Books like Flaneuse — picked by fans

I remember the first time I realized I was in a city without addresses—Dubai, as it happened—and I was dumbfounded that such a place could exist, let alone succeed. In this book, Deirdre Mask unearths the hidden history of street addresses—a relatively recent invention from the Age of Enlightenment—and notes how many places ranging from rural West Virginia to hyper-modern Tokyo and Seoul do just fine without them.

In this wild ride from addressless ancient Rome to meticulously gridded and numbered Chicago, Mask explains how addresses have been used to keep track of citizens (for both good and ill) and how street names allow urban communities to define themselves by, say, changing Robert E. Lee Avenue into Martin Luther King Boulevard.

This book takes something so in-your-face yet so often ignored about New York and other 21st-century global metropolises—their polyglot nature—and makes it the focus. I know when I arrive in a major city, the cacophony of myriad languages stands out on that first subway, bus, and tram ride. But soon enough, it all becomes background noise.

By foregrounding this phenomenon, arguing that it’s peaking today as global migration swells, and telling the stories of several tenacious language communities in New York’s outer boroughs, Perlin reads NYC through the alphabets that cover its bodega awnings.

I’ve read more books than I care to remember that treat cities solely as markets, using an economic lens that reduces urbanites to mere maximizers of their own economic self-interest. This book does the opposite, and that’s why I found it so refreshing.

Urban observer and activist Jeremiah Moss chronicles New York City during the pandemic, a time when there’s literally nothing to buy—no stores to shop in, no restaurants to eat in, and no fashion trends to keep up with. With the market shut down, Moss finds that neighbors reconnect with neighbors on a human level, and a creative, festival-like atmosphere sweeps the city. This book helped me remember what’s great about living in a big city despite the many obvious cost-of-living drawbacks.

I love this book because it was so ahead of its time. Written during San Francisco’s first bout of hyper-gentrification—the 1990s dot-com boom—it is a chronicle of and tribute to the economically marginal but culturally central communities that got squeezed out: SRO denizens, Black activists, and queer refugees from Middle America.

In this 2001 book, a yet-to-be-discovered Solnit, in league with photographers Susan Schwartzenberg and Kate Joyce, records it all through the bulldozed and whitewashed spaces where these urbanites once lived. Most indelible is Joyce’s photo essay on San Francisco Starbucks outlets, each with a line below marking the storefront’s former life (“New Manila Restaurant, 1964-1994”; “Melody Video & Sound, 1936-1992”) showing how a flood of corporate money washed away so much that was unique in a great American city.

There are so many things I loved about Motherland, it’s hard to know where to begin. For starters, Elissa Altman is a brilliant writer and a great storyteller. Her portrayal of her dramatic, narcissistic mother created a flawed, human, larger-than-life character I will never forget. Elissa moves us through time effortlessly, at one moment vividly portraying herself as a child and in the next, seamlessly bringing in the voice of wisdom—her adult voice now—as we watch her struggle to make peace with the past. I deeply resonated with the love and hate, attachment and resentment that ricocheted between this unforgettable mother-daughter pair. I love books that grab me and don’t let me go. Motherland definitely had me hooked all the way from beginning to end. I hated leaving Altman’s world behind. I didn’t want the book to end.

Ellen Meloy just might be my favorite Utah writer. She’s smart and witty. She’s laugh-out-loud funny. She’s self-deprecatory and never preachy. She gets her natural history right. And her writing is gorgeous. She died far too young, at 58, in 2004, and I miss her. As she wanders outward across Bears Ears National Monument from her home in Bluff, Ellen’s musings apply equally to the slickrock spine of the Waterpocket Fold in Capitol Reef. So I was determined to include her in my own book. I chose an excerpt from The Anthropology of Turquoise—a terrific piece on sensual canyon country wildflowers, “slickrotica.” In her book, Ellen follows turquoise to the ends of the earth, but she always brings us back to her home territory in the canyons. 

First, because it’s incredibly funny. Geoff Dyer set out—he says—to write a sober, serious study of D. H. Lawrence, but life, travel arrangements, random people and his own inertia kept getting in the way. The story of his odyssey doesn’t just evoke all the things about writing that we’ve always suspected (that it’s hard; that it’s easy; that we often wonder why on earth we do it; that we never question that we want to do it). It also, by stealth, evokes and explains an amazing amount about Lawrence, and why he’s a writer that so many people love—or hate—so passionately. 

This story made me want to stand up and cheer.

I loved how it brought to life one of my favorite late nineteenth-century female artists—Suzanne Valadon. I also loved how the book wove her tale with that of a contemporary woman, motivated by Suzanne’s bold art and life.

I rooted for both women as they struggled for personal and professional fulfillment, feeling disheartened by their frustrations and jubilant over their victories, such as Suzanne’s acceptance into the Académie des Beaux-Arts. It thrilled me how she overcame the many societal barriers in her path and won over the Académie with her powerfully expressive art.  

This book was on the bedside table at a friend’s house where I was staying. I picked it up, started it, and stayed up much later than I had planned!

I was so engaged with the idea of an eighteenth-century woman who began making these botanical paper cut-outs and achieved attention for her work in late life, and I was drawn along by Peacock’s clear, lyrical prose and how she wove in aspects of her own life as a poet.

I loved Mary Delaney’s creativity, spirit, and grit, and she now feels to me like a friend from 250 years ago. 

This is such a fun read―a fictionalised account of the real-life husband and wife’s experience of walking the Camino de Santiago. I love how the two protagonists, who start as strangers, take turns to tell their stories, especially the hilarity in the ‘he said–she said’ of their relationship―they really are opposites but both bring out something remarkable in the other. Romantic in a very real way.