Here are 100 books that Moon Magic fans have personally recommended if you like
Moon Magic.
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When I was nine years old, my first poem was ‘published’ in my elementary school’s annual creative writing booklet. It was such a thrill to see my poem in print and to know lots of people would be reading it. I was hooked on writing, but it would be many, many years before I was published again. While I know it’s never too late to publish a book, I regret how long I waited. Young writers, don’t be afraid to go for it and don’t ever feel you’re not old enough for your words to matter. Readers need your unique, fresh vision.
I love that this book was the result of a dare! In 1816, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley and three friends held a contest to see who could write the scariest story. Mary’s story—like her monster—has since taken on a life of its own and today permeates all forms of storytelling.
I find it amusing that my favorite version of the monster is the one Mel Brooks gave us in Young Frankenstein. I wonder what Mary Shelley would think if she knew how much her acceptance of a dare would change storytelling forever.
I like to revisit the original story from time to time to savor the gothic drama and flowery writing. If I’m reading it on a dark and stormy night, all the better.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
I have always been intrigued by fantastical world-building that is complex, detailed, forensically credible, and immeasurably encyclopedic in scope. It should propel you to a world that feels almost as real as the world you leave behind but with intricate magic systems and razor-shape lore. Ironically, some of my choices took a while to love, but once they “sunk in,” everything changed. Whenever life gets too much, it has been cathartic, essential even, to transport to another universe and find solace in prose dedicated to survival, soul, and renewal.
Thomas Covernant is a leper shunned by society but finds himself in the Land where some herald him as the one who’ll save them from an evil sorcerer, Lord Foul. He is not always a sympathetic character, but being on society’s edge where all and sundry openly shun him can do that to anyone.
What I loved the most was the captivating Land with its many peoples and inhabitants, such as the sentient woods and the Forestals that ward them, the Elohim, a benign people with special powers, the Giants and the evil Viles, Waynhim, and ur-viles.
Outside being exotic, the world feels credible and immersive, especially the “wild magic” Covernant begins to wield. I ended up caring passionately about what happened to the Land and wanting Covernant to acknowledge his worth.
'Comparable to Tolkien at his best' WASHINGTON POST
Instantly recognised as a modern fantasy classic, Stephen Donaldson's uniquely imaginative and complex THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT, THE UNBELIEVER became a bestselling literary phenomenon that transformed the genre.
Lying unconscious after an accident, writer Thomas Covenant awakes in the Land - a strange, beautiful world locked in constant conflict between good and evil.
But Covenant, too, has been transformed: weak, angry, and alone in our world, he now holds powers beyond imagining and is greeted as a saviour. Can this man truly become the hero the Land requires?
I have pursued escapism in all its forms for most of my life. From studying the otherworlds of ancient civilisations, especially in my native Britain, including Arthurian tales and those of the Welsh Mabinogion to the fictional worlds of Tolkien and Lewis’s Narnia. I am lucky enough to live in the Snowdonia Mountains with a wealth of legends and myth-making landscapes on my doorstep. This led to a practical interest in The Western Mystery Tradition and from there an academic curiosity toward occult societies and their founders. I believe there is a distinct link between our spiritual morality and physical mortality that is worth exploring through experience.
Few people can claim the title The Wickedest Man in the World bestowed upon one of the most vilified and revered characters of the nineteenth century, Alistair Crowley.
Writer, mountain climber, occultist, and dare I say visionary, Crowley has rubbed shoulders with both literary giants and personalities of the early nineteen hundreds. A member of several secret societies and founder of his own Temple of Thelema and surrounded by some of the strangest characters one could hope to meet in a single lifetime.
This biography recounts passages from his own diaries and manuscripts bequeathed to the author after his death and anecdotes both funny and disturbing about a man who lived a most extraordinary life. Eventually dying in poverty at a rooming house in Brighton.
