The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845). Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838 and eventually settled in Rochester, where he published his abolitionist newspaper The North Star for 16 years. His autobiography — written in clear, controlled, devastating prose — is one of the foundational texts of American literature, and reading it before visiting Mount Hope Cemetery, where he is buried, gives the place a different gravity.
Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia by Nancy Martha West (2000). An academic but readable study of how Kodak's marketing invented the modern idea of the snapshot and the "Kodak moment" — the sense that life should be photographed and preserved. Understanding the argument helps explain why the George Eastman Museum is more than just a collection of cameras.
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900). Not set in Rochester, but the novel's protagonist passes through upstate New York on her way from small-town Wisconsin to Chicago and New York, and Dreiser's portrait of American industrial ambition and urban restlessness in the 1890s illuminates exactly the world that Kodak and Bausch + Lomb were building in Rochester at the same moment.
The Women's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss (2018). The final push for the 19th Amendment, culminating in the 1920 Tennessee ratification vote. Rochester was central to the suffrage movement — Susan B. Anthony spent most of her life there — and this book puts her legacy in the context of a national political struggle that went down to the wire.