I believe all books change us. But some books have a very immediate and profound way of changing how we think and see the world.
I have read many other people’s ‘top X number of books’ lists. And for each list, there’s a theme or a genre which dictate what can be included and what can’t, which makes sense. Just listing a bunch of books isn’t particularly helpful. But the themes tend to repeat one another, and the books listed under each theme or genre are, for the most part, the same. There a business book lists, entrepreneurship lists, self help lists, mystery novel lists, fantasy novel lists, and so it goes on. And then we have celebrity lists. Apparently we have to know what Oprah, Barack, Bill (Gates), the Zuck, Elon and everyone else who’s rich or famous is reading because there are so many books out there. And I guess we want maximum results from our books – which sounds weird, but feels true.
The journey to my list
When I first decided to compile this list I got excited. I had inadvertently given myself permission to revisit the books that stood out like opposable thumbs along the dragged knuckles that represent my ‘thinking life’. And it was fun. I realised that sitting down and reflecting on the books that had made my beliefs tilt precipitously wasn’t something that I’d done before, at least not with any resolve.
In pulling this list together a few things came up that you should be aware of. The first was that, like music, many of the books which affected me seem to cluster around years where there was significant growth or change in my life.
And the second is that it was hard not to put in books that I thought would impress others (you). Know that I have wrestled with this and tried my best to quiet my ego when deciding what books to include. And the third point before we dive into the list; I write this in the hopes that others might read some of these books and discover how amazing they are for themselves.
I recommend every book on this list.
The list
Essays in Love by Alain de Botton
I had just finished high school. It was my gap year. I had a job with almost zero responsibilities that provided me with more money than I needed. I watched arthouse movies most weekends, read books and walked around telling everyone how they should lead their lives. Basically, being an arse who didn’t quite know yet how to be an adult.
And then I read Essays in Love. There were many books that nudged my curiousity towards exploring philosophy This was one of the first books to do so.
Alain de Botton is one of those writers that has a breathtaking clarity of vision. The way he can see a situation for what it really is and distill life’s moments to their essence has challenged me to see the world with greater objectivity. De Botton’s writing constantly reminds me to ask questions of myself, of others and of the world so that I can be more compassionate and hopefully, wiser.
Intellectuals by Paul Johnson
This book is filled with stories and observations relating to people whom I considered great thinkers; Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky. And I was thrilled that this book lay bare their flaws and shortcomings. What I took from that book was that great ideas and thoughts are possible despite one’s weaknesses. And it was another one of the books that eventually convinced me to study philosophy.
I only later learnt that Paul Johnson was a right wing journalist, and that many people believed that he had written this book to tarnish the memory of several left leaning and highly influential intellectuals of the past 300 years. Maybe I was too young and naïve to pick up on the sullying motives behind the book.
I was inspired by this book.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
I read this book for the first time when I was at university. It introduced me to magical realism, post-colonial literature and some of the most elegant writing I have ever encountered. When I read this book, there was something about magical realism that felt intuitively natural to me. The places where I’d grown up, predominantly in the Southern Hemisphere, all had some element of magic woven into the fabric of their reality. Even tonight, as I write this in Sydney while the sun sets, I have the overwhelming sense that there is more to this land, this place than what we can rationally explain. I’ve had a similar experiences in parts of South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.
The concept of magical realism was the foundation for my belief that people experience the world in fundamentally different ways. That what one person might see as a normal part of life I might see as fantastical or incomprehensible. And this, I am starting to think, means that culture, education and beliefs influence our consciousness which decides how we can experience the world. Since reading Midnight’s Children I have sought out books that weave magic into their reality. I believe it makes me more open to seeing magic where usually I would not, which hopefully alters my consciousness.
Whale Music by Paul Quarrington
I bought this book as a birthday present for my mum. I knew my mother liked unusual stories, and this novel, apparently inspired by events in Brian Wilson‘s life seemed like an appropriate gift. She read the book in a couple of sittings and then gave it to me to read, making it clear that this is a book that needed reading.
