100 Books Like On the Move

Kingston Heath’s captivating book Patina of Place investigates human relationships with working-class living spaces so powerfully. Sometimes I think parts of my book would have been better as a film for capturing what it feels like to move through a neighborhood and into a house. But Heath has managed to do it on static printed paper by combining historic photographs, first-hand accounts, childhood memories, and—most importantly, his gorgeous drawings!—to convey everyday experiences in New England’s three-decker housing units. What sets this book apart are Heath’s textured stories of women rearranging their furniture to make room for another family member; a child’s-eye view of his grandmother’s upholstered sofa; and one couple’s reflections on demographic change around their apartment of 50 years. 

No one writes more compellingly about the multi-sensory experiences of living in America’s past environments than Dell Upton. His book Another City deals with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century city—a century before the time period in my book—but he weaves together narratives of urban experience from America’s first decades as a republic to offer surprisingly contemporary commentary on city politics today. His chapter called “Smell of Danger,” to offer just one example, demonstrates that America’s urban elite mobilized their belief that disease was caused by “miasmas” rising up from foul-smelling waste to justify segregation along with class and racial lines. In the era of yellow fever and cholera, Upton argues that “the physical geography of disease became a human geography of fear.” 

OK this book is not about the United States but Rebecca Ginsburg’s incredibly nuanced investigation of the domestic landscape in apartheid South Africa should be required reading for anyone thinking about embodied experience and architecture. Houses built in the twentieth century for White families in suburban Johannesburg featured small rectangular rooms in the back yard for Black domestic workers. Using interviews, site visits, and compassionate storytelling, Ginsburg pieces together the daily rhythms for women who woke up outside, “came in the dark,” and learned the “tempo of kitchen life,” to borrow two of her provocative chapter titles. When people possessing such drastically different levels of social power share spaces built to remind them of their status at almost every turn, the visceral capacity of architecture becomes painfully clear.

Jessica Sewell’s book Women and the Everyday City makes us feel like we’re walking the streets of turn-of-the-century San Francisco. She combines traditional architectural history sources like floor plans, maps, and historic photographs with diaries written by women from varied class and ethnic backgrounds to piece together their experiences of the city. My favorite section uses advertisements and published memoirs to demonstrate that women without the economic means and cultural capital to be welcomed in downtown department stores or even some of the local grocery stores had much more complicated choices to make as they navigated everyday needs like finding transportation, buying food, and creating community. She compares the urban public imagination with how the city was actually built and experienced—just like theorist Henri Lefebvre suggests!

Lady Oracle was one of the novels I read in the several years after first having the vague notion that I might like to write a novel akin to Steppenwolf but that would be set in the approximate present day and have a female protagonist. As Lady Oracle’s main character is a writer who, after periodically reinventing herself, now fakes her own death, flees her intellectual, non-dancing husband, and holes up in an Italian village, I saw possible avenues for my own husband-leaving Kari. Would Kari flee to another country? Would she have secret lovers or a history of being fat? Would she, too, fake her own death? Kari ultimately didn’t follow many of Joan Foster’s paths, but she might have.

While this book was a bit slower-paced than I typically prefer, Anne Rice’s elegant style kept me turning pages. Reuben’s transformation isn’t a painful curse but is, as the title suggests, more like a superpower, a gift to be used for good. As the “Man Wolf” he becomes a popular and controversial media figure, a vigilante who literally devours attempted rapists, muggers, and other criminals. Meanwhile, in his human life, Reuben wrestles with Catholic guilt over the people he has killed. I like that thoughtful, spiritual angle, as well as the rich descriptions—and I also love a certain group of characters who come in later, but that’s a spoiler!

From the strange title to the premise of a futuristic television star who suddenly no one remembers, this book, is the essence of why PKD remains one of my favorite authors: futurism, psychology, and existential angst distilled into a mind-bending cocktail whose characters somehow still feel perfectly grounded and believable. 

Parrotfish is a very early and stunning YA about what it is for a pre-pubescent child to transition from a girl to a boy written by a woman who prepared for this by learning as much as possible from the experiences of a close transgender friend. Because of these efforts, the problems faced by such young people and their families are sensitively dealt with in this story of Gabe's heartwrenching journey which, at times, is also hilarious. Instructive as well as entertaining, it gently schools the reader in compassion and understanding for anyone who chooses to make such a difficult journey. This was my first in-depth view of the difficulties and yearnings of a transgender youth.

Kristina Gocheva-Newberry is a natural storyteller. Her narrators tend toward disarming authenticity. They tell it like it is, rather than censoring themselves out of politeness—a habit several of her characters see as problematic and uniquely American. What Isn’t Remembered features a plethora of characters of Russian and Armenian descent, both in the US and in Russia, and depicts their lives as citizens, immigrants, and the children of immigrants. Cultural tensions wind through the book and are tempered by startling moments of tenderness. At heart, the book is about messy relationships and the invisible histories that press and bind. What Isn’t Remembered is the perfect book to sink into on a quiet, rainy day. 

I’d be remiss if I shared books from Canada with you and didn’t point you towards some of the amazing writing coming out of Saskatoon, Treaty 6 Territory, and the Homeland of the Métis. Lisa-Bird Wilson's newest book is a beautiful novel about an Indigenous woman’s search for identity after her adoption. Living in Saskatchewan as Canada wrestles with truth and reconciliation, books like Probably Ruby give me a path to understanding and learning. The voice of this novel is searing and gorgeous, filled with heart and light, and I believe anyone who reads it will feel changed by the experience.