Here are 82 books that Atomised fans have personally recommended if you like
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I guess we all have a "calling." Mine has always been to explore the deeper, darker, less palatable aspects of being human. I’m a bit like a space explorer of the human psyche. I’m lucky in the sense that my day job permits me to research, teach, and better understand things like love, death, and loneliness. I’ve been researching and writing about them for many years now. I always treasure books that help me to shed light on these themes. They are like shiny pebbles or jewels that I pick up and keep in my pocket. I hope you enjoy and learn from some of the treasures in my personal collection!
I love the opening quote in this book. I’ve never, ever forgotten it since I turned the first page. It’s a quote from Dante’s Inferno: “Midway through life’s journey, I found myself lost in a dark wood, having lost the way.”
That’s exactly where I found myself when I started reading this book. Like millions of other people, I was lost when I found it. I was looking for someone or something–wiser than me–to help me recognize that what I was going through in early midlife is actually a very normal, perhaps essential part of life’s journey.
Author James Hollis' eloquent reading provides the listener with an accessible and yet profound understanding of a universal condition - or what is commonly referred to as the mid-life crisis. The book shows how we may travel this Middle Passage consciously, thereby rendering our lives more meaningful and the second half of life immeasurably richer.
I am a University Distinguished Professor at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. I have devoted my career to studying service quality and ways to improve it, first in the commercial sector and, since 2001, in healthcare. I started my healthcare journey studying at the Mayo Clinic, and I have since done in-residence research at other health systems, most recently, Henry Ford Health in Detroit. My work includes research on improving the patient and family experience in cancer care. Kindness and dignity are vitally important in healthcare – and too often missing. I am on a personal mission to enhance healing in all its forms.
Being Mortal exposes the often-inhumane ways “modern healthcare” cares for older people who are ill. Too often, we send older people to soulless institutionalized living facilities, overtreat them with medications and procedures, and undertreat them with kindness and dignity.
We can do much better in caring for chronically ill elderly people, and Gawande makes a strong case for doing so in this beautifully written book. I assign this book for my healthcare seminar, and it often emboldens students to intervene in the healthcare and living experiences of elderly family members. It happens every semester. I love it!
'GAWANDE'S MOST POWERFUL, AND MOVING, BOOK' MALCOLM GLADWELL
'BEING MORTAL IS NOT ONLY WISE AND DEEPLY MOVING; IT IS AN ESSENTIAL AND INSIGHTFUL BOOK FOR OUR TIMES' OLIVER SACKS
For most of human history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty - every day was a roll of the dice. But now, as medical advances push the boundaries of survival further each year, we have become increasingly detached from the reality of being mortal. So here is a book about the modern experience of mortality - about what it's…
I guess we all have a "calling." Mine has always been to explore the deeper, darker, less palatable aspects of being human. I’m a bit like a space explorer of the human psyche. I’m lucky in the sense that my day job permits me to research, teach, and better understand things like love, death, and loneliness. I’ve been researching and writing about them for many years now. I always treasure books that help me to shed light on these themes. They are like shiny pebbles or jewels that I pick up and keep in my pocket. I hope you enjoy and learn from some of the treasures in my personal collection!
I think I read this book when I was heartbroken. I imagine that’s why most people would initially gravitate to it.
Heartbreak is something we are all likely to experience at least once in a lifetime. I remember how sick I was of being told by other people that they "understood" how I felt and that they’d "been there too." Ginette Paris didn’t do that. In fact, I remember how she stated that nobody really knows what YOU feel like when you’re heartbroken because nobody has lost exactly what YOU’VE lost. There’s never been a loss exactly like your relationship before because what you lost is in some sense completely unique.
The book is full of revelations about heartbreak that brought me far more comfort than the usual well-meaning platitudes.
Look at your broken heart with the curiosity of a naturalist, as you would pay close attention to your pet, to understand what is going on.
The pain of mourning and heartbreak is neurologically similar to being submitted to torture. There seems to be only one way to end that agony and to limit somatic damage; neurobiology calls it an evolutionary jump and psychologists call it an increase in consciousness.
Past theories of grief therapy considered recovery from the point of view of stages: a one-year cycle of mourning was supposed to heal the heart. Not so! A true Liberation…
I guess we all have a "calling." Mine has always been to explore the deeper, darker, less palatable aspects of being human. I’m a bit like a space explorer of the human psyche. I’m lucky in the sense that my day job permits me to research, teach, and better understand things like love, death, and loneliness. I’ve been researching and writing about them for many years now. I always treasure books that help me to shed light on these themes. They are like shiny pebbles or jewels that I pick up and keep in my pocket. I hope you enjoy and learn from some of the treasures in my personal collection!
