100 Books Like The Beauty of Living Twice

Charlie Brown, Lucy, and “the gang” have fascinated me since I sat at the family table, fighting with my siblings for sections of the newspaper. My copy of this book is copiously highlighted because there was so much to learn about the artist’s life and technique. The opening pages reeled me in when the writer told of Schulz witnessing his mother’s excruciatingly painful death from cancer. I know cartoons have wisdom that goes beyond kids’ comprehension. This book shows how and why Schulz used all the elements of his life to write this strip. Peanuts and the comics of my childhood are why I use graphic novels like Maus in my classrooms. They have truths that hit on many levels.

I love it as a tale of heroism, youthful idealism, success, defeat, death over and over. I first read the final chapter of this book in an excerpt after which I ordered it immediately. I had been curious about the real story behind this highly intelligent icon. Disturbing and illuminating, this book shows how driven, outright murderous in the name of revolution, Che was and how this catapulted Fidel and the Cuban revolutionaries to victory over Fulgencio Batista. I had such empathy for Che as I read through his life that I couldn’t reread the final chapter about his brutal prolonged death.

I was a Black Panther and worked with Eldridge editing the Black Panther Party newspaper in 1967-1968 in San Francisco. I’ve known Marvin X since I was a teenager. He gives an up close, insider’s look at the Black Power movement, naming names and telling truths that are insightful and uncomfortable. Cleaver left the U.S., lived in exile and returned with a sharp turn to the right and an embrace of Christianity; Marvin X was his buddy at several key points on this pariah’s path. This memoir captures him (and Marvin) fighting to survive the post-revolutionary era and his demons.

This coming-of-age story is set in Depression-era South Carolina. My relatives in Oklahoma from that era also were driven out of the South by racism, segregation, and the threat of death. Adam, who was my mentor and colleague at Laney College in Oakland, California, was a young Black male facing lynching. He was too intelligent to survive in the South. He reminds me of my father, a Tuskegee airman who fought the good fight and left the South for good also. 

First of all, Nia Vardalos is just hilarious. She could write an Ikea assembly brochure and it would probably be side-splitting. But in the book, she tells about being a rising star (a great story on its own) who had it all – except a baby. After a grueling battle with infertility, she eventually came around to the idea of adoption, and started to learn more about the fost-adopt process of taking an older child who is unlikely to reunite with their original family. With great heart, she tells the roller-coaster story of bringing a 3-year-old with attachment challenges into her life—and the inevitable universality of motherhood. “Nothing prepared me for the life I would feel for my child. Nothing prepared me for how quickly it happened for me. And here’s what I just figure out now: no one is ever prepared. In a way, we’re all instant moms.” She’s… show more.

This book is a tour-de-force—a beautifully written story about Marian Graves, an Amelia Earhart-type adventurer during the prohibition era, and Hadley Baxter, the actress set to play her in a movie more than half a century later.

I really enjoyed how the two stories are in conversation with each other; both women determined to chart their own courses in very different eras and what they learn about themselves in the process. I was also struck by the intense obligation the actress feels to get this character right and the personal toll it takes as she discovers how similar their emotional lives may have been.

This book provided a true escape just when I needed it most, and I could have kept reading long after I turned the final page.

This book includes so many of my favorite things: an inn on the coast of Italy, a young innkeeper with outsized dreams, movie stars, an almost-romance, and a chance for rekindled love.

I clung to every page as the story moved back and forth from the 1960s to the present day, from the set of Cleopatra in Rome to Hollywood backlots. This book is like a vacation full of interesting people you want to know better, the kind of vacation you never want to end.

I read this novel just as I was starting to write in earnest, and before I fully understood how hard it is to pull off a feat of complex storytelling as elegantly as Walter does in this novel. It’s a marvel.

This novel is a blend of fact and fiction and informed speculation, centered on the relationship between two mammoth film stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age: Loretta Young and Clark Gable. While the deeper truths of their relationship during the filming of Call of the Wild might be disputed, what is certain is that they produced a daughter whose identity was kept secret—even from her father. Loretta is sympathetically portrayed, often from the perspective of an Italian nun (the author’s creation). A whole galaxy of film celebrities passes through the pages of this book, which for fans of 20th century cinema, is a plus. One touching and poignant aspect of the story, for me, is the danger Loretta’s beloved child poses to her reputation and career.

A novel about Marlene Dietrich held a natural attraction for me, as Dietrich was one of Dolores del Río’s close friends in Hollywood. Gortner paints a vivid picture of decadence in pre-War Berlin, where Dietrich finds work in music halls. There, she meets Joseph von Sternberg, who casts her as the lead of The Blue Angel, the film that launches her career. As antisemitism grows in Germany, von Sternberg, who is Jewish, leaves for Hollywood, and Dietrich follows him. Paramount Pictures finds in her the answer to MGM’s sexy Swedish star, Greta Garbo, and casts her in one hit after the other. When Hitler approaches her to make propaganda films for the Nazis, Dietrich courageously rebuffs him, opting instead to become an American citizen and entertain Allied troops. 

This murder mystery novel is one that really stayed with me. It has a noir quality that fits the 1940s era, and a realistic depiction of the difficulties of employment at various levels in Hollywood. Suspicion falls on the protagonist when her roommate turns up dead on the set of a Barbara Stanwyck film, and through the course of the novel various scandals, mysteries, and cover-ups collide. Though the main character isn’t herself a star, far from it, she offers a particular perspective on the stars she knows and the industry as a whole. Stanwyck is one of Hollywood’s great talents and true survivors, as forceful on the page and as desperate to salvage her personal life as any of her movie characters.