83 Books Like Figures in a Landscape

While I hunted for spiritual wisdom, I also read great fiction, and sometimes, the two came together in one work of art. The protagonist of this book, whose title derives from the Upanishads, is Larry Darrell, an upper-crust young man slated for the perfect marriage and career. But WWI left him with PTSD and higher priorities.

His search for truth and meaning eventually takes him to an Indian ashram and transformation in the Himalayas. He returns to New York but resists the pull of privilege. He’ll drive a cab to pay the bills and frequent the libraries. I grew up the opposite of privileged, but Larry was nevertheless a role model. I wanted what he wanted; I was even a New York cabbie for a year. 

Maybe the best way to feel the road is through the eyes of someone deprived of his/her freedom. I’ve never been in a foreign prison, but I have sat in a few jails, and the prospects of long-term confinement always terrified me.

In the early 1930s, Henri Charriere was sentenced to life imprisonment in the brutal penal colony of French Guiana for a crime he didn’t commit.

In this memoir, I yearned for blue skies and open roads as I followed Henri’s desperate escape attempts and refusal to accept confinement. I’ve never wanted someone to get away so badly.

Give me an array of spicy Indian food, a handsome hero, and a good Bollywood movie, and I’m set for the evening. But this book transported me to a different period in Indian history. I teetered on a cliff's edge as the intrigue and drama of Lin’s tale unfolded. 

The story moves from one heart-stopping incident to another as it transitions through the gritty criminal underworld, congested streets, and overcrowded slums of India in the 1980s. It gripped me from the beginning and kept my earpods glued to my ears until the end. It was one of the most compelling biographies I’ve ever listened to.

Even after I became a traveler, I found myself pulled into Bruce Chatwin's writings because of his ability to make you feel more than just a location.

His stories about nomadic people and exotic places blend fact with fiction to give a fuller picture. I’ve read all of his work, but this book made me feel he was a kindred spirit.

One story in particular, Milk, captured the raw yearning to dive head-first into a foreign culture and made me a lifelong fan.

OK, so I was biased by Robin Williams in the movie, but here we have a robot that shows creativity! Its “Masters” tolerate this, then encourage it, and soon Andrew is selling his brand – created by a robot! I like the way a hobby turned into a business. He becomes part of the family, and as those around him age and die he becomes alone, something that runs through my mind sometimes late at night. Andrew decides that he wants to be human, and the barrier is his immortality.

When I was in graduate school, I watched the movie Awakenings with Robin Williams playing the role of Dr. Oliver Sacks. Having really enjoyed the movie, I went to a bookstore and picked this book up and could not put it down.

Sacks, more than any author I have read, captures the perspectives, struggles, triumphs, feelings, and diversity of people dealing with various psychological and neurological conditions.

At the time, studying psychology, I was reading books, listening to lectures, and watching videos about effective listening practices. Sacks made me understand seeing the person—observing and identifying subtleties, idiosyncrasies, and proclivities—was part of being an effective observer and that listening was only possible if we use our eyes as well. 

Elizabeth Taylor—not to be confused with the actress of the same name—has been called ‘the unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction.’ I wholeheartedly agree, and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is Taylor at her sublime best. It’s the tale of an elderly woman, wealthy but recently widowed, who’s faced with a choice: "Do I spend my last days in a care home—or check into a grand hotel?" She opts for the latter and finds herself among a group of fascinating characters, each as eccentric as she herself. 

Insightful about the sadness and loneliness of ageing, this book did not make me feel despondent about growing older. On the contrary, it showed me that love, happiness, and a sense of adventure can be ours at any age, if we’re willing to take chances and open our hearts to others.

Love, desire, falling too passionately for a married man, the world may be different from when this book was published in 1936, but the angst, the joy, the terror, and the hard choices remain the same.

An intelligent, capable, charismatic woman falls for a handsome, upper-class man, tantalizingly just out of her social and emotional reach. Will he leave his wife and the easy security of a stable relationship? Will love trump duty? Life-changing decisions reach a climax in the office of a back-street abortionist, where the snare of passion and its potentially destructive consequences are laid bare.

Written in lyrical and episodic prose, this is a truly timeless and memorable read.

I fell in love with designer Vicky Tiel’s 2011 memoir because of what I’ll call its “sex-positive” rompiness, which reads like a Swinging Sixties female version of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. (I stumbled upon it during research because it includes some of my characters, primarily Mia Fonssagrives, daughter of supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and stepdaughter of Irving Penn.) 

In the book, Tiel, who made her name designing catsuits, hotpants, and miniskirts, explains how she and Mia went from being design students in New York to “It” fashion designers in Paris pretty much overnight. They have many adventures, bed many men, and pick up practical life advice from models and movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor while growing up. It’s a total period piece but also, it hasn’t aged. With pictures and recipes!  

At last, a book about Elizabeth Taylor that takes her acting skills seriously, analyses her prodigious output, and is neither sensational nor trivial. I was entranced. Like Sybil Thorndike, Taylor’s career lasted 65 years. Kennedy puts it in context, refreshingly focusing on her professional rather than personal life.

Commenting on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he remarks: ‘At some point we have to reject the idea we’re watching the Burtons air their dirty laundry and embrace the possibility we’re watching them act. Brilliantly’. This readable, thoughtful book examines Taylor’s 56 movies and includes television, theatre, and special appearances such as a play reading in 2007, part of her remarkable fund-raising for AIDS.