Here are 100 books that Trick Mirror fans have personally recommended if you like
Trick Mirror.
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I am an LA-based author, sociologist, and cultural and political theorist who writes from beyond the surface. A seer since childhood, I have always challenged the official story (even when it got me in trouble), guided by my intuition and a refusal to accept injustice as inevitable. My writing is fueled by a deep curiosity to unravel society’s darkest puzzles—systems of control, violence, collective amnesia—and to imagine what could exist beyond them. Through storytelling, I invite readers to question what they’ve been taught and to see the world not only as it appears, but as it truly is, and reimagine what it could be.
Urgency is a lie. We all need a reminder to sit down and do nothing and this book is the one to remind you. One of the main points is that our attention is sacred, and we live in a fast world vying for it. Refusing to participate is one of the highest acts of liberation, especially when practiced in community with others who to believe in the art of “doing nothing.”
I love the permission this book gives. Often, we need permission to sit down because nothing is as urgent as we are told it is.
This book is great for those who constantly fill their calendars. Something beautiful happens when we refuse and sit with our own thoughts: we come to know our own minds.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library
"A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review
One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
As someone who has endured great challenges in life, I am fascinated by stories about overcoming obstacles and facing difficult challenges. We do not choose where we are born or to what circumstances ,but we do have the opportunity to rise above those challenges that we face on a daily basis. The human spirit and the desire for a better future is a universal gift we all share.
I don’t think Garcia Marquez needs a review or introduction. Reading any of his books is a pleasure, with easy and delightful writing and striking sentences.
These sentences often describe things or people in a way that feels natural and perfectly captured. For instance, he describes the world as so new that many things lack names. His eloquent descriptions, like that of ice, create vivid images. The characters are relatable, and you feel a happy exhaustion after finishing the book, reminiscent of great works like Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
Those who find the stories too unbelievable should learn about Colombian history, as they provide real context. I simply love the book!
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
I’m a storyteller. I’ve told stories through journalism, theater, film, and comics. When I was the editor of a film magazine, Scenario: “The Magazine of the Art of Screenwriting” I interviewed filmmakers about the craft of telling a great story. As a journalist, I love original sources and voices, for the way they tell a personal version of history. They say history is told by the winners. I prefer the reverse angle—history told, not by the “losers” but by true, strong, authentic voices. I somehow want to read, reveal, recommend, and illuminate marginalized voices.
This book is quietly hilarious. I loved being “inside” Patricia Lockwood’s mind. As a fellow lapsed Catholic, I resonated with her upbringing and living in the strange shadow of religion. Lockwood weaves a contradictory coming-of-age story with profound wit and lyricism.
She also explores the complexities of what she calls “The Portal”—the internet of things that boggle the mind even as they bring solace. I loved how Lockwood used “the portal” to understand her conservative upbringing and eventually find her own irreverent path in the world.
The book led me to follow her online presence too, and helped me learn new ways to “be” online. As Lockwood writes in Priestdaddy: “Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?”
'Glorious' Sunday Times 'Laugh-out-loud funny' The Times 'Extraordinary' Observer 'Exceptional' Telegraph 'Electric' New York Times 'Snort-out-loud' Financial Times 'Dazzling' Guardian 'Do yourself a favour and read this memoir!' BookPage
The childhood of Patricia Lockwood, the poet dubbed' The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas' by The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange riddles and warnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing,…
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 a writer and editor, I spend a lot of time thinking about what prose—especially first-person nonfiction, which is mostly what I edit—does, and how it sets out to accomplish its project. Across forms, I tend to think humor is largely underused! No matter how serious the subject, there’s always a place for it to sharpen the critique. My book engages with topics like systemic discrimination and inequity, but throughout, I always stay attuned to the comic absurdity of my subject—both as a way to give more pleasure to the reader, and as a way to cut to the heart of what I want to express.
