I'll continue to update this as I try more book pairings when I travel. 🙂

London, England 💂‍♀️
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World — Favorite book I've read so far in 2019! It describes Victorian-age citizen mapping, and it's a fascinating mix of medicine, sociology, data science, and urbanism all in one.

Paris, France 🥐
Paris Reborn: Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City — The best book I've read about the renovation of Paris. It gets into the sociotechnical details, while most others tend to get distracted by the grandiosity of it all (which is pretty impressive of course, but not enough to really capture my attention).

Tokyo, Japan 🗼
The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the 21st Century — A bit dense and repetitive, but a source of amazing details about specific policies and how they shaped Japanese cities. This one would be good for really any Japanese city, but of course Tokyo comes up the most often.

NYC, USA 🗽
Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan — I don't usually think of myself as liking this kind of book. It is aggressively poetic. But I found myself getting sucked and swirled into it, and it gave me the strongest flavor for what New York is of anything I've ever read. It's a bit like a pungent blue cheese—some people may not like it, but once you get the taste for it you begin to crave it.

Death and Life of American Cities — Jane Jacob's writing somehow reads like poetry while also being rigorous and scientific. It is far less surreal and dramatic than Delirious New York, but still beautiful. I listened to the audiobook while wandering Manhattan the first time I ever went to New York alone, and I cannot recommend it more strongly.

The Power Broker — Reason to read this: Understand one man's impressive wielding of power from a position that was not intended to have it. Also learn about how NYC became the city it is today. Next time you're in NYC you won't be able to walk more than a few blocks before catching Moses' name on some plaque or carved into a building.

It is the biography of Robert Moses, who was the NYC Parks Commissioner from the 1920s through the 1960s. Moses is more responsible for reshaping the entire face of New York City than any other individual, and his thinking influenced urban planners nationwide and beyond throughout the 20th century. Over the course of his career, Moses personally conceived and completed projects costing 27 billion dollars, more than any other US government employee ever. These projects ranged from highways and bridges to housing complexes and city parks, many of which required bulldozing entire neighborhoods and in turn displacing hundreds of thousands of NYC residents. Despite the immense impact he's had on the field of urban planning, Moses was never elected to public office.

The book is not only a look into Moses' fascinating life but also a unique perspective on American history and urban planning during that half century. It's also a must-read for anyone interested in how power works, even if they aren't specifically drawn in by the cities angle.

Aside from the intensity of the story itself, the research that went into this masterpiece is just awe-inspring. The author Robert Caro is the best researcher-writer whose work I have ever read. His exhaustive series on LBJ is also fantastic. Although the LBJ books are more well-known and even more ridiculously in-depth than The Power Broker, I enjoyed the story about Moses a bit more because his impact was more concrete and on a more understandable scale. Also, The Power Broker is a story about taking a seemingly insignificant position and wielding it in a way that massively amplifies its power, whereas LBJ's story is more about climbing the ladder until you're at the top. As a side note, the narrator for the Audible recording is fantastic.

Los Angeles, USA 🏖
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies — This book gave me a romanticism about LA that I didn't think was possible. Having spent lots of time visiting my grandparents in LA as a child, I thought of the place as a bit of a wasteland, because it offered me no independence. All I remembered was sitting in hours of traffic and getting shuttled from one place to the next by car, without really seeing the place besides the tarmac of the highways. This book changed that for me and gave me a longing to go back. (Though unfortunately I haven't spent much time there since reading it... writing this up reminds me that I should change that!)

San Francisco, USA 🌉
Season of the Witch — Reason to read this: You are coming to San Francisco for the first time and want to get a sense of the city's recent history. This book is full of incredible stories of what happened in those mid decades of the 20th century, so you'll likely enjoy it even if SF is not on your upcoming itinerary.

Season of the Witch is a tapestry of San Francisco through the 60s and 70s. Growing up in the South Bay ~45 minutes away from the city, I had learned about the hippies on Haight Street and the gay-friendly culture of the Castro, but this book opened my eyes to a whole new level of richness in the city's history. I learned gems like the fact that Jim Jones and The People's Temple (of the infamous 1978 Jonestown koolaid massacre) played an instrumental role in George Moscone's mayoral victory in 1975. As a result, Moscone appointed Jones as the chairman of the SF Housing Authority Commission, and Jones gained access to California politicians like Governor Jerry Brown, SF Supervisors Dianne Feinstein and Harvey Milk, and First Lady Rosalynn Carter. In exchange for his cult's political support, these figures supported him and The People's Temple up until the day the news came in of the mass suicide at Jonestown. This shocking episode is just one of the incredible stories I learned about San Francisco's history from SOTW, and it completely reshaped the way I think about the city. From Jonestown and the Zebra Murders to Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, I can sum up what I learned in a brief sentence: SF during the span of the 60s and 70s was the real Gotham City.

Bombay, St Petersburg, Shanghai, or Dubai 🌍
The History of Future Cities — Reason to read this: Gain a sense of romance of the history behind 4 global cities. Ideal if you're about to travel to one of them. (Note: by "romance" I probably mean something very different from what most people mean...)
The book explores four cities—Bombay, St Petersburg, Shanghai, and Dubai—that were created with the idea of being a window to the future in an undeveloped, unglobalized country. Each one catapults itself into a different kind of future, but the common theme is a fascinating lense through which to look. This book helped me fall in love with cities (though I have yet to visit any of the four in the book actually!).

Detriot, USA 🛣
The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways — This book isn't about Detroit per se, but it's about the surprisingly long history of the interstate system, which is of course inextricably linked to the history of Motor City. It's a great mix of engineering, urbanism, sociology, infrastructure, and geography... who could ask for more?!