Here are 100 books that Borrowed Finery fans have personally recommended if you like
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Who can really claim that they know everything about the human heart, the mind, the soul? The infinite mysteries and complexities of what makes someone who we can call “human.” I'm betting no one. Certainly not me. But what's important is the passion to keep exploring, to keep digging through the mind in an effort to understand myself. That effort, along with what I discover, is one of the most tangible things that not only enriches my living life, but also gives me comfort facing the inevitable end. These books were passionate companions, inspiring me, for however long, to further my efforts in self-discovery.
I love this book because it helped put my best friend’s suicide in perspective—provided some tools to understand his mind and motivations.
It allowed me to not feel so alone in dealing with his loss, giving me comfort and insight from someone who had already done a lot of processing around her own father’s suicide.
I couldn’t help but feel a certain kinship, which of course didn’t fill the hole in my heart, but did allow for a certain sense of peace and resolution.
Sixteen years ago, Joan Wickersham's father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Using an index - that most formal and orderly of structures - Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. Every bit of family history - marriage, parents, business failures - and every encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors exposes another facet of elusive truth. Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and deeply personal exploration, "The Suicide Index" is, finally, a daughter's anguished, loving…
Alice Wilson wants children; her husband, Dan, doesn’t. So Alice "accidentally" gets pregnant, trusting that Dan will eventually go along—and he seems to, at first. But as their marriage falls apart, Alice realizes that, even from the beginning, Dan has cruelly used small criticisms and belittling comments to undermine her…
I'm a journalist, fiction writer, and screenwriter, as well as the author of ten books, the most recent of which isCreative Types and Other Stories, which will be published later this year. Along with Neil Cross, I developed for televisionThe Mosquito Coast, based on Paul Theroux’s novel, which is now showing on Apple TV. Currently, I live with my family in Los Angeles.
This is a memoir about being a writer—and failing. With scholarly rigor and tenderhearted sympathy, Specktor excavates the lives of artists forgotten (Carol Eastman, Eleanor Perry), underappreciated (Thomas McGuane, Hal Ashby), and notorious (Warren Zevon, Michael Cimino), while always circling back to his own benighted Hollywood upbringing, complete with a lovely tribute to his mother, a failed screenwriter. This is an angry, sad, but always somehow joyful book about not hitting it big, and I've never read anything quite like it.
"[An] absorbing and revealing book. . . . nestling in the fruitful terrain between memoir and criticism." ―Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage
Blending memoir and cultural criticism, Matthew Specktor explores family legacy, the lives of artists, and a city that embodies both dreams and disillusionment.
In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor’s first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood…
I’m an award-winning biographer and critic. My essays and reviews appear regularly in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, and I teach literature and creative writing at King’s College London. I’ve always loved stories about the lives of great writers – stories that seek to illuminate genius, without ever explaining it away.
This is a magnificent autobiography, a work of intricate self-portraiture that takes in everything from the author’s dental troubles, through his relationship with his father, to his reaction to his cousin’s murder. Amis’s comic energy and stylistic brio are on sizzling display throughout, but so are qualities that aren’t often associated with his fiction: gentleness, generosity, emotional vulnerability…
In this remarkable work of autobiography, the son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life, including the final one of his death. Amis also reflects on the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in 1973 and was exhumed twenty years later from the basement of Frederick West, one of Britain's most prolific serial murderers.
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
Alice Wilson wants children; her husband, Dan, doesn’t. So Alice "accidentally" gets pregnant, trusting that Dan will eventually go along—and he seems to, at first. But as their marriage falls apart, Alice realizes that, even from the beginning, Dan has cruelly used small criticisms and belittling comments to undermine her…
I'm a journalist, fiction writer, and screenwriter, as well as the author of ten books, the most recent of which isCreative Types and Other Stories, which will be published later this year. Along with Neil Cross, I developed for televisionThe Mosquito Coast, based on Paul Theroux’s novel, which is now showing on Apple TV. Currently, I live with my family in Los Angeles.
