100 books like Hocus Bogus

Candide is wonderful for many reasons, but above all because it is an equal opportunity parody.

Voltaire spares no one as he spoofs the usual suspects, such as religion, colonialism, and the nobility, but also the Enlightenment’s excessive optimism, philosophical speculation, and rationalism. Voltaire’s greatest setups are favored upon young Candide’s mentor, Dr. Pangloss who, in the face of every monstrous, absurd tragedy that befalls Candide, insists that all is well in this “best of all possible worlds.”

I also love that this crazy, tragic farce ends with a cautiously optimistic invitation to “cultivate our garden,” – to leave philosophical speculation to the philosophers, and instead to focus on concrete efforts to make the world a better place

I first read this book exactly 50 years ago, back in 1974, when I was 26. Ever since then, I have reread Jaroslav Hašek's masterpiece every single year, always in February. It is the gloomiest month of the year in Europe when our tonus is at its lowest, and we desperately need something to cheer us up.

The hilarious story of the good soldier is precisely that “injection” of optimism, serenity, élan vital that helps me make it through the last winter months till the arrival of the Spring. Although I already know by heart many passages from Svejk, I still laugh aloud while reading them—reading about the instinctive wisdom of an ordinary, small Czech man trying to comically outsmart the demonic forces of History…

Andrija’s a lifeguard on the river in a small town in the Balkans. During the war, he jumps in to save a man from drowning. Turns out he wasn’t a local, or even a partisan, but a high-ranking Nazi officer. Labelled a collaborator, Andrija flees at the end of the war and ends up an odd-job man in West Germany. When his employer falls into his own swimming pool, Andrija is convicted of his murder—for the man who died was the officer he’d once saved. In prison, Andrija discovers a book by Plato and he tries to write his own defense as if he were a philosopher too. The contortions he gets into as he tries to undo the tangle he’s been put in by history get funnier and funnier every time you reread this forgotten classic.

This is the first and probable the only truly comic novel to come out of the old USSR. Set in the army during World War II, it riffs unsparingly on the absurdities of Soviet life and takes digs at human follies of every kind. The most memorable chapter, which brings tears to my eyes just when I think about it, contains a recipe for homebrew vodka made from the commonest of human products. Don’t miss this one! You’ll not look at your garden the same way ever again. 

It can be incredibly frustrating to try to talk about how broken the mental healthcare system is (especially in the United States). Most people have no frame of reference for it.

Similarly the impact mental illness can have on family and loved ones is, for many, uncharted territory. Enter No One Care About Crazy People.

Powers expertly weaves the history of mental healthcare in America together with the story of his family’s battles with schizophrenia. The result is a heartbreaking and beautiful and horrifying and eye-opening book that leaves you better equipped to have those frustrating conversations. 

I’m not going to lie to you, this is a hard one to read. It hurts. That said, it is one of my all-time favorite books.

Lily’s mom has schizophrenia and Lily is terrified that she might get it too. Lily gets personally involved in a story at her newspaper internship about an abandoned elephant calf. Feeling a kinship with the elephant, Lily goes through extraordinary lengths to make sure the calf finds a safe home, while at the same time, realizing that she has begun to show signs of mental illness. Fischer combines mental illness, family, friendship, and animal welfare into a riveting, thought-provoking book. I loved how she showed the reader how a character can live with the early stages of schizophrenia without losing her sense of self and purpose. 

This isn’t a crime book but it does involve an unravelling of a mystery. The story spans three timelines, childhood recollections of a tragic accident, in which the main character Matt’s brother dies, the aftermath of the incident and then the present day, in which Matt is being treated for schizophrenia in a mental hospital. Too often those suffering with schizophrenia get a hackneyed handling by creatives but author Nathan Flier, a former mental health nurse, paints vivid and insightful observations into this poorly misunderstood condition. 

I flat-out love Michael Crichton’s 1980 jungle-adventure novel Congo, which uses for inspiration H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 breakout adventure King Solomon’s Mines, the protagonist of which is hunter/trader Allan Quatermain. King Solomon’s Mines was about seeking diamonds in central Africa, as is Congo.

The main character in the book is Karen Ross who is asked by her high-tech company to learn why the previous diamond-seeking expedition vanished. Beyond that, the book perfectly exemplifies the technical thriller Crichton invented in the 1960s with Andromeda Strain, written on two levels at once, the action and adventure layer meshing seamlessly with the layer explaining the world’s most up-to-the-minute sophisticated technology.

Note that the last sentence of Congo reads: “The projected intersection point now marked a field of black quatermain lava with an average depth of eight hundred meters.” The name “Quatermain” is sufficiently close to the geological term “quaternary”… show more.

Hearing voices is considered a symptom of schizophrenia and can quickly lead to hospital lockup, medication, and being shunned by society as “mentally ill.” In this fascinating account, Smith reveals the truth about this experience we call “madness” – hearing voices is actually a normal human experience across history and culture. Poets, religious visionaries, people spending time alone or grieving – even Freud, Gandhi, actor Anthony Hopkins, singer Lady Gaga -- all heard voices, and anyone under the right kind of stress can hear voices. The problem only arises when people hear distressing voices and have nowhere to go for help other than being treated as ill by a doctor.

Psychiatry made the catastrophic mistake of calling homosexuality a mental disease, and for many decades LGBT people were abducted, confined in hospitals, drugged, tortured, and killed for the mental crime of being different. Today people who hear voices are also… show more.

When a friend first handed me her copy of Esmé Weijun Wang’s book, I imagined it would sit unread on my shelf for a long time. Given how much time I spend in my professional life working with people with severe mental illness, I assumed Wang’s personal account of her struggle to find a diagnosis and effective, compassionate treatment would be redundant for me.

I was so, so, so wrong. I read nearly the entire essay collection in one sitting—it is stunning, somehow scholarly and deeply personal at the same time. The book is required reading for anyone who wants to better understand one of the least understood diagnoses in the history of psychiatry.