100 books like To Bless the Space Between Us

I’m sorry, but can we finally remove Frankenstein from every undergraduate Literature 101 course and demand instead that our brightest young minds read THIS? My college boyfriend’s mother gifted it (prescient) during my sophomore year, and I read it on repeat during that whole relationship… and through every major challenge that came after.

I have a particular appreciation for Chödrön, and any Tibetan Buddhist nun for that matter, who can, in one breath, extend the most heartfelt, accessible nugget for finding peace AND relay the experience of throwing a flower pot at her ex-husband's head. Namaste. 

This book by Markus Zusak is frequently named one of the best WW2 books. I like it because it’s a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of hope in dark times. It’s a haunting and beautifully written novel set in Nazi Germany.

Narrated by Death, the story follows Liesel, a young girl sent to live with a foster family. As she navigates a tumultuous world filled with fear and cruelty, Liesel finds comfort in books and words. I loved the premise of stealing forbidden books and sharing their stories with others. Through Liesel’s experiences, I explored the themes of love, loss, and the power of storytelling in the face of adversity.

Joan Didion’s book is heralded for its bravery, clarity, and confessional witness about grief and loss. Indeed, it’s all these things, but for me, more importantly, this book paints a masterful depiction of the loss of innocence that comes when you lose something meaningful—like a loved one.

Particularly, it shows, with exhilarating force, the fragmented sense of time of such an experience, moving from Didion’s darkest moments of despair at the loss of her husband in the present to treasured memories of her life before his passing and musings about what comes now—in the future.

This book is not for the faint of heart, but it is for the savoring soul who, like Didion, possesses an inherent human desire for a sense of coherence and wholeness after life has torn it asunder.

This book has long been a favorite of spiritual seekers, with its sweeping panoply of stories from antiquity’s gods and goddesses to the world’s wisdom traditions and more.

This is a book for those interested in the universality of human experience across time and culture—which I am. But even more, it opens our minds to the importance of a story itself.

Campbell helps readers understand that truth and fact are different—indeed, there are several kinds of truth: empirical truth, which depends on objective data, and also mythopoetic and narrative truth, which rely on symbols and stories to provide meaning.

Hickman’s book kept me going immediately following my unforeseen staggering loss. It is a treasure: a little book of readings, one page for each day of the year containing a quote from literature, the Bible, or wisdom traditions, followed by a brief meditation and ending with an affirmation. Each entry seemed to speak directly to me, to where I was in that moment, reassuring me, coaxing me to keep on keeping on, helping me to believe that in time, I would feel more able to cope with my new reality.

It was designed as a daybook, so it would never end until I decided I didn’t need it anymore. Just turn to the appropriate day of the year and start again...

When I read Kessler’s book, a missing piece came into place for me. I had been working hard to absorb my loss, to be brave, to keep going...what I needed, in addition, was to find meaning in what had happened.

This book helped me ask the right questions to begin to do that. It drew me forward into a new stage of acceptance, helping me let go of underlying angst and despair.

If you think you know yourself, think again. The sole (or really soul) purpose of Simon Wiesenthal’s book is to reawaken the conscience: Would you offer forgiveness to a dying young Nazi SS soldier for the brutal murder of Jews in which he participated, and that was consuming his conscience?

This question, at the heart of this book, is one Wiesenthal faced when he was in the concentration camps—to which he responded no. For decades, he wrestled with conflicting feelings about his decision, and in this poignant page-tuner, he inspires readers to consider the same. 

What particularly grabbed me was not only the eloquent writing and storytelling (the first part is a memoir) but also its coupling with the spectrum of responses from nearly 30 theologians, spiritual leaders, scholars, writers, and statesmen who offer their own feelings on the question of forgiveness (part two).

I especially appreciated that regardless of… show more.

Sorely in need of self-acceptance, self-compassion, and patience, I loved the sense of affirmation conferred by Smith’s book—the sense that I’m all right as I am, I’m enough as I am. This book led me onward—literally—since each brief meditation ends with “keep moving.”

Its format of short single entries invites thinking about a single question or situation at a time, which is especially helpful when overwhelmed. Keep Moving always leaves me in a calmer, better place, no matter how often I revisit it. 

There is growing literature in both religious and secular circles about a needed sense of reverence for the Earth to counter an utterly utilitarian view that all life is present as resources for human use only. I commend Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul to illustrate how a great tradition, Celtic spirituality, through its poetry, song, and way-of-life practices, draws deeply on the sense of the sacred that the soul knows and most people experience in some measure.

First published in 1893 it traces the history of the Druidic and Bardic schools across Ireland in the pre-Christian era, through the arrival of St. Patrick and into the Monastic Celtic Christian period, giving a unique insight into this time before the Normans brought ecclesiastical Roman Catholicism with them.

It was a lucky find at the old bookshop at the Hill of Tara. Although it is not specifically about Druids it offers great insights into the schooling and learning of the Pagan and medieval Irish before the collapse of the Gaelic civilisation in Ireland. There is nothing else quite like this in existence, that I know of.