If You Like This, Try That-The Best Book/Film Recommendations
When I read, my mind instantly makes connections. So, when I’m plodding through Old English poem The Wanderer and I happen upon the line ‘Where have the horses gone? where are the riders’, I jump to Tolkien’s Lament of the Rohirrim (‘where is the horse and the rider?’). But I also see Don Messick, the actor who plays King Théoden in the acclaimed Lord of the Rings film trilogy, say these words reverently as he prepares for battle.
It’s easy to make ‘must-read’ or ‘must-watch’ lists but ones that cross-reference a particular mood across several mediums? Not so much. But the joy that, for example, comes with finding a book that puts monster hunting front and centre (Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse) when one craves the glory days of the ‘monster-a-week’ episodes that first made Supernatural’ popular, is singular. I can’t help but think that this is the one-stop ticket to near indefinite indulgence. As such, Once Upon a Time fans can get their modern day fairy tale fix with Eisner award-winning graphic novel series Fables. Fans of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novella Made Things, a story that provides a glimpse into the minds of homonculi, can take their fascination with the hidden lives of inanimate objects one step further by immersing themselves in the podcast Everything is Alive.
For this list, I’ve decided to match some of the best films of 2023 (there are quite a few Best Picture contenders among them!) with suitable books. It might not be a perfect match as I have not read everything that has ever been published and what I feel is the core message of a film/book isn’t meant to be a universal verdict. In some cases like Killers of the Flower Moon, which is based on a celebrated non-fiction title, I’ve chosen to list another book as that would be making it too easy. I’ll also freely admit I’ve left out films like Anatomy of a Fall or Maestro simply because psychological thrillers and fictional biopics aren’t really genres I’m well read in. (If you have your own cross-media suggestions for these films or others from this year that I’ve left out, please feel free to comment!)
Ready to find your read-alike? Then, here it goes!
How To Blow Up a Pipeline-Birnam Wood
If you like stories about young, passionate climate warriors (eco-terrorists sounds too harsh!) who take the law into their own hands for ‘the greater good’ of all, watching How To Blow Up a Pipeline and reading Booker prize winner Eleanor Catton’s most recent release, Birnam Wood, is a must. Both are dark and explosive eco-thrillers that make environmental activism appear current as well as sexy. (If that premise intrigues you, there’s also Stephen Markley’s recent The Deluge, as well Jeff Vandermeer’s Hummingbird Salamander and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future.)
Saltburn-The Talented Mr.Ripley
A clever, needy and maybe slightly creepy guy makes friends with the typical golden boy scion, plunging and ultimately dashing himself against the rocks of a glittering world of money, excess and glamour? That works for both Saltburn and The Talented Mr. Ripley. In fact, director Emerald Fennel (‘Promising Young Woman’) even name drops the latter work-albeit its film adaptation-in an essay about the film in the December issue of Empire. For people craving a larger fix, Fennel, who defines Saltburn as a Gothic story, also mentions Rebecca, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. ‘If there was sex, murder and an enormous house, I wanted to be there’, she writes.
American Fiction-The Sellout
Are you looking for a biting satire on race relations that still manages to be hilarious on its own terms? American Fiction delivers on that premise, casting Jeffrey Wright in his break-out role as black academic Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison.Frustrated at a literary establishment that denies success to anyone who won’t cater to the publishing industry’s need to read about Black trauma and tragedy, he pens a fictional ‘hood’ memoir chock full of the worst clichés only to see it become an overnight success. Booker prize winning The Sellout taps into the same outrageous vein by featuring a protagonist intent on re-segregating the town he lives in, an in-your face ploy adopted by author Paul Beatty to take the mickey out of the idea of a ‘post-racial America’. (I mean, what even is that? When is race as an issue going to be post anything?)
