Brenna
One sentence synopsis... Following the interwoven fates of several families in the English city of Salisbury, from prehistoric times to the 1980's.
Read it if you like... British history, detailed chapters on the history of agricultural innovation and money lending. Not the most exciting of Rutherfurd's books. This one definitely leans more on the step-by-step history of how the people of the region changed the landscape v. the entertainment of the fictional storylines.
Further reading... only two more Rutherfurd books left - Ireland and Hampshire - until I can rank them all.
One sentence synopsis... An antiwar novel following a young American soldier as he wakes up in hospital and slowly realizes he's lost his arms, legs, mouth, nose, sight and hearing.
Read it if you like... as weird a comparison as this is I think if you liked ‘A Little Life' you'd like this. Both are books you'll be yelling out loud about as you read. Just when you think things can't get any worse - they do. Both have main characters who somehow manage to keep their humanity and evoke so much sympathy.
Dream casting... the entire novel is inside the mind of Joe Bonham and apart from the occasional flashback he's ‘a piece of meat that keeps on living'... so not the easiest to cast but I did think someone like Josh Hutcherson fit the bill of flashback-Joe. Though that could just be because Joe worked in a bakery à la Peeta Mellark.
One sentence synopsis... Generational, political, and cultural differences express themselves through the experiences of South Korean women in this collection of short stories.
Read it if you like... clean, precise writing which is probably true of most short stories but feels particularly noteworthy in this case. Most of the characters have trouble expressing their emotions which makes the style impersonal in the extreme.
Further reading... for Korean fiction I preferred ‘Kim Jiyoung, born 1982' and for impersonal characters/writing style obviously Sally Rooney.
One sentence synopsis... ‘The Namesake' is a beautifully written, introspective portrait of one immigrant family's experience - specifically spanning three formative decades in the life of the eldest son, Gogol Ganguli.
Read it if you like... ‘Americanah' or ‘Exit West' for books that highlight the immigrant experience. The tv show ‘Love Life' for the series of women Gogol dates from his teens to late 30's who shape his life.
Dream casting... Disclaimer: Age-wise this doesn't work but since we follow the characters as they grow up they wouldn't necessarily play opposite each other. That being said, Megan Suri as Moushumi and Dev Patel as Gogol. And for the beginning of the book, which focuses on Gogol's parents when they were young - Rahul Kohli as his dad and Richa Moorjani as his mom.
One sentence synopsis... A propulsive journey across the north water on a whaling expedition follows a disgraced Irish surgeon, a psychopathic harpooner, amongst a cast of violent, unfortunate men.
Read it if you like... ‘The Terror' or ‘Godless'.
Dream casting... unfortunately this was a case of knowing who was cast in the show before reading the book. As a result I could only picture Colin Farrell as Drax and Jack O'Connell as Sumner. That being said, I'm not mad.
One sentence synopsis... The story of a marriage divided into two parts - ‘Fates', centered around good-hearted (yet narcissistic) playwright Lotto and ‘Furies', shifting to focus on the mysterious ‘ice queen' Mathilde.
Read it if you like... stories where the couple at the center have two radically disparate views of their relationship and life together, ie. Gone Girl. Unconventional writing - Groff's sentences are more like declarative statements and she occasionally interrupts the narrative with Greek chorus-like asides.
Dream casting... Will Poulter as Lotto. Anya Taylor-Joy as Mathilde.
One sentence synopsis... After Sophie is bitten by a potentially rabid cat, a series of ominous events snowball to reveal the rot within her marriage - and the wider social conditions of 1970s Brooklyn.
Read it if you like... post-war realism, ‘The Great Gatsby', short stories.
Dream casting... just take Victoria Pedretti and Penn Badgley straight out of ‘You' and into this. Spot on.
One sentence synopsis... After his estranged friend and fellow writer Ben blows himself up with a bomb, Peter attempts to reconstruct his life and discover what led him to that end.
Read it if you like... post modern narrative techniques or Historiographic metafiction. There are some strong Ted Kaczynski vibes from Ben in the later half of the book. Auster is taking liberties with history - think Quentin Tarantino but actually good.