I have pursued escapism in all its forms for most of my life. From studying the otherworlds of ancient civilisations, especially in my native Britain, including Arthurian tales and those of the Welsh Mabinogion to the fictional worlds of Tolkien and Lewis’s Narnia. I am lucky enough to live in the Snowdonia Mountains with a wealth of legends and myth-making landscapes on my doorstep. This led to a practical interest in The Western Mystery Tradition and from there an academic curiosity toward occult societies and their founders. I believe there is a distinct link between our spiritual morality and physical mortality that is worth exploring through experience.
John and Caitin Mathews have a vast body of work on the subject of spirituality. This is one of their first and, in my opinion, one of their best.
I recommend this title to anyone who feels a deep connection to Celtic heritage and the old Gods and Goddesses of early British and Welsh ancestry. I was especially entranced by the pathworking techniques, a guided visualisation journey into the ‘otherworld’ of our native ancestors. Having undertaken several of these guided visualisation journeys, I had some deeply personal and life-enhancing experiences that I still vividly recall some thirty years later.
A great introduction to the Western Mystery Tradition.
I’ve always had equally balanced interests in the arts/humanities and the natural sciences. I started as a physics major in college but added a second major in philosophy after encountering the evolutionary theories of Hegel, Bergson, Alexander, Whitehead, and Teilhard de Chardin. This interest continued in graduate school at Northwestern, where my first year coincided with the arrival of Prof. Errol E. Harris, who had a similar focus and would direct my doctoral dissertation in philosophy, whose title was From Ontology to Praxis: A Metaphilosophical Inquiry into Two Philosophical Paradigms. One of the “paradigms” was reductionist; the other was emergentist.
Mario Bunge’s study is notable for the variety of its analyses of various diverse phenomena in which emergence is evident: in general systems theory, for example, as well as in language systems, social analysis, theories of holism, social systems, biology, epistemology, and biomedical sciences.
Bunge singles out a sense of “convergence” that highlights the integration of multiple sub-processes. It’s not just the specific relation between distinct parts that is a hallmark of emergence, but the integrated relation among these sub-processes. This book certainly broadened my perspective of the whole subject area.
Two problems continually arise in the sciences and humanities, according to Mario Bunge: parts and wholes and the origin of novelty. In Emergence and Convergence, he works to address these problems, as well as that of systems and their emergent properties, as exemplified by the synthesis of molecules, the creation of ideas, and social inventions.
Along the way, Bunge examines further topical problems, such as the search for the mechanisms underlying observable facts, the limitations of both individualism and holism, the reach of reduction, the abuses of Darwinism, the rational choice-hermeneutics feud, the modularity of the brain vs. the unity…
When I realized years ago that the universe isn’t merely a concrete reality, I turned to metaphysical/visionary books to understand my experience. There weren’t that many books, but the ones I found became dear friends. Now, after decades as a freelance editor, I am writing fiction in this genre because I believe stories can be as powerful as expository writing for awakening consciousness. However, I’ve noticed many metaphysical writers discourage the engagement and commitment needed to make this world a better place. For this reason, I seek to gather—and contribute to—writing that is visionary and also advocates for democracy and social justice.
The worn and dog-eared copy of Strange News From Another Star has graced my bookshelf for almost 50 years. (Note that this and not the more recent edition, which is missing some of the best original stories, is what I’m recommending.)
Hesse spoke to me at a time in my life when I didn’t realize fiction existed that could reflect my own metaphysical experiences. His stories mirrored my own dreams and visions and confirmed that I wasn’t alone in the world. And he did this in a timeless way that embraced the philosophical along with the political.
When I published Orphan, Agent, Prima, Pawn, in which Soviet-era psychological warfare plays a heavy role, I happily washed my hands of Russian intrigue and turned to more benign, pastoral inspirations – my life-long relationship with an idyllic cathedral town in Wiltshire, for example. Just days later, the world learned that a certain Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov shared my fondness for Salisbury’s “world-famous 123-metre spire,” the glories of which prompted their 72-hour visit from Moscow (and overlapped with the botched poisoning of a KGB defector living down the road). Since then, I find myself drawn to works that explore the interstices of morality, criminality, and great construction projects.
