what Irene thinks she saw.
Mother and daughter tied together by shame and secrecy, love and hate.
I wait by the bed. I move into her line of vision and it’s as though we’re watching one another, my mother and me; two women – trapped.
Today has been a long time coming. Irene sits at her mother's side waiting for the right moment, for the point at which she will know she is doing the right thing by Rose.
Rose was Irene's little sister, an unwanted embarrassment to their mother Lilian but a treasure to Irene. Rose died thirty years ago, when she was eight,…
The best fiction explores complex relationships between friends and lovers. I’ve been fascinated by this for as long as I can remember because love and friendship are the cornerstones of human existence. As concepts, they give life meaning yet can also take it away. They bring us together but can also leave us estranged. The sun-soaked cities of Europe have for so long been playgrounds for young lovers and friends, enjoying both the best of life and the most melancholy. I love traveling Europe–the grandeur, the romance, the happy-sad sentiment of it all. It embodies the topic and makes for the most beautiful setting.
The Trio captures the essence of friendship and love and the coexisting yet diametrically opposed social anxieties that can accompany them. This is why I love this book–love is presented as complex, challenging, and fraught with more that is unsaid than actually expressed.
I also love this book because it expresses love as a real feeling, something that is experienced but not always easy to explain (or get along with). The characters are relatable, honest, and flawed, yet likable. The book is also set in beautiful locations–Stockholm, Paris, London–which makes it beautiful to read.
Elegant, mature and richly atmospheric, a bittersweet love story glimpsed through the veil of memory
'The love child of Normal People and Brideshead Revisited... Sublime and elegiac' Francesca Reece
'[A] heady mix of hope and nostalgia, of desire and regret, of new love and lost love' Sunday Times
Thora, August and Hugo come from different worlds. One is an art school dreamer, one a wealthy scion of the old-world elite, and one an ordinary boy from out of town. But over the course of two sky-blue summers in Stockholm, they are drawn together…
I grew up in the eighties, and that means I grew up watching movies such as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Say Anything. Thirty years after watching those movies, some iconic scenes have stuck with me: the characters of The Breakfast Club sliding across the hallway to Simple Minds’ song “Don’t You Forget About Me,” John Cusack holding the boombox over his head while blaring Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” and the Psychedelic Furs “Pretty in Pink” song playing on the soundtrack of a movie by the same name. The books in this list do a lot with those same ingredients of heartbreak, music, and hope that the characters who so often remind me of myself might find love.
“In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.” That’s how Updike’s story A & P starts, and really, all I’m doing in recommending this book to you is actually recommending that you read the story A & P.
I once became an English major mostly because I was an unconfident student, and both of my parents were English teachers. I figured I could go home and get help with my homework if I needed it. I always say Updike’s A & P is the first story I ever really liked. Later, when I made the English Honor Society in college, I was asked to read a story that was important to me, and I chose this one.
I used to think all stories were old like Beowulf or MacBeth, but this one showed me stories could come from situations I’d lived. After all, I had worked in…
When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the…
I am a philosopher of language (and of art) and have been for 30+ years. Why philosophy of language? Well, it encourages a certain salutary kind of self-consciousness—which is extremely valuable to philosophy—and facilitates greater rigor. But it only got going some one hundred and twenty years ago. So it's modern(ish) as well as deep. And whereas it might seem a narrow slice of the philosophical pie, it isn't; it seems to provide fruitful ways of thinking for almost any philosophical subject. For example, rather than 'What is X?', we ask 'What do we mean by "X"?'; a subtle difference perhaps but the change in perspective might be a key.
Musil is a person who you know you’ll never quite keep up with; he has irony within irony within irony. The book is fiction, but few things are better for learning skepticism about "essences" and big ideas, and yes, humility about oneself.
Ulrich, Diotima, General Stumm, sister Agatha, and Moosebrugger are the unforgettable characters, and post-World War I, Vienna is the stage.
It is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef. But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ordinary Viennese world is beginning to show signs of more serious rebellion. Caught in the middle of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: youngish, rich, an ex-soldier, seducer and scientist.
Unable to deceive himself that the jumble of attributes and values that his world has bestowed on him amounts to anything…
I'm Marwan Mohammed, a sociologist for the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), a pure product of the French working-class suburbs; having failed at school, taken to the streets, and ended up in research after a detour through social work and community organizing. I founded several grassroots organizations in the Paris suburbs, such as C'noues (which became a futsal club that trained several top-level players, including my brother Abdessamad Mohammed, the French national team's all-time top scorer) and more recently NormalZup, an association that tackles educational inequalities at source. I'll be telling the whole story in a forthcoming book.
There are many remedies for racism, including education, transmission, and prevention. So as not to limit myself to the human and social sciences, I suggest this children's novel by Ayaan Mohamud. It's an embodied account, a fictionalized testimony that we discover by following Hanan, the main character, who attends a prestigious school where she is subjected to a very routine form of Islamophobic ostracism.
She follows her mother's advice to stay the course and not overreact for a while. But after a tragedy, this position is no longer tenable and she makes her voice heard, in other words, she takes her place as a visible Muslim in American society in a different way.
This novel will delight young and old alike and is a good complement to the more scientific works cited in this list of recommendations. It was originally written for my children, so they wouldn't shut up.
"Will leave you feeling moved and inspired. A must read!" Cosmopolitan
A stunning debut about finding the strength to speak up against hate and fear, for fans of The Hate U Give and I Am Thunder.
People like me are devils before we are angels. Hanan has always been good and quiet. She accepts her role as her school's perfect Muslim poster girl. She ignores the racist bullies. A closed mouth is gold - it helps you get home in one piece. Then her friend is murdered and every Muslim is to blame. The world is angry at us again.…
I’m passionate about this because I write romantasy too, and so do many other wonderful authors. Sarah J. Maas is a legend in the Romantasy genre, and she’s prolific, so there’s a lot to read with her various series. But, if you’ve finished with her books and are looking for more, there are plenty of authors out there doing amazing, spine-tingling, dare I say loin-tingling work, and we should celebrate them. Besides, no matter how prolific Ms. Maas is, readers will always finish books faster than even she can write them.
I loved the main character, the beautifully named Saffron Everleigh. She’s a woman in 1923 London, trying to make her way in academia at a time when women weren’t usually allowed in the doors.
Her scientific interests and studies in botany come in handy when she attends a dinner party for the school, and a professor’s wife drops to the floor, poisoned by an unknown substance. Working with the equally passionate, ahem, Alexander Ashton, a fellow researcher, Saffron must investigate the murder or wind up next on the murderer's list. There are two more books in this series, so we are lucky to spend more time with our plucky heroine.
The Lost Apothecary meets Dead Dead Girls in this fast-paced, STEMinist adventure.
Debut author Kate Khavari deftly entwines a pulse-pounding mystery with the struggles of a woman in a male-dominated field in 1923 London.
Newly minted research assistant Saffron Everleigh is determined to blaze a new trail at the University College London, but with her colleagues’ beliefs about women’s academic inabilities and not so subtle hints that her deceased father’s reputation paved her way into the botany department, she feels stymied at every turn.
When she attends a dinner party for the school, she expects to engage in conversations about…