The Zone of Interest-The Boy In The Striped Pajamas
A24’s international feature film covers the mundanity of evil, The Zone of Interest depicting your regular happy family living right next to Auschwitz. A girl shining a torch on pilfered gold tooth fillings, a boy trying out an inmate’s uniform-both The Zone of Interest and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are good at illustrating the dichotomy of guilt and innocence. This is an attempt to answer the age old question, ‘how could people have condoned and thrived under the atrocities committed under Hitler’s regime?’
Poor Things-Our Hideous Progeny
Here we have characters that question society’s unwritten rules regarding heteronormativity, the role of women in said society as well as the question of what is truly natural or unnatural. Though Bella Baxter in Poor Things is the Creature, the female narrator of Our Hideous Progeny being Viktor Frankenstein’s stand-in, I still think they’d get on like a house on fire. After all, why shouldn’t two people bent on leaving their mark on the world, their respective quests being about self-discovery, find some common ground? Anyone who actively takes a stance against conservativism and the arbitrary nature of what constitutes ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, being equally enamoured with the premise of a rollicking Victorian adventure tale should put both Poor Things and Our Hideous Progeny in their sights.
Oppenheimer-The Passenger/Stella Maris
Cinema seems to have finally cracked the code when it comes to depicting the great questions, such as the nature of consciousness or the thin line that seperates genius from madness. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer makes a valiant stab in the dark, unveiling the brilliance but also the darkness of the man who was instrumental in creating the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Passenger and Stella Maris, two books that constitute the last works of Cormac McCarthy, further illuminate the philosophical implications of quantum physics by focusing on brother and sister Bobby and Alicia Western, the children of a scientist who was a part of the Manhattan Project. People who like their fiction and viewing experiences to come with a heady dose of guilt-ridden brilliance while throwing up the odd philosophical or moral conundrum will know what to turn to.
Past Lives-Persuasion
This one’s tricky (maybe because I’m not as well-read in contemporary romance as some of you might be?) but you can’t go wrong with Austen. Both Past Lives and Persuasion are intimate, character driven stories that expound on the way first love forms and shapes us all and the way missed connections and seemingly mundane moments can linger for a lifetime. (Should you want a dose of something more contemporary that also illustrates the split loyalties of an immigrant experience, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn deliver on that.)
Killers of the Flower Moon-Anything by Louise Erdrich
After watching Killers of the Flower Moon, I felt, on a smaller scale, similar to how I did when I finished War and Peace. There’s epic world-building, intricate family history and a sense of both dread and anticipation that builds up as one gets to know the foibles and strengths of individual characters. Readers keen on exploring the themes of racism, greed and malice exemplified here by the real life murders of oil rich Osage Indians that occurred in the early 1920’s might enjoy anything written by Louise Erdrich.
Her stories centre around forced religious conversion, intermarriage, stolen land, rape and murder, weaving several generations of the same families into stories that evoke as deep a sense of place as anything from Thomas Hardy or William Faulkner. (The historical events she references range from the large scale, such as the German and Swedish immigrant homestead encroachments on Native Land, to the more personal, as in her Pulitzer winning The Night Watchman, which is based on the real life story of her grandfather, who inspired other members of the Turtle Mountain Reservation to resist the Indian termination policies of the 1940s-1960s.)
The Holdovers-Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine/The Catcher in the Rye
These stories shine a light on as well as elevate the experience of both the lonely and the unpopular. Where The Holdovers Paul Hunham is a curmudgeonly prep school teacher who seemingly delights in punishing his students, Eleanor Oliphant in Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is an aloof, intelligent Classics graduate (this is the one person who would probably have appreciated Hunham’s Christmas gift of a copy of Meditations!) whose colleagues call her ‘Wacko Jacko’. As the plot progresses, The message? Judge others at your own peril. (For those young and young at heart, you could do worse than pairing a viewing of The Holdovers with a read of The Catcher in the Rye. Said novel’s smart-aleck, pathologically lying yet somehow tragically innocent protagonist mirrors Angus Tully, the troubled teenage boy who ends up bonding with Hunham.)