I cried on behalf of all lobsters when I’d finished listening to the main essay, "Consider the Lobster," in this collection.
For me, it was a profound educational and emotional experience that jolted me into a deep sense of empathy for a creature I’d never really considered all that much up to now.
This celebrated collection of essays from the author of Infinite Jest is "brilliantly entertaining...Consider the Lobster proves once more why Wallace should be regarded as this generation's best comic writer" (Cleveland Plain Dealer).
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person?
David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of John McCain's 2000 presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's…
Soon after 9/11, I had dinner with several American scientists worried about how new security measures would affect international collaborations and foreign-born colleagues. Since science rarely if ever comes up in discourse about the War on Terror, that set me off. I’m always drawn to whatever gets overlooked. I was born in one international city – New York – and have lived in another – Los Angeles – for over 20 years. I’ve spent time on four continents and assisted survivors of violent persecution as they seek asylum – which may explain why I feel compelled to include viewpoints from outside the US and fill in the gaps when different cultural perspectives go missing.
For decades, Holocaust denial was widespread in Arab countries. That’s beginning to change, and Sansal’s harrowing novel – inspired in part by a Nazi officer who escaped to Algeria and became a hero in the war for independence – aids in writing that history back into consciousness. We gain extraordinary intimacy with two brothers as they contend in different ways with the challenges of North African immigrant life in France, the massacre by the Algerian military that claims the lives of their parents, and the discovery of their father’s horrific past. Sansal was attacked for comparing Islamist fundamentalism to the Holocaust and for visiting Israel, but I think it’s clear his intent is to condemn any ideology based on an unyielding and violent intolerance of difference.
“[A] masterly investigation of evil, resistance and guilt, billed as the first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust” from the Nobel Prize–nominated author (Publishers Weekly).
Banned in the author’s native Algeria, this groundbreaking novel is based on a true story and inspired by the work of Primo Levi.
The Schiller brothers, Rachel and Malrich, couldn’t be more dissimilar. They were born in a small village in Algeria to a German father and an Algerian mother and raised by an elderly uncle in one of the toughest ghettos in France. But the similarities end there. Rachel is a model immigrant—hard working,…
I am uniquely qualified to assemble this list because I gave my heart and head to the fictional and true West in fourth grade. When I learned California history, enraptured by images of wild horses and vaqueros, the cruelty of bear and bullfighting (no one talked then about cruelty to “converted” Native Americans), and the myth of Zorro. I grabbed the chance to move to the cowgirl state of Nevada, where I learned to love the scents of sagebrush and alkali flats. Research for my fiction and non-fiction has given me license to ride in a Pony Express reenactment and 10-day cattle drive and spend all night bottle-feeding an orphan mustang.
This ranch-centered book puts a human face on the cost of war.
A best in the West (or at least his small Nevada town) bull rider is physically and mentally torn apart by war. He can’t see the future he envisioned for himself anymore. But the story is really about his younger brother, Cam. I love Cam’s humor most of all, but his devotion to his idolized big brother is what makes this more than a story about a skateboarder turned bull rider.
This book is about family in an opposite way from The Red Pony it confirms the safety net family can provide.
Cam O'Mara, grandson and younger brother of bull-riding champions, is not interested in partaking in the family sport. Cam is a skateboarder, and perfecting his tricks—frontside flips, 360s—means everything until his older brother, Ben, comes home from Iraq, paralyzed from a brain injury. What would make a skateboarder take a different kind of ride? And what would get him on a monstrosity of a bull named Ugly? If Cam can stay on for the requisite eight seconds, could the $15,000 prize bring hope and a future for his big brother?
I have lived in London most of my life, and what I love most about it are the wild places, the spots where the city and nature rub shoulders. When reading fiction, ‘place’ matters a lot to me, and if I am familiar with the setting, I like it to be accurate. That said, I love a little fantasy to stretch the boundaries. As well as being a writer and editor, I have worked part-time in bookshops for over forty years, and during that time, I must have read hundreds of novels set in and around London. These are five of my absolute favourites.
As a bookseller as well as a writer and editor, I believe strongly that good children’s books should also be read by adults.
