100 books like You Can't Say You Can't Play

I first read this book in the mid-1990s as I was honing my skills as a therapist.

It hit me hard, as if the author, a psychiatrist, had been a fly on the wall of my childhood home. Miller holds no punches about what drives some people to become clinicians.

Part One of her book is titled “The Drama of the Gifted Child and How We Became Psychotherapists.” It helped me get clear about my choice of career. It was painful reading, but critical to my skills as a clinician and my own mental well-being. I’ve never forgotten it.

Whether you are a therapist, thinking about becoming one, or want to read a book that tears the cover off the myths of childhood, this is essential reading. 

If you have read a parenting book or taken a parenting course in the last sixty years, chances are you have been influenced by the wisdom of Haim Ginott, even if you didn’t realize it.

He and his students, including the authors of How to Talk So Children Will Listen, set the groundwork for what is known today as connection parenting, conscious parenting, gentle parenting, playful parenting, and authoritative (but not authoritarian) parenting.

When my mom passed away and I looked through her books, I saw she had a first edition of Between Parent and Child, first published when I was a young boy.

When I read it, I felt a strong flash of recognition about the way she raised me. Ginott gets children, and he gets parents.

Korczak was a pediatrician, an educator, a champion of children’s rights, the director of orphanages, and much more.

He said, “A child has a right to grief, even if it is for the loss of a pebble.” And he knew about grief.

He cared for orphans in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he accompanied the children to a concentration camp, even though he was offered the chance to escape.

He said, “They children will be scared without me there with them.” He marched with them to the train, carrying a green flag, which was the symbol of his beloved character King Matt, a child king who tried to unite all the children of the world in peace.

He did not survive, but we are very lucky to have his writings. He is my biggest hero, and my biggest inspiration.

I read every Nicholson Baker book as soon as it arrives, and not just because I knew him before he published his first short story.

My favorite novels of his explore what it is to be a thinking (and sometimes, overthinking) human being.

In The Everlasting Story of Nory, he applies his wit and wisdom to the mind of a nine-year-old girl, and he captures beautifully what that time of life is like.

This little book from 1973 made me realize I wrongly believed that all technological advancement was progress. Why should it be? With every invention that promises to make life easier, ask this question, says Illich: "Will this make me a more independent, capable human being? Or will human qualities be made obsolete?"

In the Middle Ages, people built cathedrals without burning fuel. We have since lost this ability. Is that progress? Ivan Illich introduces the concept of radical monopolies: industrial processes that make non-industrial activities impossible. "Cars can [...] monopolize traffic [...] practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles." Likewise, funeral systems rule out the possibility of burying a loved one ourselves.

Illich is a radical philosopher of thin books, best read slowly.

Set in the 19th century New England social landscape of transcendentalist educational trends, this is an important book about women, misogyny, education, and ‘western’ medicine. The landscape here is a farmhouse outside a New England village where the patriarch social philosopher and teacher has started a school for girls following the death of his wife. His grown daughter is his helper, and you see where I’m going with this…also his prisoner. She is vulnerable by her sensitive nature and by her lack of worldly education. When other girls come to board at the new school and other teachers, men, arrive to practice the educational theories they have developed in a fervor of advancing just how women’s education should evolve, the young women respond variously to these new influences. The remote landscape, again, keeps them from freedoms that might improve their awareness. There are also magical trees, birds, and a… show more.

This is what fairy tales would look like if they were gothic, so I love this book.

I read it a few years ago and fell in love with it. I purchased the print copy because I wanted the illustrations in front of me to look at too. Almost any story you read comes from a myth or a fairy tale if you deconstruct it, so reading this book keeps your brain tuned into this idea, but you don't need to be a writer to find delight in this book.

The cover of this book is quite lovely, too!

Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin has been top of my favourite books list since I first read it more than 20 years ago.

It’s also a fascinating, nuanced, and evocative book about the magic and fantasy of a particular time and place - in this case, a liberal arts college in the mid-1970s in Minnesota. The fantasy elements of the book are slow to emerge (and reward a re-read later).

Dean deftly weaves together details of the place - season to season - but also the way that the lives of students change across their time at college. Most of all is the feeling of something just around the corner, whether it’s a ghost, a hint of magic, bagpipes drifting through the night, or small details that don’t quite add up. 

I read this back in grade school! There’s a mouse, a princess, and a quest (the rest you can discover for yourself).

Despereaux is an unlikely hero but, armed with his sewing needle, the gang of rats he’s up against don’t stand a chance.

The story is completely immersive, to this day it makes me crave soup.

My inner child is still captivated by the Lilliputian world of T.H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose every time I read it. I don't know why the idea of discovering a secret miniature kingdom is so alluring: I think it may have something to do with my love for dollhouses when I was a child. T.H. White was best known for The Once and Future King and The Sword in the Stone, based on the Arthurian legends; he was a master at taking an old story (Gulliver's Travels in the case of Mistress Masham's Repose) and making it truly his own.