100 Books Like A Lodging of Wayfaring Men

Mass formation psychosis causes people to lose contact with reality. Case-in-point: the apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln. The author presents a cogent case against the 16th president’s policies of “internal improvements,” high tariffs, and a national central bank (the failed and rejected Hamiltonian policies of the Whig party and Henry Clay). Lincoln insisted upon instituting mercantilism—a strong central government that dispenses special privileges to wealthy and influential corporations, who then support the central government, contravening the Constitution. In a reality stranger than fiction, he killed an estimated 620,000-750,000 Americans in a war upon the Southern states and their right to secede against tariff tyranny; disabled the sovereignty of the states; and did away with habeas corpus by arresting any who objected to his policies, setting precedents that have gutted an intimidated America ever since.

Based on a true story, here we have an epic masterpiece detailing the so-called Secret Space Program. It is a tour de force of “the black arcane world of super-science—beyond media and beyond the government.” It is essentially a memoir “spanning forty years in the life of Dr. Ted Humphrey and his involvement with Area 51, the Development of Time Travel, the Dulce Mesa Wars, the Montauk Project, Black Ops, the Shadow Government, and his meteoric rise to become head of an all-powerful global organization engaged in a desperate and Above Top Secret race against time to save our world.” All hype aside, this tale provides a possible counter-narrative to the debilitating System and reason to be optimistic; a twisted magic realism going way above and beyond the normative.

This is Mark Emery’s personal account of his challenging journey into the legal, political and financial brambles of USA, Inc. His courage and convictions outweigh unthinking acceptance of the System and its enslavement of citizen-serfs. Emery stands up for his status as a free man and asserts his God-given rights against all the odds, often winning and sometimes losing. It is a case study in freeing oneself from a Leviathan of centralized government power that seeks to subject people to its array of rules, regulations and statutes that only keeps us from knowing our true selves. Since publication Mark Emery has allied himself with Anna Maria Riezinger and her extensive research into corporate “government” and allied systems that have been engineered to transplant the constitutional republic of our Founding Fathers.   

An open mind and creative imagination are needed to explore reality. In making sense of the most significant science fiction writer of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick, we might refer to the dying words of his Berkeley buddy, Jack Spicer: “My vocabulary did this to me.” Like a Zen stone mason in a hall of mirrors, Dick often seems to depart from the most inscrutable of semantic pebbles. Exegesis offers us a lexical labyrinth infused with the most profound heuristic paranoia, to yield a vast shifting matrix of uncountable speculative origins. Anyone who reads this book and does not write at least one of their own, even as a prophylactic, is indeed “duller than the fattest weed on the wharf of Lethe.” (Paraphrased from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)

Some people will argue that of all the movies adapted from books, the book will always win, but in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I believe the film adaptation is more alluring than the original short story, but it would not be fair to discredit that this film was influenced by Fitzgerald’s original satire of a child born aging in reverse.

While the movie veers away from the short story in time period, setting and character development, the short story draws more into the philosophical questions I believe we ourselves as a society are subconsciously thinking—even today, nearly a century after it’s writing as to how we contradict the specific wisdom that comes with age while also relinquishing it due to natural mental decline and end up treating our elderly like children.

Unlike the film, the story takes place just after the American Civil War and draws a… show more.

There is nothing like this groundbreaking memoir—it is as good as it gets—and it has probably influenced every memoir since (including my own).

Kingston is a poet, and I find it impossible not to sink into the striking, gorgeous language and imagery as she describes growing up between multiple worlds: the China her parents emigrated from, the California of a first-generation daughter of immigrants, the ghost-filled China of her mother’s “talk stories,” and her inner life and growing awareness. She weaves family stories, famous myths, and her own girlhood experiences into a beautiful and unforgettable narrative.

I probably re-read it once a year.

I very nearly stopped reading this book–even though it’s so short as it starts off unbelievably abstract. I didn’t know what was going on, and the descriptions only added to the confusion. But I’m so glad I kept going.

The main character does amnesia in the most charming way, and discovering his past and the strange world he seems both lost in and totally at home in was absolutely enchanting. This has stuck with me ever since, like the most vivid fever dream.

I love reading novels and stories that make me wish I’d written them, and this collection by Kelly Link made me wish that time and time again. This book also introduced me to the concept of fabulism, a form of magical realism where elements of the fantastic occur in everyday settings, which is something I find compelling both as a reader and as a writer. Link combines humor, fantasy, magical realism, and more than a touch of horror to create a collection of stories that is unique, weird, and wonderful. 

Unforeseen forces, mystery, and time travel in the confines of a coffee shop, what isn’t to like?

I read this book when I was in the middle of moving countries. The book helped me to slow down amongst all the turbulence of movers and then the dreaded Covid vaccination certificates. But with moving, I had to say goodbye to friends, and there was one close friend who did not like the fact I was leaving and, therefore, refused to see me before I left. There are many reasons why people react in certain ways, but I was hurt during that time and hoped that our friendship was more than that. 

This book made me think about what I would say to her in the future—hindsight is a great gift if only we could activate it in the present.

In my opinion, one of the finest living writers in the English language, Winterson masterfully spins a tale of historical, poetic, eccentric, dreamy and highly sensual, and gender-bending eroticism involving an androgynous hero during the Napoleonic era, and taking place in the kitchens of the emperor, on the battlefield and along the freezing march into Russia, as well as amid the canals of Venice. Always thought-provoking and rife with magical realism and plain heart-stopping imagery, tension, and poetry, Winterson tells her story in a manner that will—if not change your ideas about everything—certainly challenge them. I always feel inspired to stretch my understanding wider—and I actually fall deeply in love with the world all over again—each time I finish a novel by Winterson.