Here are 100 books that The Secret Life of a Cemetery fans have personally recommended if you like
The Secret Life of a Cemetery.
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As author and editor of six books about cemeteries, I have visited gravesites all around the world, from the world-famous to little family burial grounds to tombs tucked inside churches. On my travels, I’ve collected more than 300 books about cemeteries. My absolute favorites are the memoirs in which people—who are as passionate about cemeteries as I am—take me along on their graveyard adventures. I want to know what cemeteries mean to people, whether they’re travelers like me, or grew up in cemeteries, or worked in them, or are fiercely curious about the inequities that follow us to the grave. So many cemeteries, so little time!
She has been traveling around and around the globe. At every port of call, she skips the souvenir stands and heads for the cemeteries. Because she's a member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, she can often link up with local taphophiles for personalized burial ground tours. Reading her adventures is so much fun!
There aren't exactly 80 graves in this book, but Tui does explore from Texas to Egypt, from Singapore to Portugal, and from Petra to Transylvania. She even leads tours of cemeteries in Italy each summer. She's inspired me to make plans to hit the road. There are so many cemeteries yet for me to see.
Around the World in 80 Graves shows readers that some of the best roadside attractions aren’t neon billboards or giant balls of twine—they’re historic cemeteries.Join author Tui Snider on a journey through unusual, unforgettable burial grounds—from Texas to Transylvania, the jungles of Malaysia to the South Pacific, the ancient tombs of Egypt, and even the Arctic Circle.Along the way, she dodges a would-be kidnapper, meets the grieving parents of a serial killer’s victim, encounters endangered butterflies and venomous snakes, visits a mysterious space alien grave in Texas, and even gets mistaken for a ghost.With her signature blend of humor, curiosity,…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
As author and editor of six books about cemeteries, I have visited gravesites all around the world, from the world-famous to little family burial grounds to tombs tucked inside churches. On my travels, I’ve collected more than 300 books about cemeteries. My absolute favorites are the memoirs in which people—who are as passionate about cemeteries as I am—take me along on their graveyard adventures. I want to know what cemeteries mean to people, whether they’re travelers like me, or grew up in cemeteries, or worked in them, or are fiercely curious about the inequities that follow us to the grave. So many cemeteries, so little time!
I grew up down the road from the small-town cemetery where my family was buried.
In contrast, Rachael Hanel's father was a small-town cemetery caretaker. As a child, she helped him collect the silk flowers so he could mow around gravestones. Rachael studied other people's grief and thought she was comfortable with it. Then her father suddenly died of cancer, and her perfect family disintegrated.
Hanel's Midwestern distrust of emotions is very familiar to me. Rereading this book—before and after my own father's death—completely altered the way it affected me. Be prepared if your own grief is still fresh.
Rachael Hanel's name was inscribed on a gravestone when she was eleven years old. Yet this wasn't at all unusual in her world: her father was a gravedigger in the small Minnesota town of Waseca, and death was her family's business. Her parents were forty-two years old and in good health when they erected their gravestone-Rachael's name was simply a branch on the sprawling family tree etched on the back of the stone. As she puts it: I grew up in cemeteries.
And you don't grow up in cemeteries-surrounded by headstones and stories, questions, curiosity-without becoming an adept and sensitive…
As author and editor of six books about cemeteries, I have visited gravesites all around the world, from the world-famous to little family burial grounds to tombs tucked inside churches. On my travels, I’ve collected more than 300 books about cemeteries. My absolute favorites are the memoirs in which people—who are as passionate about cemeteries as I am—take me along on their graveyard adventures. I want to know what cemeteries mean to people, whether they’re travelers like me, or grew up in cemeteries, or worked in them, or are fiercely curious about the inequities that follow us to the grave. So many cemeteries, so little time!
I learned a lot reading her memoir, from the word for a sexual attraction to statues (agalmatophilia) to the fact that it was Diego Rivera who named Catrina, the elegant female skeleton in the tight dress.
Enriquez visited a lot of cemeteries that I've only read about and others that I've never heard of, all the while writing passionately about indigenous erasure in colonial cemeteries, the recovery of the bodies of Argentina’s Disappeared, and the history and traditions of all the countries she visits. I was fascinated to explore the perspective of a cemetery tourist who isn't American or European.