I love the boldness of putting “comedy” right there in the subtitle, and Pyae Moe Thet War absolutely delivers. This memoir-in-essays, about being a millennial woman in Myanmar, has one of the strongest voices I’ve encountered in recent essay collections. She writes back against the expectation that racialized and minoritized writers perform their trauma for the reader, or must be restricted to certain topics and tones. You’ve Changedsets a precedent I know other writers will feel empowered to follow.
In this electric debut essay collection, a Myanmar millennial playfully challenges us to examine the knots and complications of immigration status, eating habits, Western feminism in an Asian home, and more, guiding us toward an expansive idea of what it means to be a Myanmar woman today
What does it mean to be a Myanmar person—a baker, swimmer, writer and woman—on your own terms rather than those of the colonizer? These irreverent yet vulnerable essays ask that question by tracing the journey of a woman who spent her young adulthood in the US and UK before returning to her hometown…
As a writer and editor, I spend a lot of time thinking about what prose—especially first-person nonfiction, which is mostly what I edit—does, and how it sets out to accomplish its project. Across forms, I tend to think humor is largely underused! No matter how serious the subject, there’s always a place for it to sharpen the critique. My book engages with topics like systemic discrimination and inequity, but throughout, I always stay attuned to the comic absurdity of my subject—both as a way to give more pleasure to the reader, and as a way to cut to the heart of what I want to express.
Whether in her book or her writing for BuzzFeed, Koul’s voice and humor are always instantly recognizable. Their distinctive tone is right there in the title. In her debut collection, Koul explores growing up as a South Asian woman in Canada, braiding her personal narrative with deft cultural critique. Essay collections rarely have such a strong sense of characters as this one does—Koul’s parents, especially, are deeply felt and sharply rendered figures who appear across the essays as sources of humor, pathos, and exasperation.
A DEBUT COLLECTION OF FIERCE, FUNNY ESSAYS ABOUT GROWING UP THE DAUGHTER OF INDIAN IMMIGRANTS IN WESTERN CULTURE, ADDRESSING SEXISM, STEREOTYPES, AND THE UNIVERSAL MISERIES OF LIFE
In One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming…
I am an author who also penned a novel during the pandemic, with a timeline that stretched into the first six months of the pandemic–against the advice of my agent and the publishing industry at large. I know many authors choose not to write about intense political and social happenings, but that “life will never be the same again” feeling was something I couldn’t avoid. The pandemic threw people together and kept us apart at the same time. I was intensely interested in its incubator effect as well as the silo aspect quarantining had on all of our lives.
The opening of this book knocked me out, and I was hooked.
I usually veer toward literary, slower, familial dramas, but this book combined what I love in literary family dynamics with the frightening premise of an inexplicable disaster occurring in the outside world. The suspicion we were quick to possess about others during the early days of the pandemic is heightened to a new level with two couples pitted against each other, one preoccupied with the welfare and antics of their children.
I loved the construct that had even spouses second-guessing each other. The intensity of the situation brought out the worst and eventually the better sides of all the characters, a phenomenon that resonated as I read this book during the first year of the pandemic, at the same time rioters invaded our nation’s capital.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a happy, very well-adjusted adult who deeply believes that life is pointless. This understanding that I do not matter–and neither does anything else I love–hasn’t driven me to despair but rather liberated me. My nihilism is a tool to free me from corrosive messages of meaning, performance, consumption, and exploitation. It allows me to understand and love my life as a delicate, fleeting, lovely, and one-day forgotten thing. And with that perspective, I understand how precious it is.
Fun fact: I wrote my book while recovering from a period of intense work burnout that someone more dramatic could call a nervous breakdown. During that time, I was coming to terms with the fact the job I love has broken my brain and likely made it very easy for other people to exploit me.
I read this book during this period, and it helped me understand not only how toxic but also how unnecessary our relationship with work was. It helped me detangle my identity from employment and realize that a job is just a part of my life–not the whole thing.
It helped free me from the dreaded “hustle culture.”
