Love Hamlet's Mill? Readers share 100 books like Hamlet's Mill...

Reading Graves’ biography, I get the sense of not just his wry humour but of his enduring pain. When he covers his First World War service, his jokes are cracked out of exasperation at the orders he receives that led to a succession of “bloody balls-ups,” and retold through a wince.

Graves’ biography has been described as “a version of events that told the poetic truth about his experiences…rather than being primarily fact-driven.” I believe all biographies are a form of fiction as our own memories are more often a product of our imagination than photographic recall.

Graves’ poetic retelling allows a more universal resonance beyond the trenches of the Somme than if he just stuck to the facts of that time and place, and resonated more for me because of this. 

Back in the 18teens, the president of Yale somehow had enough free time to lead the senior class in debates of various “questions” followed by an extemporaneous “decision” on who was right.

Yale’s President Dwight certainly had plenty of amusing ideas (that California was frequently visited by mariners from “Hindostan”; that Africans who “never expose their faces to the sun are white”), but what makes his “decisions” so interesting is that many of the questions force him to examine counterfactual histories.

And so he describes what the world would have been like if the Crusades had not happened (Europe bound in a perpetual feudal system!) or if the South were to secede (and this is in 1813, remember!—anyway, it wouldn’t turn out well, Dwight says).

(I found an 1833 copy of this book jammed behind a shelf and torn to pieces back when I was working in a used book… show more.

Long before people had any tolerance for such nonsense—meaning back in 1822—an anonymous genius published an version of the life of Lord Nelson unlike any other. I mean specifically that this book, Albion, is 234 pages long and contains approximately forty-five impressionistic run-on sentences.

In 1922 such an account of a recent war—compare with David Jones’s strange, difficult WWI prose-poem "In Parenthesis," for example—would be merely audacious, but in 1822, it was completely baffling; which is too bad, because for two hundred years the text has lingered in obscurity. (I have reason to believe I’m the only living human to have read it in its entirety.)

But a pointillist biography of Nelson—as narrated by the great man himself to the angel that bears his soul to heaven after his death at Trafalgar—is exactly what the world has been missing!

There have been many descriptions of Atlantis published before, but very few have been written by someone who has actually been there, via psychic time travel, or at least via a series of dreams inspired by Atlantean stone furniture in Bolivia.

Fortunately, Walter F. Laredo has left us just such a book, and if he sometimes plays coy (maybe it was all just a dream???), he wonderfully includes an appendix of technical schematics of Atlantean inventions (bionic eyes, “chemical laser” beams) alongside full-color paintings of Atlantean architecture and the occasional nude Atlantean woman.

It defines the basic structure of every myth and is a foundational work in the myth genre. I have always turned to this book for reminders on how a “journey story” should work on the page, and it never fails to inform. 

The book is a distillation of the work of legendary mythologist Joseph Campbell and his theory of the monomyth, or the single story underlying all human mythology. Vogler’s book is accessible and practical and another essential for every writer's toolbox.

The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell is probably best known for A Hero with a Thousand Faces, but it’s another book—Pathways to Bliss—that I turn to like a travel guide to my own spiritual journey. In prompting readers to explore archetypes to help them create their personal mythology, Campbell believes that life should be a journey to finding our bliss. This is a book about personal growth for people who want to self-discovery in a larger—mythical—context.

Wolves may be more prevalent in literature and film than they are in reality. For an ecocritical perspective on canid cameos in American narrative, Robisch examines 200 texts to understand the real and imagined wolves and their places across cultures and what that tells us about humans and nature more broadly.

Point blank, this book changed the way I see the world. While on its surface, it might not seem like a mental health book, it is a powerful testament that story is the bedrock of consciousness. In reading it, I was asked to reevaluate many of my ideas and truths.

It illustrated how much of what I think makes us different is a shared story and a place where I can connect to others if I’m willing to rattle the cage of the stories I “know” to be “immutable.” This translates into every story I tell about myself and my world. I’ve read it repeatedly, and every time, I pull something new from it.

It has helped me grow by expanding my worldview and has led me to a more comprehensive understanding of the mind, humanity, and the stories we share.

This short punchy book is written by ex-policy advisor Alex Evans, following his disillusionment with high power international climate politics. Having worked for the British Government and for the UN Secretary-General in the 2000s, Evans realised that scientific evidence and rational arguments were not enough to change the world for the better. In The Myth Gap, he therefore makes the case to recognise – or else to create – different stories, or myths, which provide the orientation and motivation for different people groups to act out change in their own different worlds. No one story will do the job; we need many.

A controversial, scholarly attempt at synthesizing and organizing the foundations of world mythologies may seem a strange selection. It’s certainly an enormous task, and Witzel could be wrong, but this sweeping book tantalizes and enriches any open mind with an interest in mankind’s story on Earth: two great separate migrations out of Africa carried differing concepts of the world’s origins. The first made its way around India to Australia. In this story, the world had no origin, it always existed in Dreamtime. Mankind emerged into time and joined all creatures and their landscapes. The second migration into Europe and Asia brought the foundations of Western traditions. The story is more familiar: an all-powerful deity created the world out of chaos or primordial waters, fashioned and breathed life into human beings, and thrust them into a world of constant struggle and conflict. If for some reason that doesn't sound familiar, reread… show more.