100 books like The Greeks and the Irrational

Williams was one of the most creative and engaging moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a student at Oxford of E.R. Dodds. While Dodds reminded his readers of how strange the Greeks are to us, in terms of their religious practices, Williams reminds us that the Greeks are also very like us in the moral problems they confronted. Rejecting the idea that modern people have given up on “shame” in favor of “guilt,” Williams showed that we still share the same concerns as the conflicted characters of Greek tragedy – like them, for good and for ill, we gain our sense of ourselves and our moral worth from the reactions of the those around us. 

The United States today still bears the scars of our long and terrible history of slavery. In this new and wonderfully thoughtful history of ancient Greek slavery, Sarah Forsdyke brings us face-to-face with the lived experience of a very different, but also harrowing, history of human bondage. Forsdyke delves into the question of how slaves lived and worked, how they resisted their oppression, and how the fact of slavery defined Greek society and economy. The intertwined development of a market economy, a citizen-centered democracy, and the systematic extraction of labor from unfree people is a stark reminder that our American story, although in many ways distinctive, was not unique. 

Barry Strauss is among the best writers ever to address the history of ancient Greece and Rome. In this exciting book, Strauss retells the great battle of Salamis – the naval battle that turned the tide of the Greek-Persian wars of the early fifth century BCE and inaugurated the Athenian Golden Age. He does so through the eyes of a wide range of those who participated in the battle – on both sides. This is military history that attends closely to the human element, and that reminds us that at various points in the past, the future of the world hung in the balance – and that the result was never foreordained. 

Full disclosure: Adrienne Mayor is my wife. But that is not why I chose this book: It is a mind-blowing account of ancient dreams of technology and ancient scientific wonders. Mayor is a master storyteller. She recreates the ancient myths to reveal the timeless fascination with “artificial life” – with beings that are like us in some ways, except that they are “made, not born.” Long before humans could create real mechanical men and thinking machines, the Greeks dared to imagine what that would mean for humans and our relations with one another. And they imagined the inner lives and torments of the semi-machines themselves. Read this book and shiver to learn that our modernity was dreamed of 2500 years ago. 

In modern neuroscience there is a resurrection of a line of research on altered states of consciousness. We must not think that this fascination started with Woodstock or Timothy Leary… At all times mind-altering rituals and substances were used. Uptight professors of antiquity hardly spoke of what happened in ancient Greece where mind-altering rituals were part of society for spiritual insight, prophecy, and healing. Yulia Ustinova gives a fascinating account of how in ancient Greece sensory deprivation in caves, often in combination with the practices of fasting or use of psychedelics, induced altered states of consciousness in selected individuals.

This is an outstanding short introduction to Greek history – with a really neat gimmick. Instead of writing a standard kind of history, Cartledge picks on the eleven most prominent cities of ancient Greece and writes up their story in about ten or twelve pages. But the chapters are also organized chronologically, so that the first two cities, Cnossos and Mycenae, illustrate Greek prehistory. Then we move on to the Archaic Period (four places, including Sparta), then the Classical Period (three, including Athens), and then the Hellenistic period (one: Alexandria, the greatest city in the world before Rome). He ends with a leap into late antiquity and the eastern Roman empire with Byzantium. I’m always on the lookout for books that can turn people on to Greek history, get them to share my (and Cartledge’s) passion: this one does it brilliantly.

Athens is where I lived as a student in the 1970s, and I’ve loved the place ever since! People who visit Greece often miss out on the capital or find the modern city ugly and noisy. But this book explains the magic effect that Athens has exercised on natives and visitors for at least two thousand years – all the way from the legendary wisdom of Solon the lawgiver to the gritty problems of a decade of enforced austerity (only recently overcome), and of a new multi-culturalism that comes with mass migration across Europe’s front line into Greece.

Carl Jung is the person who actually coined the term “synchronicity” and was the first to recognize it as an important connecting principle between the unconscious and the outer world. He observed that such events occur when the archetypal processes of the collective and personal unconscious correspond to objective events in the real world. Here, for example, he reports the now-famous case of the patient who dreamed of a scarab beetle, a creature that represented transformation to the ancient Egyptians, only to find a similar beetle tapping on Jung’s consultation room window the next day, as the patient described the dream to him.

For Jung, virtually all authentic instances of synchronicity involve the archetypal unconscious and reflect mythic themes. This book includes a number of the first and best examples in synchronicity literature.

One of the reasons I read this genre is because so many of these stories include strong, fierce heroines and Calla Tor from Nightshade is one of the strongest. In a society and culture that imposes rules and oppression on their people, Calla is forced to test the limits and figure out who she really is and what she’s made of while still being a strong leader to her pack. This story is on my top 5 list because Calla is an unforgettable character, but so much of why you’ll love her is thanks to the world this author creates. Nightshade is another unique, fresh take on werewolves that you won’t want to put down.

This novel takes a more serious tone from the outset, though there are humorous situations in the later books. This is one that will keep you up at night, reading and biting your fingernails as the characters struggle to survive. It begins somewhat slowly, but quickly gains steam and keeps you wanting more. The action is fast-paced and realistic and the military aspects are spot on. There is a character for everyone in this series, and it was the idea of Sky that loosely inspired a character in my own series.

The way that Campbell wrote this heroine and followed her progress from a young and naïve college girl to powerful and able to face down every threat thrown her way was so engaging and powerful that I bought the entire series as soon as it was released. The male characters were so diverse and far-ranging that none of them… show more.