39 books like Rituals Of Blood

This country was settled primarily by Puritan extremists who imprinted their deep distrust of the body’s needs onto future generations. The Calvinist obsession with sin and predestination led to a uniquely American situation. As wealth became a sign of grace, poverty indicated moral failure.

Weber’s classic book describes the process in which a perspective that began in renunciation was transformed into the drive to work incessantly in the pursuit of worldly success and, eventually, conspicuous consumption. As the strictly religious fervor dissipated over time, the competitive quest for efficiency, productivity, wealth, and the self-validation they symbolized remained and became our most fundamental value.

What others would later call the “American Dream” endures because, like no other myth, it promises fulfillment both in this world and the next. This helped me understand our obsession with individualism and why America ignores or mistreats many of its children simply because their parents are… show more.

My introduction to world mythology was Joseph Campbell, who described a nearly universal narrative – or monomyth – in which a young man (such as Christ, Percival, or the Buddha) ventures from his land, defeats opponents or temptations and returns with a critical gift for his people.

America, however, inverted this myth in profoundly important ways. In our story, repeated over three centuries in thousands of sermons, novels, movies, television, and video games, an innocent and racially pure community is threatened by evil (usually non-white).

When democratic institutions fail to suppress the threat, a selfless superhero arrives – from elsewhere – to defeat the villains and restore the community to harmony. Then, however, disdaining the feminine values of community and relationship, this hero disappears (often into the West).

I realized that he is the model for both our ideas of distant fathering as well as our unshakable belief in American… show more.

This is the scariest book I have ever read. The authors, a communications professor and a psychologist (and veteran), argue that nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States.

The doctrine that provides the central experience of Christian faith is the sacrifice of an irreplaceable son by an all-powerful father whose will it was that the son should die violently. In the modern world, and especially in America, nationalism has taken on and replicated this mythic function.

What keeps the group together and makes us feel unified is not the sacrifice of the enemy but the sacrifice of the very best of our own. Through successful sacrifice (when enough of our young men are killed), internal hostilities are discharged and the group is re-unified. Sacrifice restores the authority of the nation/god and reconsolidates the group.

This is why we die for the flag, commit our children to do… show more.

This journalist, screenwriter, and novelist is well-versed in psychology, mythology, history, and musicology. His essay in this book, Hear That Long Snake Moan, is the single best piece of non-fiction I have ever read, and it inspired me to write my book.

Our disease – the Western divorce of consciousness from flesh – appears as consumerism, environmental degradation, fundamentalism, perpetual war, genocide, and racism. Yet, mysteriously, it may be possible that the terrible uprooting and enslavement of some fifty million black people over three centuries actually initiated a great healing process.

For all its sorrows, the twentieth century saw periods when Dionysian madness seized the Apollonian mind in its flight from the body and brought it back to Earth. African-American music fundamentally altered America and began the slow process of cleaning out the festering wounds underlying puritanism, nationalism, and materialism. We have a long way to go, but Ventura has… show more.

Tim’s stories about Michael Jordan are worth the price of admission alone. What I really love about this book is how Tim breaks down the mindset of a champion – what it takes to overcome the daily challenges that come your way and thrive when the odds are working against you. The audiobook version also has great chapter intros by Tim.

Hanif Abdurraqib has a way of making you forget you’re reading poetry while also reminding you that nothing else could be as poetic as one of his poems. They always unravel in a way only his unique way of storytelling permits. It’s truly a skill that is mastered beautifully in this collection.

I’m both inspired and depressed by this book. Yes, the book itself is on the depressing side, but what truly saddens me about it is that I’ll never write as well as Richard Yates. He packs so much into this 57,000-word work that it almost defies logic. Still, he’s an inspiration as a writer, and I will always use him as a guidepost. No one’s ever going to confuse me with Michael Jordan, either, but I’m still going to shoot hoops (poorly) in my driveway.

In addition to the many books on meditation and mindfulness practice, I read performance books to add that angle to my own book. Even if someone only wanted to run faster, jump higher, or hit a better golf shot, I wanted them to find something more. This is also true of Mumford’s book. He offers profound advice for athletes of any type learned from his experience and the journeys of the professional athletes he has coached. There’s kindness without sugar-coating and profound vulnerability on these pages. I read it straight through.

I love the film The Wicker Man (released in 1973) and was delighted to discover this novelisation from its director and screenwriter.

Full of pagan religion and ritual sacrifice on remote Summerisle, it is wonderfully creepy. Nor is it a flat retelling of the film but an expansion of the character of poor Sergeant Howie. Set up by Lord Summerisle to be the May sacrifice, he is tormented and abused as he searches for a missing child and on film is shown as priggish and cold.

Yet in the book, he is brave, vulnerable, doggedly trying to do the right thing in the face of adversity. He also performs a touchingly heroic act at the end of the book even as he suffered - I admit to shedding a tear. 

Can you call it “urban fantasy” when most of the action happens in rural areas? You really get a sense of how much young Paxton Locke lost when his mother murdered his father to summon a demon, and how that shapes him in the present into a man who goes out of his way to help others all over the country. Paxton isn’t the only character whose layers we get to dig into either. Without spoiling anything, he does pick up a sidekick in his travels who is more than meets the eye, and the narration occasionally switches to some other colourful characters on their own arcs to intersect Paxton’s.