Dream casting... too many good options for this one. I need a Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Tom Hiddleston type for the straight man/try-hard Peter Aaron and someone who can do descent-into-madness like Jake Gyllenhaal or potentially Ryan Gosling as charming, provocative, unhinged Ben Sachs.
One sentence synopsis... Eight stories - some interwoven, most not - of people transplanted from their homes and setting down new roots in foreign environments.
Read it if you like... Jane Austen - for the forensic precision into family habits, customs, and pressures with love versus arranged marriage plots.
Further reading... anything by Lahiri. She circles the same themes of the immigrant experience and family disconnect between generations in every book but every time gets closer and closer to literary perfection.
One sentence synopsis... A story of human nature, disillusionment, and self-deception amongst members of every class of society in a provincial English town.
Read it if you like... Hardy, Austen, disastrous marriages, unfulfilled potential, failing to live up to expectations, settling, Stars Hollow but everyone ends up disenchanted or publicly shamed.
Dream casting... Scoot McNairy as Garth. Stephen Root as Bulstrode.
Nicholas Braun as Fred. Anna Baryshnikov as Mary. Phoebe Fox as Dorothea.
One sentence synopsis... The perverse musing of a mid-level government bureaucrat trapped in a prison of his own insufferable character.
Read it if you like... unlikeable men who don't play well with others, think Woody Allen or a dark Larry David for modern influences. More obviously it's for those who are into existentialism, the modernist movement, or Russian literature.
Further reading... either Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, or The Brothers Karamazov. If you've read any let me know which I should try next.
One sentence synopsis... From inside a correctional facility, a former food writer and serial killer narrates her life's story as told through the meals and the men she's consumed.
Read it if you like... the most obvious comparison is obviously Hannibal (specifically the Mads television version). Summers's writing is as metaphor-heavy as Raymond Chandler, with plenty of food comparisons to work with. But she tries to squeeze too much into a slim novel - the democratization of writing on the internet, feminism, the industrial meat complex, the history of cannibalism, the modern art world, etc - and isn't completely successful in blending everything together.
Dream casting... Julianne Moore as Dorothy Daniels.
One sentence synopsis... An exploration of absurdity through the life of Meursault, a French Algerian whose apathetic responses to society's standards of behaviour lead him to his death.
Read it if you like... nothing. And dislike nothing. And have no feelings for anything at all. Perfect book for you. Far stretch comparison but at times Meursault gives off some very Patrick Bateman, dead-behind-the-eyes vibes.
Dream casting... I don't think a film version of this book makes any sense but somehow I'd trust Joaquin Phoenix to find a way to make it work.
One sentence synopsis... An unstable young man commits a murder (with motives less mercenary than experimental) setting off an epic of suffering and eventual salvation...kinda.
Read it if you like... Kendall's storyline in Succession.
Dream casting... a 20 years younger Jeremy Strong (happy bday, my dude) would be my perfect Raskolnikov but if we're trying to be more age accurate then Nicholas Hoult could also play it. With Caleb Landry Jones as Svidrigailov.
One sentence synopsis... Recently ‘released' from a juvenile reformatory, a group of boys embark on a road trip across American in 1954 - they don't make it far before a series of detours throw their plans into disarray.
Read it if you like... Americana, Huck Finn style stories. It was way too sentimental for me. There was never a doubt the young hero and his precocious little brother would have everything work out for them in the end. Towles' last two books led me to have higher expectations and this third novel was a big let down.
Dream casting... Charlie Plummer and Jacob Tremblay as brothers Emmett and Billy Watson.
One sentence synopsis... A plainspoken, honest essay that became a layered memoir about loss, grief, Korean culture, and a mother-daughter relationship.
Read it if you like... Japanese Breakfast. Or if Lane was your favourite Gilmore Girls character.
Further reading... for the mother-daughter dynamics, A Mercy (Toni Morrison). For the Korean culture, Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (Cho Nam-ju).