Sullivan is probably best known today for his instant-classic essay collection Pulphead, but I actually prefer his first book, Blood Horses, a memoir he wrote in the aftermath of losing his beloved sportswriter father, whose special focus was horse racing and the Kentucky Derby. Sullivan, who cares nothing about horses and horse racing, tries to get closer to his lost father by covering the grand race and learning everything about the sport, and horses, that he can. This puts Sullivan on the grounds of the Kentucky Derby on the morning of September 11, 2001, while standing next to the Saudi owner of a celebrated racing horse. What happens when the Saudi’s phone starts ringing is too good to spoil here. An extraordinary memoir.
One evening late in his life, veteran sportswriter Mike Sullivan was asked by his son what he remembered best from his three decades in the press box. The answer came as a surprise. 'I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. That was ... just beauty, you know?'
John Jeremiah Sullivan didn't know, not really, but he spent two years finding out, journeying from prehistoric caves to the Kentucky Derby. The result is Blood Horses, a wise, humorous and often beautiful memoir exploring the relationship between man and horse and the relationship between a sportswriter's son and his late father.
Why do I use the word “fraud?” The answer is agonizingly simple. My whole life, and I mean since I was ten, I wanted to be “a real writer.” Whatever that was. And now here we are, 55 years later. Despite my great good fortune to spend 24 years coming up with jokes for Dave Letterman, three years as a columnist at Sports Illustrated, and to have my name on four novels, if you asked me, “Are you a real writer?” I would tell you, “not yet….” Here are five real writers.
A memoir of his mother and his life in Glovershville, New York from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. It is utterly unfair that such a singular writer of fiction can be this deft at non-fiction. The best piece of advice I ever got as a writer was “Make your characters complicated…” Some characters, like Jean Russo, come complicated out of the factory. (By the way, Russo is a friend, and once told me at a book event in his honor that he felt like a fraud. So, I am in fine company).
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist turns to memoir in this "intimate and powerful" account (Chicago Tribune) of his lifelong bond with his high-strung, spirited mother—and the small town she spent her life trying to escape.
Anyone familiar with Russo’s novels will recognize Gloversville—once famous for producing nine out of ten dress gloves in the United States. By the time Rick was born, ladies had stopped wearing gloves and Gloversville was on its way out. Jean Russo instilled in her son her dream of a better life elsewhere, a dream that prompted her to follow him across the country when he went…
My father used to take me to watch the Twins play at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, a twenty-minute drive from our house in suburban Minneapolis. As soon as the Twins announced their schedule each year, he would buy tickets for the doubleheaders. Our favorites were the twilight doubleheaders, when we watched one game by daylight, and the other under the night sky. Baseball was pure to me then: played outdoors on real grass. Seated beside my dad during those twin bills, I felt his love for the game seep into me and take root. All these years later, almost two decades after his death, that love remains strong.
I came of age in the seventies, and this book took me through that time, specifically 1977 again, able to view events through the lens of a particularly insightful adult.
This book encompasses more than baseball. There’s the battle to be mayor between Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo, Rupert Murdoch buying the New York Post, disco and dancing at Studio 54, the dawn of punk rock, but at its heart is the story of the Yankees and that crazy love triangle of Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, and George Steinbrenner. I was delighted to relive all of that craziness.
“Masterful . . . In Mahler’s expert hands, the city’s outsized citizens are flawed, fierce, bickersome, and as indomitable as the metropolis itself.” —Mike Sokolove, author of The Ticket Out
A passionate and dramatic account of a year in the life of a city, when baseball and crime reigned supreme, and when several remarkable figures emerged to steer New York clear of one of its most harrowing periods.
By early 1977, the metropolis was in the grip of hysteria caused by a murderer dubbed “Son of Sam.” And on a sweltering night in July, a citywide power outage touched off…
I have expertise and a passion for this topic because I suffered from a terrible addiction to drugs for many years and was considered a hopeless case. If I can beat my addiction then anyone can!