I don’t understand why everyone wasn’t talking about this book when it came out. It’s a gem about a tortured man who happens to be a musical genius, who struggles with grief, his life and the meaning of things. I loved every moment of this novel. And it showed me the joy and suffering leading a completely alternative lifestyle can bring.
Read this book.
The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill
The Minotaur, the terrible monster from Greek mythology who ate human flesh now lives in a trailer park and works as a line chef in a rib joint somewhere in Carolina. He goes by the name ‘M’ and has completely forgotten who he was along with any sense of the power and ferocity he is capable of. Instead, he leads an ordered life while trying to hide his own struggles with living in a human world filled with lying and desires.
This is another one of those books that I thought everyone should talking about, and nobody was. I think Neil Gaiman promoted this as a must read a few years after the book was published. So don’t just take my word for it that this is a worthwhile read.
This story is terribly sad. I reminded me how the world can wear one down and steal the life from you if you get caught up in believing what everyone else believes, wanting what everyone else wants.
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
This book introduced me to morning pages. Morning pages is a form of journaling where you sit down to write 3 A4 pages first thing in the morning. The aim is for you to write down whatever comes to mind and to keep the pen moving – stream of consciousness writing. It’s a form of meditation that allows you to clear your head so that you can do important creative work for the rest of the day.
Morning pages have delivered so many ideas for my novel, for this site, for things I’m doing at work. The benefits to doing morning pages cannot be overstated. And, again, don’t take my word for it, Tim Ferriss and Austin Kleon and Brian Koppelman are all proponents of the practice.
One warning about this book, it is very spiritual with a religious slant. There’s good stuff in there about creativity and leading a creative life, but I struggled with religion on occasion. That said, this list is about books that changed my life, not books I 100% agreed with.
At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
My father wanted me to study law when I went to university. On registration day I stood in the queue ready to commit four years of my life to getting a law degree. A little further down I remember seeing the registration desk for humanities, which was doing a roaring trade. I considered what it would be like to sit in a lecture theatre discussing the intricacies of commercial contracts versus what it would be like debating the meaning of life.
It is then that I walked away from the law queue and signed up to do a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. In that moment I hoped that I would find the meaning of life, discover why people do what they do, and in the process write amazing philosophical treatises that would change society. And I started off strong, but by the time I’d graduated there were other things that had caught my attention, and I drifted away from philosophy.
Four years ago I came across this book. I bought it because it had the word ‘apricot’ in the title, and I always thought ‘apricot’ was an funny word. There’s that, and I also wondered what apricot cocktails had to do with freedom and being. About twenty pages into reading this book I rediscovered my love for philosophy and the joy of just thinking about what all this is about. This book was a great source inspiration, as well as an amazing window into the lives of the early 20th Century philosophers living in Paris.
The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
I experienced a crisis of meaning that started in my late thirties and followed me through to my early forties. I don’t subscribe to the idea of a midlife crisis, instead I think we all experience times in our life where we look around and struggle to recognise ourselves in the lives we’ve built. In those moments we reflect on our life and we realise we’ve been living on autopilot. We can’t grasp why we made the decisions we have. The critical moments in our lives feel alien to us, as if we weren’t there at all. And in all the noise of living we’ve lost who we are.
This book helped me start the journey that led me back to knowing what I want. My wife gave me this book and it challenged me to stop looking out at the world, but instead turn around and look back into myself. I suspect I’ll read this book a few more times before I die.
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
When I read The War of Art I felt Steven Pressfield had written the book specifically for me. If Pressfield hadn’t written this book, and I hadn’t read it, I wouldn’t be writing a novel today, I wouldn’t be writing this article and I definitely wouldn’t be writing poetry. This book explores, with great insight, the difficulty we have in starting creative work. Pressfield calls that overwhelming feeling to do anything other than creative work ‘resistance’. My wife and I use the term resistance at least once a week. When we have important work that we don’t want to tackle, when she’d rather paint her nails and I’d prefer to trim my nose hair than do the work, we help one another through the resistance.
I am grateful for this book. If you aspire to do anything creative, read this book.