One sentence synopsis... A love letter to Los Angeles conveyed through several snapshots of different characters and areas of the city.
Read it if you like... trying to decipher which celebrities are loosely disguised in these semi-autobiographical stories.
Further reading... no longer in LA so need Paris book recs next to stick with the read-where-you-are theme. I still plan on finished Babitz's books, however I've been warned these last two were the best. If you've read them let me know!
One sentence synopsis... A slice of North West London structured around the evolving lives of two best friends.
Read it if you like... beautiful writing and use of language - as with all Smith novels. The turns of phrase and insights make the book worth a read but the ending let it down and some secondary characters could have been more filled out.
Dream casting... Nathalie Emmanuel as Keisha/Natalie and Rose Leslie as Leah. This may be one of my best casting decisions yet. They should remake the BBC adaptation with these choices.
One sentence synopsis... A 1947 novella about an Italian woman's unhappy marriage which begins and ends with the pronouncement: ‘I shot him between the eyes'.
Read it if you like... themes of family, failed relationships, and Italian literature a la Ferrante. The style reminds me of Sally Rooney - extremely up close with the characters but you come away feeling they're so much more to them that could be said still. Descriptions of setting written very play like.
Dream casting... Stanley Tucci has to be Alberto the disappointing husband who fancies himself an artist and intellectual but constantly misquotes Proust.
One sentence synopsis... Four women who live in the same apartment building in Seoul, Korea run up against the country's repressive beauty standards and deep seated misogyny.
Read it if you like... ‘Her Body and Other Parties', ‘Breasts and Eggs', or ‘Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982'.
Dream casting... really into Blackpink since watching the documentary on Netflix so just cast Jisoo in everything.
One sentence synopsis... Tracing the lives of American expats in Paris and India, ‘The Razor's Edge' explores the dichotomy between materialism and spirituality during the Great Depression.
Read it if you like... Westerners seeking enlightenment in India (Larry is the original ‘Eat Pray Love', George Harrison has nothing on this guy), Paris novels (though the book spans Chicago, Paris, and India it's primarily set in France), or pondering the meaninglessness of modern life.
Dream casting... the cover of my copy of the book has Bill Murray as Larry so I thought I'd have to work hard to imagine anyone else but in reality, the whole vibe of Larry - affluent, charming, traumatized from his experiences in WWI, setting off in search of a transcendent meaning of life - would be perfectly captured by Andrew Garfield.
One sentence synopsis... Members of a university detective club visit a deserted island which was the site of a quadruple murder-suicide the year before and start being picked off one by one.
Read it if you like... Agatha Christie: the book is loosely based on ‘And Then There Were None'. Fair play detective stories: the answers are there all along if you're paying attention, no stupid twists at the last minute to reveal disappointing murderers. Or cult-classic Japanese mystery fiction: the characters are one dimensional, the writing is sparse, and it's all completely intentional. The book belongs in the shin honkaku genre of Japanese mysteries, a genre defined by the reader's ability to plausibly solve it.
Dream casting... Will Sharpe as Ellery and Yōsuke Kubozuka as Shimada.
One sentence synopsis... An Italian teenager finds himself become the personal driver for one of the Third Reich's most powerful commanders - while spying for the Allies in Milan.
Read it if you like... really wild semi-true stories (the book is a fictionalized account of a true and truly crazy life story of Pino Lella) at the expense of good writing. Would have been better as a non-fiction but from the rumblings of book twitter there's some controversy over how much is fictionalized (think ‘A Million Little Pieces').
Dream casting... Tom Holland was cast as the lead in the adaptation of this book that never happened... perhaps due to the controversy...
One sentence synopsis... The romantic longings of four angsty millennials struggling to confront global catastrophe and their complicated feelings for each other.
Read it if you like... ‘Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants' but the friends share polemics against capitalism and gendered power dynamics instead of magical pants. Also, if you're interested in art that tackles the pandemic - albeit with a light touch.
Dream casting... Emma Corrin as Alice (the Rooney character stand-in) and Jack O'Connell as her love interest, the warehouse worker Felix.