Books to Read if You Liked...Daisy Jones and the Six
I originally read Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid, in the first half of 2020 about a month after the world shut down. I had basically spent that month surviving, feeding/fighting a very serious sugar addiction, and getting good at audiobooks. I picked up Daisy Jones in print, read approximately four sentences, and immediately put it down to switch to the audio. There is a very popular review of this book floating around out there saying that there must be two different versions of this book, since they really hated it when so many people seemingly loved it. I think there probably are, because I know I wouldn’t have loved this as much if I’d read it instead of listening.
So there’s my pitch to listen to this one, if you decide to go that route. But as of April, Amazon’s limited series version of it has aired all of its episodes, so you also have the option of watching. No spoilers here at all! I really enjoyed the show (as evidenced by the fact that I got through the whole thing in three days) and if the story the book tells interests you but you don’t want to read it, I think this was a really good adaptation. Riley Keough and Sam Claflin both did a really good job of making their characters a bit unsympathetic, the narrative structure builds really well to the climactic last concert, and managed they managed to really capture the emotional heart of the whole thing. I even ended up loving a few of the songs they wrote!
Anyway, if you watched it and loved it or read the book and loved it, or both, here are some other books to consider reading.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: If you want to read something like Daisy Jones, you can read literally anything else by Taylor Jenkins Reid, but I’d specifically recommend The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Malibu Rising, or Carrie Soto is Back. First, these books all live in the same imagined universe, with characters appearing across the titles. You don’t have to read all of them at all, and I don’t even think I realized there was a shared universe until Malibu Rising, the third by publication date. But more important than the shared universe, each of these books features a character in a memorable, real-life time period who feels like they could have existed. So if what you liked about Daisy Jones was how much you wanted to listen to the album, or hear more interviews, or watch a documentary about them, and instead you “settled” for Fleetwood Mac, consider getting that same experience from any of these other books. I cannot tell you which one I loved the most, and they’ve all been optioned for adaptations, but the adaptation of Evelyn will be first, likely in 2024, Malibu is set in Malibu in the 80s and I just fell in love with that setting, and Carrie was a fantastic character, if any of that helps at all.
For the rest of these, I looked for any of the following to find read-a-likes:
music
feels like it could have been a true story (or is nonfiction)
told through interviews or some other audio thing
strong relationships between characters
ensemble cast
memorable/specific time period
Songs in Ursa Major by Emma Brodie - The year is 1969, and the Bayleen Island Folk Fest is abuzz with one name: Jesse Reid. Reid's intricate guitar riffs and supple baritone are poised to tip from fame to legend with this one headlining performance, but his motorcycle crashes on the way to the show. A star is born when Jane Quinn, a local, and her band play in his place. Jesse and Jane strike up a friendship as he recovers; she ends up with a hit first record and goes on tour with Jesse playing to sold-out stadiums. When she’s blindsided by a dark secret, it gives birth to one of the most iconic albums of all time. This shares similarities with Daisy Jones, but the story it tells is completely different; reviewers have mentioned they see elements of The Bell Jar, and it becomes an exploration of what we’re willing to sacrifice in order to get what we want. Apparently, there are also real-life cameos for the time period!
The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes by Elissa R. Sloan - Cassidy Holmes isn't just a celebrity. She is “Sassy Gloss,” the fourth member of the hottest pop group America has ever seen. Hotter than Britney dancing with a snake, hotter than Christina getting dirrty, Gloss was the pop act that everyone idolized, and Sassy was at the center of it all. Fans couldn't get enough of them, until the group’s sudden implosion in 2002. But fifteen years later, Sassy has died by suicide, and no one is reeling harder than Rose, Merry, and Yumi, the other Glossies. Told in multiple perspectives and different timelines, the story of the rise and fall of a pop icon is told similarly to Daisy Jones but with the nostalgia factor of the late 90s/early 2000s and a look at different aspects of celebrity and the music business. TJR herself recommended this one.