The White Album by Joan Didion & With Love and Irony by Lin Yutang
I read with Love and Irony when I was in my early teens. It was my grandfather’s and I read it over the course of a holiday that I spent with him. Lin Yutang is a Chinese philosopher, linguist, inventor and all around amazing guy. With Love and Irony is a collection of essays and satirical pieces which he wrote for magazines between 1930 and 1940. When I was 13 I loved the book. I missed a lot of the satire, but recognised the charm with which Yutang brought the ordinary and the mundane into sparkling clarity, making everything interesting. There are essays on why he named his study ‘have not done studio’, the joy he experienced when he buying birds, and why he often cried at the cinema.
As charming as they were, the collection of essays didn’t have that much of an impact on my life when I read it. However, earlier this year I read Joan Didion’s ‘The White Album’. This, again, is a collection of essays, but this time the essays span 1968 – 1977. And Didion is brilliant in capturing the feeling of the time, the place and herself through observing the simple, the everyday. And once I read this book I thought back to when I read Lin Yutang, and it was then that it hit me; this is something I want to do. There is something about observing the world and being able to use the everyday to capture an idea or a time that speaks very intensely to me. And that is something I want to do more here, in my gymnasium.
Honourary Mentions
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
A brilliant piece of narrative non-fiction. When I read this book I understood that the world is full of stories, that one could write a novel about something that actually happened. And In Cold Blood is a story haunts me. Very rarely does a month go by when I don’t think about what happened to the Clutter family. This was a gateway book that introduced me to Hunter S. Thompson, Robert M. Pirsig, Bill Bryson, Jon Krakauer and Robert Fulghum.
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
A truly epic and a quintessential magical realism novel. When García Márquez had the idea for 100 Years, he was on his way to Acapulco with his family for a holiday. As soon as the idea came to him, he is said to have turned the car around to go back home and start writing. He sold the car so his family could live while he wrote. The book took a lot longer than he’d expected, and eventually the family was forced to buy food on credit and ask their landlord for 9 months grace on the rent. If you read this novel you’ll understand why it was worth the sacrifice.
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
I read this book while I was at boarding school. Most of the philosophy was lost on me. However, the fact that the main protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, lived a lonesome and disconnected life appealed to me. Reading about, what I assumed, was Roquentin’s depression as he wandered around a French town gave me an escape from constantly being surrounded by other people in the boarding house. It is only later that I came to understand that Roquentin was dealing with his own self doubt and metaphysical anguish. To me it all sounded like depression.
The enjoyment I derived from reading this book introduced me to the idea that philosophy might be fun.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
A guy wakes up in his bed. He’s turned into a cockroach. His family at first pity him and then grow to resent him. Someone throws an apple at him which gets lodged in his thorax and starts to rot.
When you’re a teenager you read this along with William S. Borroughs‘ Naked Lunch and you realise, with great relief, that there are a few adults out there that are fucking strange. These books made me feel better about the really weird stuff that I sometimes thought about.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I read this book a year ago now. It had been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years and I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I’d heard from friends that as a parent this book will haunt you. Having read it, every time I walk over to my bookshelf my eyes now unintentionally find the spine of this book and I am again filled with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. McCarthy’s writing is so tight, every single word feels like it was carefully chosen. There is no respite, no escape. This books is incredibly powerful.
What I haven’t read
Whenever I read someone’s list of recommended books I ask myself, ‘what have they read that isn’t including in this list?’ Book recommendations are only as good as the gamut of books not included on the list. And it needs to be a gamut. I don’t trust book recommendations from people who will only read a handful of books in their lifetime.
I don’t know how qualified a reader needs to be to start making book recommendations. That’s why I kept it personal, stuck to collating a list of books that changed my life, as opposed to a list of books I think others should read. And the fact that I’ve loved pulling this together gives me the confidence to say, these books all influenced several of my important life decisions as well as how I think and what I believe. If you read any of these books, I hope they mean something to you to. And if you feel I’m missing a book that will change how I see the world, please let me know.