100 books like Emerson

This book has been extremely influential and helpful to my journey as a creative photographer. This is a short book and covers material that is often not easy because it gets at some of the deep-seated reasons that many of us find it hard to consistently create art.

The underlying issue is “resistance”: a force that is the antithesis of creativity and serves to stymie us all to a greater or lesser degree. I have found the succinct discussion of resistance in the book, along with tools and techniques for overcoming resistance, one of the most valuable discussions I have encountered in my journey as a photographer and artist.

I started flipping through this book in a bookstore, admittedly with a certain amount of skepticism about another trendy tome on how to be more creative, this one by a well-known music producer. To my surprise, I could not put this book down. There is a great deal of wisdom in these pages.

This is a book that teaches one how to be, not specifically how to create art. But being comes before creation, and I found many ideas that have stayed with me as I pursue my passion for creating beautiful imagery.

Charles de Gaulle is a consequential leader of the 20th century.

In an extraordinary turn of events, this little-known colonel emerged as the leader of France in exile during Hitler’s occupation. Following the Second World War he became a dominant political figure.

He can be seen as the founder of modern France, whose shadow reaches into our present moment.

In the 1930s he wrote a brilliant mediation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword. Though distilled from his lived experience in the military, de Gaulle provides insights that apply in many situations.

The book takes on additional significance when one considers the project of self-creation that the author undertook—first on himself, then on the re-creation of France, finally on Europe and the world, in his time and into our own.

Montaigne, a 16th-century French aristocrat, is regarded as a pioneer of the essay as a form of written expression.

This collection is skillfully edited and beautifully designed. The essays run the gamut of human experience, continuing to have resonance for readers and writers alike.

Topics include: politics and history; virtues and vices; personal interactions with friends and others; travel; viewpoints of life at various ages and stages.

Marshall is my favorite working biographer, and this book had me hooked from page 1.

Fuller’s life almost demands Hollywood treatment. This early feminist thinker was a great friend, intellectual sparring partner, and collaborator of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the first editor to publish Henry David Thoreau.

Less well known is her second career as a pioneering newspaper reporter, who eventually became the first female foreign correspondent in US history. Her dispatches on the cultural scene in Europe and then her eyewitness accounts of the revolutions of 1848 were riveting. Traveling with her Italian aristocrat-turned-revolutionary lover and their young child, she returned to the US with a draft of a history of the Roman republic.

But the ship sank off Fire Island; Fuller, her lover, their child, and the manuscript were lost. But thanks to Marshall, we at least have her story!

I recommend this book because it had a great influence on me as a young child. Moving through the world, particularly as a black woman, requires a great deal of self-reliance and resourcefulness. This book/essay speaks to universal truths that are often forgotten.

I found myself equipping my toolbox with quotes that have been relevant to my present day working life. I learned how to relate in a deeper way to myself and society while crafting a value system that, as I age, is allowed to become malleable.

This obscure 1896 book is a collection of interviews with dead luminaries. At least, that’s what the psychic author alleges. Inside you’ll find conversations with Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Discover their wisdom from beyond the veil, and in the case of Ben Franklin, you can enjoy a new set of his famous aphorisms, including this one: “Spiritual knowledge, like gems hidden in the bowels of the earth, is only to be reached by patient upturning of the soil.”

Jeffrey Sklansky is that rare academic with a writer’s literary imagination, which serves the reader well in engaging The Soul’s Economy, a riveting and dense intellectual history of the market’s emergence as the organizing principle of not only economic life, but of a distinctly new moral sensibility between 1820 and 1920. 

Sklansky explores this far-reaching turn of events through a series of dedicated readings of America’s leading philosophers and pundits of the times, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Dewey, who collectively recast the pursuit of wealth into an ethic of personal rectitude and even the source of society’s general welfare.

You might be thinking, what is a philosophy book doing on a list of books to make me a better investor?

Here’s a bit of a secret about investing; learning the technical details about how to build a portfolio is the easy part. The hard part is staying cool during market crashes, bear markets, and recessions. The easiest way to lose money as an investor is to panic sell at the worst possible time.

The philosophy of stoicism is defined by focusing our attention on only the things we can control and making peace with the things we can’t. That is also the definition of a great long-term investor. You can’t control the markets but you can control how you react. 

Though it focuses on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s Demonology is the arcane inversions, doublings, and “unconscious” of transcendentalism. Between many of Emerson’s pronouncements falls this shadow of Demonology, which provides key tenets of his philosophy. Demonology is the cumulative residue of an attempt to explain away that which resists Emerson’s theory that nature is consistent, explicable, rational, and benign. Encapsulating the uncanny, and the inexplicable forces of dreams, animals, and pseudosciences, Demonology consolidates all that is “outside” and negated for Emerson—everything that is, in his terminology, “not me.” Demonology locates the cracks in Emerson’s consciousness, as well as the hobgoblins in his notion of Reason. Emerson’s conception of nature here is notably modern, and often sounds Lacanian—the demonological exception or irrational, that which cannot be fully understood or described, is the necessary anomaly or remainder on which the universality of nature depends.