100 books like The Dice Man

This book is like a forbidden fruit, tempting and dangerous. But it came to my rescue when I’d lost sight of my own dreams for a little while. Sure, Ayn Rand’s philosophy has many simplistic flaws, but in this novel, she channels a Nietzschean spirit that jolts you awake. It was a call to never forget to embrace my ambition and to continue to forge my own writing path even when readers seem indifferent.

In a world full of compromises, there’s power in refusing to settle for less than your own extraordinary potential.

This book isn’t just ink and paper; it’s a lifeline. I’ve witnessed its power to pull someone back from the edge.

For me, as a teenager, it was an awakening. Zarathustra’s spirit resonated with my own zest for life, a stark contrast to the negativity that often surrounds us. It ignited a spark within me, an echo of the boundless creativity I felt as a child, eager to shape new worlds. A reminder that within each of us lies the potential for greatness, waiting to be unleashed.

I think, therefore, I am.

Descartes’ ability to reject dogma and academic jargon, focusing instead on his own thought process to find truth, amazed me. As a writer, this is crucial: avoid parroting others and find your unique voice and personal worldview. At the same time, Descartes’ radical doubt felt risky. I don’t want to become overly critical of reality.

I see his work as a guide to intellectual empathy. It’s a way to understand ourselves and others through our shared human need for meaning.

Truth doesn’t have to be flashy to captivate. I was instantly drawn to the mystique of this book’s manuscript and the secretive author who sent it to me. In it, I discovered that beauty is a feeling, and anxiety is a prelude to exhilaration.

Normally, I'm not one for self-help, but the poetic wisdom in this book resonated on a personal level, a comforting reminder that healing isn’t a one-size-fits-all journey.

I loved this no-nonsense take on consumer culture. Listen, I love to shop. I love an outfit. But Aja Barber’s writing was a necessary wake-up call when it came to my spending habits—what’s driving them and how they are impacting the planet.

It’s easy to think the world’s environmental and social issues driven by consumerism can’t be fixed with individual choice, so why bother changing? While that’s true on some level, I feel spiritually (and financially) lighter when I am buying less and caring better for what I already own.

This book helped me finally break some shopping habits I wasn’t proud of and gave me a framework to continue questioning which of my habits are driven by our consumer culture rather than my own genuine desires. 

I was still a child when the Vietnam War ended, but for some reason, I always felt it was my war. It’s what I read about; it filed the movies I watched in high school. It was the war we trained for when I joined the Marines.

Marlantes arrived in Vietnam about the time I was born. Like the three preceding it, his memoir was written with a great deal of time for reflection. I feel that this interval between the action and the recounting of it adds a level of complexity to remembrances of a very harrowing time.

As the author and philosopher Heather Widdows makes clear, one of the big reasons why appearance has come to mean so much to us, and we spend so much time, energy, and resources on upgrading our looks, is because physical beauty has wrongly become conflated with worthiness and character.

In other words, we assume if you look good, you’re a good, moral person. In this comprehensive yet fast-paced read (which laid an academic groundwork for a lot of the reporting in my own book), Widdows connects the dots between ethics and beauty and makes the case for why we should resist the increasing demands of beauty ideals. 

Jacob Needleman’s Money and the Meaning of Life is the most influential and inspiring book by far for the development of life planning movement in financial advice.

A masterful storyteller with his own set of characters, Needleman guides us into the mystery of how money works and what money is really about. Going back and forth between money’s practicalities and the deeper longings we all have for freedom, he challenges us to explore what freedom really means in relation to money.

A page-turner of speculative philosophy, I can still remember how gripping the final 20 pages were. In his exploration of money and meaning, Needleman tells the story of life planning, which is the story of each of our aspirations for freedom, and then the path to accomplish them. 

I think Zachary Shore is one of our most underappreciated, insightful interpreters of American and global history.

Shore impressed me with his unique method of examining micro-events that give us a much wider view of American culture. He shows how America, at its best, can be a strong and moral guiding force for good in the world, but he doesn't shy from divulging the darker sides of the American psyche, such as the blunders that lead American leaders to make terrible and consequential military decisions.

Shore is not only a great historian but also a gifted writer. This book showed me how the collective memory of our nation has been portrayed too often in flawed stereotypes, either a villainous, youthful colossus or a city on a hill, a shining example for the rest of humanity. Shore convinced me that at its root, America can be a force for good as… show more.

What would you do if you were taken by force from your home as a child and placed in a museum for strangers to look at you and touch you? And if two-thirds of the adults with you died almost immediately from this treatment? And if the man who did this to you was acclaimed as a hero?

This is the story of a boy from the Arctic lost in New York City, and his struggle to return home.