100 Books Like The Moth

I haven’t read this book for over a decade, but there are still stories I know by heart and tell friends. When food critic Ruth Reichl boards a plane to take the job as the New York Times food critic, the woman sitting next to her recognizes her.

There’s a picture of Ruth in the kitchen of the restaurant where she works, and the first person to spot her come in gets a $500 spot bonus. Realizing she’ll never get an honest experience as herself, Ruth works with a costume and hair and make-up team to create a series of characters so she can dine at New York’s finest restaurants incognito.

This book is so much fun to read and a great example of how to tell just part of your story, in this case, about two year’s worth, and save the rest of your life for other books.

This is an incredibly intimate and thought-provoking book that marries the story of the author’s relationship and pregnancy with her partner, along with history, philosophy, and even critical theory. What makes the book so fascinating is how quickly she’s able to shift between these different modes of writing.

So, one minute, she’s talking about being a parent, and in the next paragraph, she’s revisiting how the philosophical approach to child-rearing evolved over the 20th century. It really shook me out of thinking a memoir had to be approached one way or be just one thing. 

Believe it or not, this actually is a book about Nina Simone’s gum and the lengths to which the author goes to protect and memorialize a piece she chewed during a concert she played, and he saved in a napkin. There is a lot of explanation of process and documentation, so it feels like an art book meets a how-to manual.

But it’s also a memoir of sorts about the author’s life as a musician playing with Nick Cave and his own band, the Dirty Three. I love how this book looks and feels and manages to be several different genres at once. In fact, the moment I finished it, I went out and bought several copies to give as gifts. 

Most music biographies read like a biography, but this one feels as visceral and memorable as a James Brown show. James McBridge is best known for his National Book Award-winning novels, but he’s equally adept at nonfiction.

He’s only written one music biography, but this is one of the most thoughtful books I’ve ever read. Instead of starting at the beginning of James Brown’s life, he starts by explaining why a chronological biography would never do the artist justice. The result is a series of stories about the musician and a refreshing take on the genre. 

Londoner Tina Brown alights in New York City and falls fast and hard for power-playing, the machinations of billionaires and politicos, the trappings of glamour and wealth and the city itself, whose rococo sensibility she brings to Vanity Fair, a magazine she rescues from irrelevance and turns into a monthly-must read. Brown generated national headlines with her high-low sensibility and indelible cover images (a naked and pregnant Demi Moore scandalized middle America, much to Brown’s delight). She also writes about her guilt as a working mother, the thrill of matching the right journalist to the right story, and her trepidation in fighting for the salary she knew she deserved. A witty and colorful document of the last moment magazines really mattered.

If you ask me or anyone else in the punk scene in 80s/90s New York, St. Mark’s Place—which was the epicenter of cool in our day—is a sad parody of itself now, touristy and dull. Until I read this book, I assumed its heyday began and ended with us, with Trash and Vaudeville and Manic Panic, with drinking 40-ounce beers on stoops.

Well, it turns out every generation that’s ever had a heyday on this famous, radical, anarchic block—whether as a gangster or dancing at Andy Warhol’s notorious Electric Circus parties—thought theirs was the only era that mattered. Calhoun chronicles hundreds of years of this exact attitude, which is fascinating and gives me some perspective.

This book is in a similar vein as Oona finds herself time jumping within her own life, suddenly living it out of sequence as she jumps to a different period in time with each birthday, forcing her to look within and realize what is important and worth holding on to and worth fighting for. I am a sucker for books where characters get the opportunity to experience alternate versions of their personal realities, and I could not put this one down. I’m all about my characters understanding that the choices they make create their ultimate realities. The ultimate messages about the importance of love and family and the choices we make really resonated with me.

A brilliant collection of horror stories, my favourite being Sometimes They Come Back.

I recommend this ghostly tale for its depiction of the fine line between the spirit realm and the world we live in. The narrative of earth-bound ghosts and their determination to exact revenge on the living bringing forth a fierce battle between good and evil. The latter played on my mind as I empathised with the main character’s psychological struggle with recapitulated past events, leaving those around him to question his sanity.

King’s unapologetically devoted to unrefined pop culture, and I’m right there with her. I completely relate to the magnetic pull of lowbrow reality shows like Jersey Shore. I sit down to an episode of Real Housewives and get up five hours later with a full bladder, cheese-dusted fingers, and no idea how so much time has passed.

I’m sometimes embarrassed to admit my love of what others may not find sophisticated, but King’s essays make me proud to be in such great company, and I feel nothing less than joy about it. 

This book is packed with the history of Chinese warrior heroines and spies. From Hua Mulan to Soong Ching-ling, the book resonates with connections across the centuries, as well as modern differences.

All too often the fate of these brave and outstanding women was to die for their cause, a theme that I think is so important for many heroines in history. Edwards is adept at identifying how her heroines challenge and defy their position in society. She also reveals the gendered position that heroines occupy as fighters, and in particular, the challenge that it poses to women’s transnational traditional place as gendered feminine carers and life-givers.