The Themis Files by Sylvain Neuvel (photo and link are for the first book in the series, Sleeping Giants) - The only thing this sci-fi series shares with Daisy Jones is the format of the storytelling, but if you dig interview-style narrative structure, this is the series that showed me how good audiobooks can be. Just like with Daisy, I recommend this exclusively on audio as it’s recorded with a full cast and told through a series of audio files and interviews and even some sound effects and it’s just really, really well done and entertaining. A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth and onto the palm of a giant metal, the walls of the cavern glowing with intricate symbols around her. Seventeen years later, Rose is a highly trained physicist leading a top-secret team trying to crack the code in the symbols. Everything changes when they realize the hand might just be one part of the puzzle. But where did all of this come from? And why is it here?
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein - This book intimately captures what it feels like to be a young woman in a rock-and-roll band, from her days at the dawn of the underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define music and pop culture in the 1990s through today. Carrie Brownstein inhabits a different era than Daisy Jones, which informs her choices and mindset and makes her examine things in a wildly different, more realistic way. Before Carrie Brownstein co-developed and starred in the wildly popular TV comedy Portlandia, she was already an icon to young women for her role as a musician in the feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney. The band was a key part of the early riot- grrrl and indie rock scenes in the Pacific Northwest, known for their prodigious guitar shredding and their leftist lyrics against war, traditionalism, and gender roles. Though Brownstein struggled against the music industry's sexist double standards, by 2006 she was the only woman to earn a spot on Rolling Stone readers' list of the "25 Most Underrated Guitarists of All-Time."
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton - This 2021 release perhaps suffered from its comparisons to Daisy Jones; in outline form, it’s very similar, but it’s absolutely not the same story. In the 1970’s, Nev, a white Brit, comes to New York looking for a singing partner. He finds Opal, a fierce Black American woman. She’s not the best singer, but there is power in her voice and she has a quality that Nev is drawn to. Their first album doesn’t set the world ablaze, but they have high hopes for their future. Things take a turn when their record company signs a new band that proudly displays Confederate flags, and a promotional event leads to a chaotic, dangerous, and fatal situation. The book is told through interviews, like Daisy Jones, as Opal and Nev prepare for a reunion concert. This has the same qualities as Daisy Jones, but with a bit less of the drugs and rock and roll and a lot more of the social/racial issues.
True Crime Story by Joseph Knox - Again, the only thing this mystery/thriller shares with Daisy Jones is the documentary style and interview narrative structure, but it works really well for this type of story and this one zips right along. In the early hours of Saturday 17 December 2011, Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old Manchester University student, walked out of a party taking place in the shared accommodation where she had been living for three months. She was never seen again. Seven years after her disappearance, struggling writer Evelyn Mitchell finds herself drawn into the mystery. Through interviews with Zoe's closest friends and family, she begins piecing together what really happened in 2011. But where some versions of events overlap, aligning perfectly with one another, others stand in stark contrast, giving rise to troubling inconsistencies. Shaken by revelations of Zoe's secret life, and stalked by a figure from the shadows, Evelyn turns to crime writer Joseph Knox to help make sense of a case where everyone has something to hide. Zoe Nolan may be missing presumed dead, but her story is only just beginning.
Meet Me In The Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011 by Lizzy Goodman - This nonfiction oral history of the rebirth of the New York rock scene in the early 2000s shares a lot of obvious qualities with Daisy Jones and the Six. It uses 200 original interviews with musicians, artists, journalists, bloggers, photographers, managers, executives, groupies, models, movie stars, and DJs to chart the transformation of that scene, the bands behind it (think The Strokes, Vampire Weekend, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol) and the cultural forces that shaped it, including the internet and 9/11.
How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie DeBartolo - The relationships at the center of Daisy Jones are echoed in this novel. There’s a lot less sex and drugs and a lot more sex and love. People LOVE this book. Eliza Caelum, a young music journalist, moves to New York and falls in love with Paul Hudson, the talented lead singer and songwriter for up-and-coming rock and roll band Bananafish. It’s a love triangle, as Eliza’s reverence for rock is matched only by Paul’s. But when Bananafish is signed to a major corporate label, Eliza has to make a heartbreaking decision that leads to Paul’s sudden disappearance.
Listen to music and read books. xoxo Lai