Books like Woodstock Goes to Hollywood — picked by fans

The Celt in me loves Dark Humor. Managed Care is one of the funniest Dark Humor books I have ever read. 

The dialogue is amazing, the characters fully developed and the story unique. Incredibly fast read. There is a poignancy to the story, and you cannot help but root for everything to work itself out for the characters.  

This is one of the best books I have ever read. 

The writing is superb, the story clever and interesting and the settings diverse and beautiful. I love the characters and their inter and intra-family dynamics. And then there is a magical cat named Brie. 

The writing draws you into each scene and you feel like you are another person in the room as the story unfolds.     

A time travel book that is clever and fast paced. Spoiled Hollywood types.

A trip back to Victorian London and a fateful meeting with Jack The Ripper. What’s not to love? As a matter of fact, I loved the female lead, Madison Taylor, so much that I included her (with permission) as a cross-over character in my latest novel, Finding Jimmy Moran.

Enough said.  

This is the latest in a series that is a clever parody of the James Bond series of books by Ian Fleming. 

Haris Orkin is an excellent writer who has built this series around his charming protagonist, James Flynn, who you cannot tell if he is crazy or has the deepest and most brilliant cover story imaginable – a patient in a psychiatric hospital.

While it is told with a tongue firmly planted in cheek, there is plenty of real action and adventure. It is a great escape from the mundane everyday life.     

Born in Los Angeles and with profound connection to this city’s psyche, Wendy Ortiz delivers a map of Los Angeles transformed into words, a fragmented memoir of hurt, love, loss, and reinvention. What does a young writer (one of thousands) living in this city and trying to make it worry about? Joblessness. Rent. Bills. Riding the metro. Alcohol. And yes, sex and publishing too, of course. This book proves that it’s not always 72 and sunny in Los Angeles.

The dutiful daughter of one studio mogul and devoted wife of another, Irene Selznick was Hollywood royalty throughout the 1920s to 40s, the Golden Age of American cinema. Her father, the tyrannical Louis B. Mayer, steered MGM, Hollywood’s most successful studio, discovered Greta Garbo and victimized Judy Garland. Her husband, David O. Selznick made the first A Star Is Born and Gone with the Wind before self-destructing from drugs and megalomania. Irene escaped the shadow of overpowering men to become the respected Broadway producer of A Streetcar Named Desire, a woman to be reckoned with and—in this powerful memoir—a first-class storyteller.

Elmore Leonard knew the vagaries of the movie business back to front, and he serves them up on a platter of delicious satire in this story about an East Coast loan shark, Chili Palmer, who comes to Los Angeles chasing a deadbeat debtor and winds up in his own fractured fairy tale version of the Hollywood dream.

Chili’s an endearing character, street smart with a unique blend of humility and self-confidence. When his collection job throws him into company with a group of movie people, he sees them and their milieu with clear-eyed objectivity.

Talking to an underworld associate, he says, “The movie business, you can do anything you want because there’s nobody in charge.” Leonard’s mastery of dialogue and character, along with his wit and sly affection for the industry he’s skewering combine to make this book a complete delight. 

A roman-à-clef which is not a novel and 80% of whose keys I have unlocked. She was “Evie” and she died in Hollywood this year of complications of Huntington’s disease and probably smoking, at age 78. Our families were close and in fact the second “L.A. woman,” second that is to Eve herself, narrating and thinly disguised as Sophie Lubin, was my aunt, Marie (née) Gattman, called “Lola,” married first to photographer Hy Hirsh (“Sam Glanzrock” in the book) and second to Elwood Scott Chapman (whom Marie “named” Aaron and who is called “Luther” in the book). Eve’s writing style is contagious and its logic so twisted that it makes you say “What?” and re-read many passages. As in my book, the battle between Stalin and Trotsky hovers constantly in the background. I think Trotsky wins.

Biblical allegory is hard to do well. Bible stories themselves have infinite depths, but their allegories are often didactic, especially when author parallels the original story too closely. Stephanie Landem’s In a Far-Off Land is anything but didactic. Set in 1930s Hollywood, the novel is equal parts Prodigal Son retelling, romance, and murder mystery. By allowing the story to take on a life of its own, Landsem avoids the Sunday School vibe, and in the end, I understood the Prodigal Son archetypal characters better.

Tolkin doesn’t hit you with belly laughs so much as tickle the upper corners of your mind with his knowing take on the mores and follies of the Hollywood of the late 1980s. (Of special interest to me, as that’s the moment I arrived there to begin my own TV and film career.) The trenchant satire is exemplified by the crime at its center: studio exec Griffin Mill, badgered by threats from some anonymous screenwriter he’s mistreated, focuses his attention on a different C-list scribe and winds up strangling him to death. Get it?  In a business full of writer-killing executives, Tolkin’s big-wig antihero literally kills a writer.