100 books like Demian

With this Hungarian author, I share the same birthday, as well as our mystical philosophy on life. Her book is an epic alchemical tale spanning centuries that describes the evolution of consciousness through subsequent incarnations from one life to the next.

I find not only the book itself fascinating but also the story of how it came into being. The author began to write it in a bomb shelter during WWII. Afterward, the Communists banned it and burned it, yet a few copies were miraculously rescued and hand-copied during dictatorial times.

Today, the book enjoys cult status in its homeland of Hungary. Unfortunately, the English translation is currently out of print, but if you can lay your hands on a version you can read, don’t miss out on this masterpiece.   

I'm a Sagittarius. Promise me a journey that takes me to a far-away land, which along the way initiates into some secrets of our existence, and I will not resist the call. This book is a wonderful blend of adventure and mysticism. It reveals a world that you can access once you open your senses for the perception of energies.

I loved this book so much that I named my forest retreat in the Northern Highlands of Hungary Little Viciente. In the book, Viciente is a place of high vibrational energy located somewhere in the Andes Mountains of Peru. 

Salinger broke a lot of unspoken rules of fiction-writing–and thus life–with Catcher. It was emotionally cauterizing for me as a teenager while incessantly trying, and failing, at learning rules adults apparently didn’t want us to know.

I’m certain many of my contemporaries identified with Holden Caulfield’s stream-of-consciousness introspection as deeply as I did. And when I think back about it, I find myself once again in the grip of how it was: ferreting out how life works but getting no guidance from parents, teachers, or bosses, only the terror of making mistake after mistake until the world didn’t make sense any longer. Just as had happened to Holden, but at last, I understood I was not alone in my confusion.

Emotion, in particular love, knows no bounds of race, culture, past, or future. I think love reaches uncommon heights in times of stress, which accounts for falling in love with abandon–like in wartime. Or when culture curbs or forbids love’s expression.

So here in this book, Lin Kong, a doctor, feels constrained during the Chinese Cultural Revolution–perhaps seeing through its façade of freedom, particularly in his own marriage. And upon that conundrum rests the plot: Lin’s waiting 18 years (by law) for divorce so he can be with the woman he desires. But the longer he waits, the more he desires her; then, once the waiting is over, desire leaves him.

Perhaps it is better for Lin to live in never-ending desire? Was his grass greener on the other side? 

I love this book because Edna Pontellier is perhaps the original flawed yet sympathetic heroine—a character ahead of her time and a symbol of the growing stirrings of feminism.

I underlined many passages in my dog-eared copy from college (my professor was the editor), including the line, “Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman,” a contrast with the other mothers summering on Grand Isle who doted on their children. She’s not what a woman and mother was supposed to be in 1899—she’s in love with a man other than her husband; she eschews the trappings of motherhood; and ultimately she escapes in the most heartbreaking way.

This book was so explosive at the time, that it was pulled from shelves and didn’t enjoy success and a rightful place in the literary cannon until it was reissued in 1966. There’s a reason it’s had a treasured place on my bookshelf for nearly… show more.

I love books that I happen to pick up by chance and fall in love with them. I picked this up at a bookstore in the airport in Johannesburg, South Africa, when I had a long layover. It was Pessl’s debut, and I was drawn in by the strength of the writing on the opening pages. The strength of the writing alone made me unable to put it down, and I finished it on the way back to the U.S.

The main character is immature and often snarky and self-absorbed, but that’s the point. It’s a story about elite high school students, most of whom you’d probably want to slap if you met them in person. But God, it’s so good. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

This was one of my favourite reads ever: I truly lived through all of its pages. It is the true story of Hayashi, an 8th Dan Karate master teaching his protégé student not only martial arts but life.

I savoured every page, longing and aspiring for a similar relationship to explore such depths of the human psyche. It was one of those rare occasions when I felt the urge to contact the author, which led to a unique and wonderful friendship between Hayashi and myself.  

This book is so amazing because it describes the real-life spiritual adventures of the legendary transpersonal psychologist, Dr. Stan Grof, who has taken many journeys into non-ordinary states of consciousness.

The book describes what becomes possible when we shift our awareness away from a mere materialist outlook on the world and give consciousness a fundamental role. I like to refer back to it, again and again, to remind myself that the limitations of my perception are the limitations of my mind: If I open up my mind, even the so-called impossible will begin to happen.  

Myers brilliantly exposes the limitations of thinking about personality types as stereotypes. The book explores the nature of individuation and the steps to finding solutions for our one-sidedness.

Edinger was a student of Carl Jung’s and this book picks up from Jung’s essential essay, “God’s Answer to Job”. Jung realized that God was in a dialectical relationship with his “Chosen People,” and when Job maintained his faith despite being subject to unspeakable cruelties, this compelled God to incarnate as Christ. Following Jung, Edinger believes we are currently living through the archetype of the Apocalypse. The word means “revealing” or “uncovering.” Psychologically, the Apocalypse is the “Coming of the self” into conscious realization. It is a point of maturity where we have gained the self-knowledge needed to integrate, rather than project, the Shadow. This portends a collective incarnation of God into our human world.