Golding was living in Salisbury when he wrote The Lord of the Flies, and his day job as a teacher at a local boys' school left a clear imprint on his dystopic view of young men left to their own hierarchical devices. But the classroom also provided a very literal view of the inspiration for The Spire, a dense and disturbing parable in which rationality and physics crumble under evangelical mania and corporal lust. It is the story of Jocelin, Dean of a medieval cathedral, who, obsessed with a divine “vision in stone,” insists that the spire be raised to impossible heights. There is no happy ending in this cautionary tale of construction hubris, yet I return to it regularly in search of solace.
Succumb to a churchman's apocalyptic vision in this prophetic tale by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies, introduced by Benjamin Myers (narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch as an audiobook).
There were three sorts of people. Those who ran, those who stayed, and those who were built in.
Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire. His master builder fearfully advises against it, for the old cathedral was miraculously built without foundations. But Jocelin is obsessed with fashioning his prayer in stone. As his halo of hair grows wilder and…
Through both a former career as an engineer and my writing, I have developed a craving (bordering on obsession) for all things scientific, historical, archaeological, metaphysical, and a more than avid interest in quantum physics which I like to introduce into my books and stories. I also have a fondness for the dark and macabre, for the bizarre, the wondrous, and the plain out there. The weirder the concept – the more I like it… get consumed by it.
I found this book by accident and was very glad I came across it while pottering around the shelves of my favourite second-hand bookshop. On first appearances, the book looks like a missing-person-stroke-body-turning-up-many-years-later-in-mysterious-circumstances kind of story, but it goes much further into a world of conspiracy theories, malign medical technologies, and seemingly unfathomable crimes. I loved the sheer pace of the book – very hard to put down – and how Iain Edward Henn set about weaving the characters, settings, and indeed reader into a possible (probable) new scientific paradigm.
I boast a two-decade-long career in the software industry. Over the years, I have diligently honed my programming skills across a multitude of languages, including JavaScript, C++, Java, Ruby, and Clojure. Throughout my career, I have taken on various management roles, from Team Leader to VP of Engineering. No matter the role, the thing I have enjoyed the most is to make complex topics easy to understand.
Naming and Necessity had a profound impact on my understanding of the importance of using proper names in programming (for functions, variables, etc.). I was fascinated by Kripke’s exploration of the usage of names in our day-to-day language. His arguments challenged my thinking and introduced me to new ways of considering reference and meaning.
The clarity and rigor of his analysis pushed me to refine my reasoning skills. Despite being a challenging read, I found it incredibly rewarding.
'Naming and Necessity' has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here reissued in a newly corrected form with a new preface by the author. If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics, or in philosophy of language, this is it.
That’s the eternal question, isn’t it? Out here in the manifestation, I am Duff McDonald, author and journalist, father of Marguerite, husband of Joey, and general man about town. I’m a Canadian who moved to the U.S. to go to college and never went back. But who am I, really? I am the same thing as everyone else, a speck of consciousness in the possibility machine, a perfect creation. This whole thing has divine origins, something I only realized not that long ago, and it set me free. I can’t wait to see what happens next. I have, of late, discovered that maximizing one’s awareness is the main quest of a human life.
Sri Aurobindo is, in my opinion, the greatest writer of them all. His poetic prose hypnotizes while swirling around the most profound ideas of all — What is the divine? How can we know the truth? What is the best way to live? The Life Divine is Aurobindo’s magnum opus, his articulation of the path to self-realization and how to use it to make the world a better place. In other words, it’s everything you need to know.
The Life Divine explores for the Modern mind the great streams of Indian metaphysical thought, reconciling the truths behind each and from this synthesis extends in terms of consciousness the concept of evolution. The unfolding of Earth's and man's spiritual destiny is illuminated, pointing the way to a Divine Life on Earth. Index.
