100 books like Zeno's Conscience

Being lured into another world by a strong first-person voice turns a book into a wide-open door, and I love going through strange doors. This one opens onto a richly detailed middle-class mess who’s also an exceptional host, recently widowed alcoholic single-parent Peter Jernigan. He takes us on a ride through suburban New Jersey as passengers in his mind, narrating his life’s unravelling with brutal whimsy and humour. This was one of the most helpless relationships I’ve had with a character in a book. A privilege and a reminder of the balancing act we all face.

This Pulitzer Prize winner remains a time-tested testament to the absurdity that is New Orleans.

I felt like I’d met every one of the characters at least twice in my own walks on the streets of this storied city. I could even taste the Lucky Dogs. This is one of the few books to have me consistently laugh out loud. You can even take a picture with the statue of Ignatius J Reilly (the main character) on Canal Street.

I like to recommend difficult books—everyone needs a challenge once in a while and the nihilist Huysmans kind of throws down a literary gauntlet here in that he’s sort of daring you to go with him to the abysses of the modern soul. 

This book is indeed way more psychedelic than any 60’s Beat guy or girl ever penned or dreamed.

Who knew that the emperor Nero appointed an Advisor on Tastefulness, who also penned a bawdy and gritty novel about the adventures of several friends in the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD? Fairly few, and the even more surprising fact is that hundreds of pages of his text survive today. You can still read either in Latin or in English translation about two young men proposing to fight for the affections of the youth Giton and you can join them all in a visit to an archetypal Roman brothel. There is nothing else remaining that provides a more direct and authentic insight into daily experiences and relationships in ancient Rome.

Dorothy Rowe’s books I discovered by accident in a Winchester second-hand bookshop, placed in the psychology section. A woman of considerable wisdom gained through her psychotherapy practice and her experience of the vicissitudes of life, Beyond Fear deals with something we all have to encounter, yet which so few of us properly understand and therefore disempower. Rowe explains in this life-changing book how fear manifests through various conditions, such as depression, a subject on which she is an acknowledged expert. I love it that she refused to simplify life, confronting it in all its difficult complexities. Life isn’t easy—we all discover that.

This book includes essays by some of the foremost thought leaders of our time, on the topic of consciousness seen through the eyes of postmaterialist science. Each seeks a scientific understanding of consciousness that is not reducible to physical processes in the brain. Their intention is not to exclude traditional science and its reliance on neurology and the brain, but rather to reach for a broader view of reality, one that includes well documented nonphysical dimensions of conscious experience, including phenomena such as out-of-the-body and near-death experiences, as well as telepathy, precognition, and more.

Each of these authors is well known and respected in their own field and presents here the cream of a lifetime of research in these areas.

Most people think of time simply as a passive, mechanical tool for measuring reality. But in this groundbreaking book, Janet Sussman introduces the idea that time is a dynamic field responsible for creating the material universe. Readers interested in the study of consciousness will begin to understand the importance of time to the unfoldment of unity consciousness and self-realization. 

This book is a brilliant combination of the science of consciousness and human development, written in beautiful, lyrical language. It invites the reader into a world that is non-linear yet coherent. It causes the reader to quantum leap over the logical mind into an experiential event of time as one's own consciousness. The author describes her book as giving "voice to the freedom enjoyed by those who can transcend time through their own awareness and be free of imposed restrictions on the naturally holographic avenues of the mind."

In the mid-1980s, Patricia Churchland started to pursue the idea that philosophers interested in the mind might want to have a look at what is going on in neuroscience, in her book Neurophilosophy.

This book was formative for me, in that it showed a way I could combine my interest in the brain with my love for philosophy. Since then, new generations of graduate students have seen the naturalness of the link and begun to bring the wealth of neuroscientific discoveries into the philosophical debates. 

In Conscience, she looks at the evolutionary roots of our tendencies to form bonds and create social norms to approach the issue of whether our sociality is hardwired. She also discusses the troubling case of sociopaths, who appear to be naturally unethical.

This book brought me valuable mindset and skillset shifts as promised, but one of the unexpected jewels was the language that it gave me for valuing work. 

I have never been good at negotiating the highest salary and therefore had to learn pretty early in my career not to equate my pay with my worth. I received from this book the language that I needed to represent that money is not the only form of payment in a job. 

The reader learns that wages are the first paycheck and there are three more. I have learned along the way that my greatest earnings have come from the emotional rewards from my work in the nonprofit sector (2nd paycheck) and the added skills and professional growth gained (3rd paycheck). 

Not everyone has the time, patience, or ability to read a complete book – so enter this enchanting volume! Mark Bajerski’s book is a treasury of uplifting quotes. Each day, you arbitrarily ‘choose’ a page, then read its spiritual message. Spirit guides your choice, so the message you receive is the most appropriate for you at that moment in time. Then, you simply Hold that Thought.

I have found that these uplifting spiritual truths reinforce my spirit no matter what circumstances I face, and so touched and delighted was I when a friend gifted a copy to me that I, in turn, gifted copies to my friends.

A gem of a book and a daily reminder that the Universe abounds with magic.