67 Books Like The Dream Merchants

I really enjoyed reading this book on the development of Australian film culture and history from the silent cinema to the talkies. Diane Collins looks at unexamined areas of this history, including audiences, marketing, and distribution, and even has a chapter about how picture palaces used to have live music at every screening.

This is an engagingly written account that provides important context for any consideration of Australian cinema history. 

Chion’s book is seminal in the study of film sound (not just music). He challenges the orthodoxy of favoring the visual aspects of film when we talk about it, arguing that we need to consider the sound of a film as well as its images.

He says that we don’t just watch films; we “audio-view” them. Chion draws his examples from an extraordinarily wide range of films. On the same page he might go from Godard to Indiana Jones to Singin’ in the Rain.

He doesn’t judge: if a popular action film is the best example for a point about sound-image relationships, he uses it. Chion introduces a lot of new terminology, but it is all carefully explained and illustrated with examples.

To me, this book is a classic in the realm of personal finance for a reason. It is the clearest explanation of how money is not actually about money; if you’re actually living by your values and seeking a life that makes you feel truly fulfilled, the point of working is to earn enough money to live on and take care of your future with, while being able to spend the majority of your time doing what you actually enjoy.

I love that this book is centered around finding a purpose without tying that purpose to how you earn a living. It also gives really clear suggestions for long-term investing, and I was happy to see that updated for our current times in the newest edition. 

Impecunious Brits George and his friend Mark decide to search for the ‘real’ America, crossing the continent from east to west in a clapped-out old car. 

At every point, amid clouds of smoke, impending mechanical Armageddon, and brushes with the law, it seems unlikely that they’ll make it. One night, in the middle of nowhere, when ominous sounds emanating from the engine, George pleads, “Not tonight, Josephine…!”

The author has a humorous conversational style and paints an unforgettable portrait of the unlikely places he passed through. I thoroughly enjoyed this bump-start, clunk, and judder across the States with the frustrating but lovable Josephine!

The main mystery in this book is not a mystery to the reader. It’s a mystery to the main character, Stevie. I love this twist.

I don’t think I’ve ever read another book where the protagonist is trying to uncover their own past, and the reader knows what answers she’ll find if she succeeds. (Though there are a few surprises that the reader isn’t privy to until Stevie unearths them.) The heart of this story is its romance, which is beautiful, heartwarming, and heartbreaking all at once.

I loved everything about this book, honestly. I read it in two days, and the only reason I didn’t read it in one sitting is because I have a small child and that precludes sequestering yourself in a room to finish a book. 

This is a memoir about being a writer—and failing. With scholarly rigor and tenderhearted sympathy, Specktor excavates the lives of artists forgotten (Carol Eastman, Eleanor Perry), underappreciated (Thomas McGuane, Hal Ashby), and notorious (Warren Zevon, Michael Cimino), while always circling back to his own benighted Hollywood upbringing, complete with a lovely tribute to his mother, a failed screenwriter. This is an angry, sad, but always somehow joyful book about not hitting it big, and I've never read anything quite like it.

This novel explores the mysteries of the heart, much as Jane Austen did. The book’s chapters correspond with Austen’s six novels and the six meetings of the book club focused on her. As five women of various ages and one man discuss each Austen novel, their witty sparring reveals the complexity of their own searches for love and meaning. By studying Austen’s novels, the book club members, all of them at a crossroads, understand themselves better and forge a path forward. Having read and re-read Austen for decades, I love this book for showing how Jane Austen speaks to us two centuries after she died.

Yeah, I know, naming Jack Reacher as one of the badasses of crime fiction is the equivalent of a six-inch putt. A gimme. Child has taken a totally implausible premise—a six-foot-five former Army MP wandering around the United States and finding trouble with nothing but an ATM card in his pocket—and created one of the best characters in suspense literature. When Reacher is on the hunt, the results are never in doubt, which is why we love him. He’s the fullback coming through the line, time and time again, and no one can stop him. One reviewer of Child’s books said that Reacher is never the underdog. That’s a perfect description.

Highly-acclaimed and inspirational, Elaine tells her personal story and her personal struggles and self-reflection as a Black woman.

She goes into great detail about what she could have done differently – and she’s only in her 30s. She is the first Black person to be named Editor-in-Chief at Teen Vogue at the tender age of 29.

This one will make you think, better understand the Black point of view and lift you up.

When I really started writing, I sought out books with punchy prose that connected to some of my experiences.

Don Lee’s Yellow was one of the few books of short stories I found that did that. What’s cool about the title story “Yellow” is that it talks about an Asian guy who learns to box who is known to be sexy, and grapples with issues of courage.

Growing up as a young Asian guy, I was never handed a story about an Asian guy struggling to be a man like all other guys growing up in America. Reading this collection changed that and changed my own perceptions of what stories are possible when you’re coming to age as an Asian in America.