This was another true story of someone who suffered a terrible addiction and was able to overcome it. I liked it because Jim was a regular guy and not a celebrity sharing his life story as so many of these book are. It was one of the first books that gave me inspiration to write a book. It also became a movie where Leonardo DeCaprio played Jim Carrol.
The urban classic coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, and basketball
Jim Carroll grew up to become a renowned poet and punk rocker. But in this memoir of the mid-1960s, set during his coming-of-age from 12 to 15, he was a rebellious teenager making a place and a name for himself on the unforgiving streets of New York City. During these years, he chronicled his experiences, and the result is a diary of unparalleled candor that conveys his alternately hilarious and terrifying teenage existence. Here is Carroll prowling New York City--playing basketball, hustling, stealing, getting high, getting hooked, and searching…
My love of New York City began at a young age–my parents were from Queens and the Bronx, and they always spoke about it with such adoration. As a young person in high school, I ached to get out of South Florida and find my way to the city they described in such loving detail. I began reading about it within the topics that interested me–music, art, fashion, performance, and more–and this beautiful world opened up, full of creative possibilities. I moved to New York in 2010 and have been writing about it and photographing it ever since for a host of publications.
This is the first book I remember reading where I learned you could write about yourself in a way that was glittery, funny, and immersive without being pretentious.
Gilman is a master of voice and narrative, plus the majority of the book–subtitled "Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless"–takes place in New York City. It’s a defining book of my life as a person and as a writer.
I’ve probably been a naturalist since I was a child. I vividly recall having conversations with snow-capped mountains at the age of five. The most alive moments of my childhood were spent outside, and in that sense, not much has changed. I no longer live in the foothills of the Himalayas. Instead, I live in the high desert in New Mexico. But nature is as strongly present in my life now as it was then—what is new is the awareness of how swiftly nature is changing. While I read widely, books rooted in the natural world have a way of making their way to me—and it’s a joy to recommend them to passionate readers.
I sank into the book’s languid mood—Merwin’s early peripatetic and poetic life sometimes seems to have no beginning and no end. There is a lot of wandering in the book, but Merwin’s sensibility gets you through to the last page.
You come away with a strong sense of what it means to engage with poetry, mythology, and nature.
America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel abroad, and few of us live in the towns or cities where we were born. It wasn't always so. "Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation," writes W. S. Merwin. Twenty–one, married and graduated from Princeton, the poet embarked on his first visit to Europe in 1948 when life…
I am an anthropologist and professor at Cornell University, where I taught 20-year-olds for thirty years. It was my job to explore the world, learn about it, and then educate others, underscoring the notion that all peoples and cultures are equally interesting and valuable. I started out, as a graduate student, watching macaque monkeys for my research, testing if their behavior might give us clues to the evolution of human behavior. But then I switched to science journalism for the popular audience and have, for decades, written for magazines, newspapers, and many books about the intersection of biology and culture on human thought and behavior.
As an anthropologist, I am always trying to enlighten Westerners that not everyone looks or acts as they do. So, I love this book with the usually great quality photos and accurate explanations by DK. Its point is not that you might have new kids in your classroom who don’t yet speak English and maybe eat food that you don’t recognize.
The point is that there are vast differences in the ways kids grow up around the world because there are so many different cultures and customs besides Western culture. In fact, Western culture only accounts for 1.2 billion people on the planet, while the remaining 6.8 live and act differently than we do. They dress, think, worship, play, and eat differently as well. And yet (also the point), we are all one species with so very much in common.
Read this, look and look at the photos by yourself,…
A favorite in classrooms, libraries, and homes, Children Just Like Me is a comprehensive view of international cultures, exploring diverse backgrounds from Argentina to New Zealand to China to Israel. With this brand new edition, children will learn about their peers around the world through engaging photographs and understandable text laid out in DK's distinctive style.
Highlighting 36 different countries, Children Just Like Me profiles 44 children and their daily lives. From rural farms to busy cities to riverboats, this celebration of children around the world shows the many ways children are different and the many ways they are the…