The setting here is 1683, and the River Thames is frozen. I studied history, and I often stand on London Bridge and try to imagine the flowing water as a field of ice with stalls and side shows on the frozen surface. Embankments and new bridges mean the river no longer freezes, but this story brings historical London to life and allows us to feel what it would have been like.
A magic nocturnal Frost Fair, a lost boy, and a determined twin sister are at the heart of this bewitching story, which is dark yet uplifting–a perfect combination that had me gripped throughout.
'Absolutely stunning... Real emotional depth alongside a fast-paced plot. Fantastic' A F Steadman
An amazing and captivating, curl-up-on-the-sofa debut about a magical frost fair and the lasting power of friendship, perfect for fans of Tamzin Merchant, Abi Elphinstone and Anna James.
The Great Frost of 1683 has London in its icy grip.
Thomasina and her best friend Anne sell sweets on the frozen Thames, amid rumours of the magical Frost Fair that awakens there at night. They say if you can find the fair, Father Winter himself will grant you any wish.
Raised alongside three feral younger brothers in the rash-inducing, subtropical climate of Cairo, Georgia, I am a lifelong resident of the South. A circumstance, no doubt, leaving an indelible mark on my voice as a writer. At this point in my writing career, I write what I know. As a reader, I enjoy exploring the rich stories woven by Southern authors, capturing other places, people, and experiences beyond my own frame of reference. Ultimately, as a Southerner, I endeavor to reconcile the South’s troubled past of racial and social oppression with the romanticized notion others have of this place I call home.
This 2002 novel follows young Harriet Cleve Dufresnes in 1970s Mississippi during the aftermath of the death of her nine-year-old brother, who was killed by hanging in the shadow of unexplained circumstances. I am particularly enamored by the novel’s focus on the customs and dynamics of Harriet’s extended Southern family.
Tartt best describes in her own words why I love this novel: It is “a frightening, scary book about children coming into contact with the world of adults frighteningly.”
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. • “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review
The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets…
Starting at age ten, I loved everything about Superman. I loved his origin story—who wouldn’t root for an alien baby arriving on Earth with superpowers that are eventually used to fight evil? Superman comics were a place for me to escape for entertainment and to dream about becoming something more…maybe something super. I hope kids today will dream about superheroes and, in the end, realize they have superpowers they can use to make their lives and the world a better place. This explains why I connect with the following five books.
I fell in love with these two brothers, Link and Hud, but I couldn’t help asking myself what I would do if I were one of their long line of failed babysitters. Their energy and hi-jinks would challenge anyone. At the same time those same characteristics make Link and Hud loveable and memorable. Never underestimate the creativity and intelligence of a child.
I hope all kids will embrace their imaginations and childhood years to have grand adventures. I loved the mix of comic book storytelling inserted within passages of text.
Lincoln and Hudson Dupre are brothers with what grown-ups call "active imaginations". Link and Hud hunt for yetis in the Himalayas and battle orcs on epic quests. Unfortunately, their imaginary adventures wreak havoc in their real world. Dr. and Mrs. Dupre have tried every babysitter in the neighbourhood and are at their wits' end.
Enter Ms Joyce. Strict and old-fashioned, she proves to be a formidable adversary. The boys don't like her or her rules and decide she's got to go. Through a series of escalating events-told as high-action comic panel sequences-the brothers conspire to undermine Ms Joyce and get…
I’m intrigued by baseball. The passion and drama of the games and the way the sport is nearly always linked to a meaningful relationship with someone dear. That curiosity has only been fueled by the books I’ve read over the years and inspired me to write a baseball story of my own. The All-American is my ninth novel and I couldn’t feel more privileged to have been able to write it.
My college literature professor lent me a copy of this novel twenty-five years ago and I spent an entire summer savoring it while it made me fall in love with baseball.
This epic novel follows the lives of the Chance brothers as they come of age, leave home, and grapple with the changing world of the 1960s. And it’s about the passion and drama and absolutely relational nature of baseball.
I still have my professor’s copy of the book on my shelf. I tried to return it a few years ago, but George wouldn’t take it back. He, apparently, has a habit of keeping several copies on hand to give to students so they’ll fall in love with it as much as he did.
Once in a great while a writer comes along who can truly capture the drama and passion of the life of a family. David James Duncan, author of the novel The River Why and the collection River Teeth, is just such a writer. And in The Brothers K he tells a story both striking and in its originality and poignant in its universality.
This touching, uplifting novel spans decades of loyalty, anger, regret, and love in the lives of the Chance family. A father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered…
