Books like Pigeon Feathers — picked by fans

When I was a teenager, I would have felt very much at home at the vintage record store in London where this story is set. (In fact, my hometown is named London, except my London is in Canada.) The quirky clerks who work there adore their boss, Rob Fleming, and spend their days attempting to outwit one another with music trivia and compiling funny and far-reaching Top Five lists.

As Rob negotiates a recent breakup, he must sort through his ex-girlfriend’s belongings and the emotional baggage he’s collected over the years. Though Rob is an adult, this still feels like a coming-of-age tale. I came away from the book resonating with the bittersweet awareness of what it means to become an adult with a list of careers if time and money were no object.

How could I not love this book? It’s set in the lovely (really!) city of Pittsburgh, and it’s about a lost weekend of literary hijinks and stoned debauchery.

The protagonist, Grady Tripp, is a young male writer making something of an ass of himself, but Chabon makes him so sympathetic, I can’t help rooting for him even as he digs himself in even deeper.

The dialogue crackles, the supporting characters are vivid and colorful, and the plot sweeps the reader up into a whirlwind of incredibly fun trouble.

The phrase “girl in a band” in the title got me to pick this book up off a table in the bookstore. I am the kind of guy who will pick up five or so books at a bookstore, take them over to the most comfortable spot I can find, and read the first few pages to see if I want to buy any of them.

The writer Kim Gordon was in an indie post-punk band called Sonic Youth, and I had just barely heard of them. After three years in Sonic Youth, Kim marries one of her fellow band members, and they stay married for 29 years. This book starts when the two of them take the stage together for the last time as they head for divorce and the band's breakup.

“They say when a marriage ends,” Gordon writes on the first pages, “that little things you never… show more.

The cover of this book has a stack of mix tapes on it and that’s what got me first: that the writer was going to explain love using the metaphor of a mix tape. As a person who has made hundreds of mix tapes myself—and later burned CDs and after that arranged playlists on Spotify—that the phrase mix tape was in the title was enough for me to pick up the book. Plus, I remember back in the 80s when I sat around waiting for a song to come on the radio so I could record it, and that was how I made my first tapes.

Each chapter in this book starts with an image of a mix tape with the songs listed on it. The writer uses the songs on the tape to write about his relationships. The first chapter ends with this line: “I’m going to be up… show more.

I love every one of Jane Austen’s novels. I have no favorites, so I can’t recommend only one. They are so funny, but they’re also full of life, love, sadness, loss, families, friends, disappointments, and surprises.

They all end in a marriage, but so do Shakespeare’s comedies–it’s just what happens in a comedy, along with many other things. I’ve read them all more times than I can count but I always find something new to love every time I reread any of them.

A year or so ago, I read a lot of factual books about India, so I was delighted to find this Golden Age cozy mystery set in a land I was falling in love with through books. This book took me back to a pre-partition India still under British rule, with a realistic glimpse of life under colonialism alongside a hefty–hopefully less realistic–dose of murder and mystery.

I adored how Harini Nagendra created a strong, independent female character who still feels genuine and believable in the time and place in which the book is set–a time when most women were stifled, submissive, and governed by their husbands–and how the observations of colonization feel true to life while remaining both sympathetic and observant to the Indian culture and ways of life.

The setting is vividly portrayed, and the sights and sounds of 1920s India are an absolute delight. The main characters… show more.

As a Francophile with a lifelong fascination with Jackie Kennedy, I felt that this book was written for me—and it delivered on every count.

Jacqueline in Paris follows a college-age Jackie through her junior year abroad in 1949, and the author gets both the woman and the moment exactly right. The Paris on these pages is beautiful but not romanticized. It is a city still visibly scarred by war, rebuilding itself with fragile dignity. That historical texture gives the story real weight.

What makes this a page-turner is how completely the author inhabits Jackie's inner life. You don't just observe her discovering Paris—you feel it alongside her, the enchantment and the disillusionment in equal measure. I finished it in two sittings and didn't want it to end.

I was totally engrossed in this story about brave, intelligent women in 15th-century China. Yuxian is trained to be a doctor by her grandmother within the constraints of traditional Chinese society. I was amazed by her ability to see past obstacles and challenges. I found myself holding my breath as she was confronted with unbelievable scenarios.

Like Yunxian herself, every woman in her circle, especially her lifelong friend Meiling, finds ways to rise to a higher plane within the limitations of arranged marriages and class prohibitions. Through friendship and purpose, this woman of the Ming dynasty left a remarkable legacy for generations to come.

I once asked Agnes Nixon, the creator of All My Children and other legendary daytime serials, how she became so good at plotting them. She replied, “I am a very good eavesdropper.”

I suspect O’Hara was, too. His 1959 epic (900 pages!) about a social-climbing, status-mad banker and the fashionable coterie of vipers he navigates to attain success at any cost is dipped in old-money style and privilege masking an ever-rotting core.

It’s packed with the one thing any great beach read needs: people keeping secrets who will do anything to protect them.    

This is a non-business book that I use for storytelling and while it was primarily written for writers, business owners can easily use the information to create better stories for audiences.

I am always looking to craft strong narratives, and this book helps me to think beyond typical master characters to make them more compelling. I will admit it can get a bit dull in sections, but I keep going back to it as a character-guide.