In Somebody is Walking on Your Grave, Mariana Enriquez blends journalistic rigour and her fascination with the macabre as we encounter famous graveyards steeped in history, such as Montparnasse in Paris, Highgate in London, and the Jewish cemetery in Prague, as well as more remote, decrepit, hidden, or secretly beautiful ones. These pages are full of the graves of famous figures - Elvis in Memphis, Karl Marx in London - mournful sculptures, traces of voodoo, catacombs, skeletons and an array of legends and stories. Mariana's personal journey weaves through haunting narratives, transforming burial grounds into spaces of reflection, obsession, and…
AcClaim is a dark, high-society romance about Beatrix Winslow-Hale, a successful romance author who believes desire can be negotiated and controlled—until enigmatic billionaire Dorian Wolker crosses the line between consensual surrender and violation. Publicly humiliated and emotionally shattered, Beatrix turns to Manon de Rochemaure, her fiercely loyal best friend and…
As author and editor of six books about cemeteries, I have visited gravesites all around the world, from the world-famous to little family burial grounds to tombs tucked inside churches. On my travels, I’ve collected more than 300 books about cemeteries. My absolute favorites are the memoirs in which people—who are as passionate about cemeteries as I am—take me along on their graveyard adventures. I want to know what cemeteries mean to people, whether they’re travelers like me, or grew up in cemeteries, or worked in them, or are fiercely curious about the inequities that follow us to the grave. So many cemeteries, so little time!
When one unaffordable hospital stay could unhouse any of us, this cemetery memoir raises issues I’d never considered.
By volunteering with homeless organizations and visiting street hospices, Amy Shea delves into the myriad ways cities dispose of their poor. She struggles with her curiosity about her subjects and her right (and privilege) to tell their stories. That aspect of the book intrigued me.
Originally, I felt as if she was centering herself in the narrative, but at some point, I found it liberating, giving her readers (and myself) permission to ask questions and search for ways to help, even if the subjects were unfamiliar or distant to ourselves.
Her memoir was the reverse of othering: inviting us to participate in solutions still being discovered.
Death is the great equalizer, but not all deaths are created equal. In recent years, there has been an increased interest and advocacy concerning end-of-life and after-death care. An increasing number of individuals and organizations from health care to the funeral and death care industries are working to promote and encourage people to consider their end-of-life wishes. Yet, there are limits to who these efforts reach and who can access such resources. These conversations come from a place of good intentions, but also from a place of privilege.
Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins,…
I write fictional, contemporary gay mysteries, but I prefer to read facts and I enjoy the research that accompanies my storytelling. Industrial history and geology fascinate me, so it isn’t any wonder that I set my tales in the Durham hills of northeast England. As some of my videos in the link show, there are many abandoned quarries, lead and coal mines in the area. I can become emotional when I think about the socio-political history of mining and quarrying. My latest tale reflects my interest in quarrying and my five recommendations reflect a passion that has its roots in the UK’s once thriving, now defunct, coal industry.
This final choice reprises the idea that a miner’s life was hard, though that isn’t the focus of the story. The plot sounds unpromising, but I loved Pure! Set in the time of Louis XVI, a provincial engineer is tasked with demolishing a Parisian church and relocating the bones of its graveyard. He employs a motley crew of coal miners to carry out the work as he knows they’ll have the necessary strength, stamina, and skill. One little episode that featured them stayed with me. The engineer stands on a platform to address the miners but years of crouching in narrow coal seams have bent and misshapen them so much that they can’t stand straight enough to see him. He was shocked. I wasn’t.
A year of bones, of grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests.
A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love...
A year unlike any other he has lived.
Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it.
At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a…
Until I did my own animal-accompanied journey with Mollie and Peggy in 1984, my only association with animals on the trail was inadvertently with a collection of cockroaches in my backpack. It was when Bradt decided to add to their anthologies with a collection of stories about travelling with animals in 2018, Beastly Journeys, that I was able to read a wide variety of books on the topic. A delightful exercise!
I discovered this fascinating and extraordinary story when I was researching tales about travelling with animals for Beastly Journeys. Unlike the other four books in my list, this one has the animal as the central character. And what an animal! Zarafa was captured as a calf in what is now Ethiopia in a plan to cement relationships between the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt and Charles V of France. The year was 1826 and a giraffe had never before been seen in France. Zarafa did the first part of her journey strapped to the back on a camel, and then – surely more comfortably – down the Nile and across the Mediterranean on a brigantine.
A hole was cut in the deck which allowed Zarafa to travel with her body in the hold, while her head and neck enjoyed the human company on deck. From Marseille she was walked, with…
In October 1826, a ship arrived at Marseille carrying the first giraffe ever seen in France. A royal offering from Muhammad Ali, Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, to King Charles X, she had already traveled 2,000 miles down the Nile to Alexandria, from where she had sailed across the Mediterranean standing in the hold, her long neck and head protruding through a hole cut in the deck. In the spring of 1827, after wintering in Marseille, she was carefully walked 550 miles to Paris to the delight of thousands of onlookers.
The viceroy's tribute was politically motivated: He commanded the Turkish…
I have a passion for critical theory since I was intrigued by the heretical idea, which originates in Marx’s Capital, that what limits our freedom and democracy is not the apparent personified power held by the state and politicians. On the contrary, real power lies in the fact that, in capitalism, labour that must succumb to the standards of time is money, that runs through each one of us. So, to an extent, we all are forced to become slaves to the rationale of capital. In this book, I analyse this idea to the philosophers mentioned. This perspective is far away from their mainstream reading and casts a completely different light on their philosophy.