'Spectacular and terrifyingly true' Owen Jones 'Explosive' John McDonnell, New Statesman, Books of the Year 'Thought-provoking and funny' The Times
Be honest: if your job didn't exist, would anybody miss it? Have you ever wondered why not? Up to 40% of us secretly believe our jobs probably aren't necessary. In other words: they are bullshit jobs. This book shows why, and what we can do about it.
In the early twentieth century, people prophesied that technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks and driving flying cars. Instead, something curious happened. Not only have the flying cars not materialised, but…
I am a happy, very well-adjusted adult who deeply believes that life is pointless. This understanding that I do not matter–and neither does anything else I love–hasn’t driven me to despair but rather liberated me. My nihilism is a tool to free me from corrosive messages of meaning, performance, consumption, and exploitation. It allows me to understand and love my life as a delicate, fleeting, lovely, and one-day forgotten thing. And with that perspective, I understand how precious it is.
It has become very fashionable to talk about capitalism and how it grinds us down as individuals. But this singular view of ourselves as lone victims is arguably its biggest trick. The truth is that the unchecked greed and growth that hurt us are hurting the planet most of all.
No one understands and can explain this, like journalist (and my hero) Naomi Klein. She’s always reported on the dangers of greed, consumption, globalization, and unchecked growth. But in recent years, she’s centered on how all these big, scary ideas converge to harm the planet. This book is tiny and it’s a digestible introduction to her writing and ideas.
It’s a book about the environment you will not only understand but actually finish reading.
In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement.
In Hot Money Naomi Klein lays out the evidence that deregulated capitalism is waging war on the climate, and shows that, in order to stop the damage, we must change everything we think about how our world is run.
Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through…
I began this veil as a mathematics major and a first generation college student. It was not easy and I had no great plans or ambitions. I was good at math. But as I read books like these, and many others, I changed my horizons altogether, saw a place for myself and a purpose previously lacking. Economic History resembles my first love of math, but with persons and human behavior included. The latter is endlessly fascinating, as is the tendency of “experts” to misread and make broad assumptions that I, ever skeptical, wish to test where I can. I like being engaged intellectually for its own sake, and, from books like Tristram Shandy, have always endeavored to take my work seriously, but not myself as a human being.
The book is, like the others I have recommended, decidedly distinctive and untraditional. It traces the convoluted history of capitalist thought prior to its advent (which is itself the subject of ceaseless debate). Reducing forces to “passion” and “order” made me look at a complicated subject in a new way.
In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests--so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice--was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I became fascinated with geography as a teenager and spent my life studying it. I always wanted to understand how we transform our planet, for better or worse. Part of this is understanding what happens in particular localities, which I have been able to look at closely by visiting places across all continents (except Antarctica). Part of it is understanding how the complex relations between human society and everything else shape global futures. My long-standing passion, however, has been understanding how what happens in one locality is shaped by its evolving connections with the rest of the world. These books pushed me to see the world differently through these connections.
I found this book so interesting because it documents how European prosperity was also shaped by deep historical ties with Asia. Digging through a huge trove of historical archives, the authors document how Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire brought capitalist practices to Europe in the 13th century.
It’s not an easy read, but I found that careful study pays off because it offers such an original perspective on Europe’s success. I liked how their evidence buttresses Blaut’s more speculative critique of Eurocentrism, also extending it by showing that Asian initiative shaped European success—it was not just colonialism and slavery.
*Winner of International Studies Association (ISA)'s International Political Sociology Best Book Prize for 2017*
*Winner of British International Studies Association (BISA)'s International Political Economy Working Group Book Prize of 2016*
*Shortlisted for the ISA Book Prize*
Mainstream historical accounts of the development of capitalism describe a process which is fundamentally European - a system that was born in the mills and factories of England or under the guillotines of the French Revolution. In this groundbreaking book, a very different story is told.
How the West Came to Rule offers a interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism.…