For my study, Benjamin succeeds in showing how the dominant social forms in each capitalist society can be debunked and that the official narrative that perpetuates the logic that supports the current system can be seriously questioned.
Benjamin’s goal was not to build another totality, another theoretical system that would bring certainty and stability to those who want to change the world radically towards socialism.
Rather, his philosophy encourages us to continue fighting to open the cracks in capitalism, to create multiple ruptures in the capitalist system, even though we do not have all the answers and are aware that our struggle will have an uncertain result.
This is how we redeem and vindicate past generations who spilled their blood for another world. This is how we redeem Benjamin himself, who dedicated his life's work to this purpose.
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them…
I have always been fascinated by France and things French. In graduate school, no women’s history was on our required reading lists. As a young woman, though, entering a professional field in which women were few on the ground, much less studied, I became an avid reader of biographies of achieving women – partly to learn how they were able to surmount (or not) the obstacles that confronted them in a male-dominated world. The five stellar biographies of French women I present here are products of the newer work in retrieving women’s histories. They are deeply researched and engagingly written. They confirm the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.”
This splendid biography traces the life and times of the Marquise Du Châtelet, born in Paris in December 1706, who became one of the most erudite women of her époque. For fifteen years she was the companion to Voltaire, the best-known of the French philosophes. She mastered calculus and translated Newton’s Principia, in addition to carrying on an active social life and raising several children. She died at the age of 42, following the birth of a daughter conceived with another lover. The author explains her subject’s life course as “from a life of frivolity to a life of the mind.” It’s a great read.
Documents the life of the French Enlightenment-era intellectual, from her aristocratic youth and controversial choice to become the mistress of Voltaire to her mathematical and scientific achievements and work as a translator of Newton.
I left home in Melbourne to spend a year travelling in Asia when I was in my mid-twenties. I ended up living abroad for a decade in London, Bangladesh, and Myanmar before returning to Sydney in 2016. My first book is about the four years I lived in Myanmar and I’m currently writing my second, which is about the year I spent backpacking from Cambodia to Pakistan. My third book will be about the three years I worked as a journalist in Bangladesh. My plan is to write a ‘trilogy’ of memoirs. Living abroad has enriched my life and travel memoirs are one of my favourite genres, both as a reader and a writer.
What’s not to love about a book set in Paris about a journalist who falls in love with a Frenchman? This book is a delight. Turnbull writes beautifully, and with modesty and humour about making every faux pas imaginable in Paris. It’s light and insightful at the time. The pages practically turned themselves.
Almost French takes readers on a tour fraught with culture clashes but rife with insight and deadpan humour - a charming true story of what happens when a strong-willed Aussie girl meets a very French Frenchman.
Backpacking around Europe, twenty-something Sarah Turnbull meets Frederic and impulsively accepts his invitation to visit him for a week in Paris. Eight years later, she is still there - and married to him. The feisty journalist swaps vegemite for vichyssoise and all things French, but commits the fatal errors of bowling up to strangers at classy receptions, helping herself to champagne, laughing too loudly…
Every picture tells a story, but it’s not always the one we expect or remember. Christmas Actually is a festive drama about family and forgiveness and a snapshot of modern family life, addressing Instagram to motherhood and everything in between.
Why Christmas? My publisher wanted my new novel to have…
I’m American but I’ve been a Francophile for ages. I didn’t get a chance to visit France until well into adulthood. So much history lives in France and it’s been my joy to illuminate it for readers who tell me they feel transported. There is no higher compliment, in my mind. I’ve been writing novels for thirty years, set in the Rocky Mountains, America’s heartland, and the scenic villages of France. The Bennett Sisters Mysteries are now up 18 books in the series, featuring settings from Paris to Champagne to the Dordogne, with more in the works. I must go back to France to research, oui?
I love weaving history into my mysteries so I was drawn to this dark tale of Paris in the Belle Époque. An English girl goes to Paris to study art but, desperately poor, throws her fate into the hands of some shady characters. The atmosphere and scene-setting of Paris during a terrible rainy winter are unforgettable.
Extra material includes a deleted scene and a Q&A with Imogen Robertson
Maud Heighton came to Lafond's famous Academy to paint, and to flee the constraints of her small English town. It took all her courage to escape, but Paris eats money. While her fellow students enjoy the dazzling joys of the Belle Epoque, Maud slips into poverty. Quietly starving, and dreading another cold Paris winter, Maud takes a job as companion to young, beautiful Sylvie Morel. But Sylvie has a secret: an addiction to opium. As Maud is drawn into the Morels' world of elegant luxury, their secrets become…
