Here are 100 books that Apeirogon fans have personally recommended if you like
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Who can really claim that they know everything about the human heart, the mind, the soul? The infinite mysteries and complexities of what makes someone who we can call “human.” I'm betting no one. Certainly not me. But what's important is the passion to keep exploring, to keep digging through the mind in an effort to understand myself. That effort, along with what I discover, is one of the most tangible things that not only enriches my living life, but also gives me comfort facing the inevitable end. These books were passionate companions, inspiring me, for however long, to further my efforts in self-discovery.
The book resonates with me on many levels. Firstly, of course, I’m a combat veteran, so the military and living through the hell of war are part of my identity. The author and I share an innate connection there.
But on a different level, it delves into the intangible burdens that resonate for years after the experience – the grief, the guilt, the terror, even the longing to return because it’s what you know.
The title is explicit, and I share the load with all my fellow veterans.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I started out like most travelers, attracted to new places and to meeting people whose worlds were different from my own. Typically, this meant tried-and-true destinations in Europe until a book project required me to visit an utterly daunting place, the West African nation of Liberia during a civil war. I was in no way prepared for the experience and it changed everything. Seeing how people behave when faced with extreme circumstances profoundly altered my view of the world. Everything was magnified. Though I still enjoy a cup of espresso on the Piazza Navona, there is nothing like traveling to a forbidden zone and meeting someone destined to be a lifelong friend on the roof of a bombed-out building. It opens the world in ways that are challenging and scary, but also incomparably rewarding.
Any account of dangerous travel holds the potential for unexpected revelation, but this one taps a motherlode of rare insights and observations. Part of the reason is that Diaz, a twenty-something soldier of fortune in Hernán Cortés’ 16th-century expedition to the New World, became enchanted by the Aztec civilization that he and his compadres had come to pillage and destroy. Diaz writes vividly and lyrically, with a keen eye for graphic detail, and is unsparing in his accounts of the remarkable brutality on both sides. Five centuries later, his account remains illuminating and disturbing, and shows it’s not always necessary to like your traveling companion to gain insight into a perilous, previously unknown world.
The History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a new abridgement of Diaz del Castillo's classic ""Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva Espana"", offers a unique contribution to our understanding of the political and religious forces that drove the great cultural encounter between Spain and the Americas known as the 'conquest of Mexico.' Besides containing important passages, scenes, and events excluded from other abridgements, this edition includes eight useful interpretive essays that address indigenous religions and cultural practices, sexuality during the early colonial period, the roles of women in indigenous cultures, and analysis of…
I started out like most travelers, attracted to new places and to meeting people whose worlds were different from my own. Typically, this meant tried-and-true destinations in Europe until a book project required me to visit an utterly daunting place, the West African nation of Liberia during a civil war. I was in no way prepared for the experience and it changed everything. Seeing how people behave when faced with extreme circumstances profoundly altered my view of the world. Everything was magnified. Though I still enjoy a cup of espresso on the Piazza Navona, there is nothing like traveling to a forbidden zone and meeting someone destined to be a lifelong friend on the roof of a bombed-out building. It opens the world in ways that are challenging and scary, but also incomparably rewarding.
Beyond the occasional adrenaline rush, one of the chief attractions of risky travel is that it enables us to see how we and others behave under challenging circumstances. For readers whose exposure typically comes from UNILAD Adventure posts or edgy Bruce Chatwin travelogues, this book is refreshingly unself-conscious and uniquely terrifying.
In his quest to locate the legendary Niger River as a potential trade route during the late 18th century, when most of Africa was still unmapped, Park, at 24, set off with two days’ worth of provisions and a few strategic supplies (including an umbrella – he was Scottish), relying upon his wits and native guides to complete an epic journey in which he suffered bouts of malaria, nearly starved, was held captive by Moors, got repeatedly robbed and at one point had to bang on a village gate to escape being eaten by lions.
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Most travel books skate across the surface of the cultures they encounter. But as someone who has lived in a variety of places, studied the languages, and undergone a certain amount of acculturation, I feel like these books often miss the true strangeness and wonder of the world. The books here get at how things look different from inside another culture and language. The travel, in other words, not just to another country, but into another world.
This isn't normally shelved in travel, but I think of it that way, and it is definitely a book about culture and the power of the beliefs of those around us.
Buford was also an American living in England, as he plumbed the depth of soccer hooliganism. At once hilarious and terrifying, this is one of my all-time favorite books, and I will never get tired of rereading it.
The author of this book has spent most of his spare time "among the thugs", the hooligans whose violence scars the face of English football. He has written a work of investigative journalism and a meditation on the violence that lies just beneath the surface of English life.
Peace has been my passion for more than half a century. In 1970, I refused to carry a weapon while serving in Viet Nam as a combat medic in an infantry battalion commanded by Colonel George Armstrong Custer III. I have witnessed enormous violence inflicted upon human beings, primarily civilians, and the earth which sustains us all. My knowledge of war comes from treating wounds. I have read numerous books about Palestine and Israel through a medic’s eyes. The books I’ve highlighted here will contribute to peace if they are read with care, with love. Never underestimate the power of words.
I admire every detail in this beautifully written family saga that reaches from Lithuania to Jerusalem.
When Amos Oz’s family escapes the antisemitism of Europe in the 1940s and resettles in Palestine, they seem to construct their new home of books rather than mortar. And beyond the towering bookcases, the volumes in twelve languages, lies a city of ancient stone torn by history and religion and competing claims.
Oz’s profound and personal understanding of the Holocaust leads him to conclude that Israel will be stronger by ending the occupation and forging paths that help to unite Jews and Palestinians.
I love the truth, the fact that empathy and compassion have the potential to heal the deepest wounds.
Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this bestselling and critically acclaimed work is at once a family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history. It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide when he was twelve years old. The story of a man who leaves the…
Peace has been my passion for more than half a century. In 1970, I refused to carry a weapon while serving in Viet Nam as a combat medic in an infantry battalion commanded by Colonel George Armstrong Custer III. I have witnessed enormous violence inflicted upon human beings, primarily civilians, and the earth which sustains us all. My knowledge of war comes from treating wounds. I have read numerous books about Palestine and Israel through a medic’s eyes. The books I’ve highlighted here will contribute to peace if they are read with care, with love. Never underestimate the power of words.
In luminous prose, Raja Shehadeh describes six walks into the Palestinian countryside between 1978 and 2006.
He writes of the ancient practice of rural peoples of naming each wadi, spring, hillock, escarpment, etc., in their immediate environment.
Shehadeh sometimes risks his life simply to walk on the land near Ramallah in the proximity of ever-expanding Israeli settlements. I have twice been to the West Bank, most recently in January of 2025. No area is safe, but the love Palestinians have for the land has in no way lessened.
Shehadeh’s book is a timeless and compassionate love letter to the earth. To know Palestine, first you must know the land.
Raja Shehadeh is a passionate hill walker. He enjoys nothing more than heading out into the countryside that surrounds his home. But in recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel.
In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Peace has been my passion for more than half a century. In 1970, I refused to carry a weapon while serving in Viet Nam as a combat medic in an infantry battalion commanded by Colonel George Armstrong Custer III. I have witnessed enormous violence inflicted upon human beings, primarily civilians, and the earth which sustains us all. My knowledge of war comes from treating wounds. I have read numerous books about Palestine and Israel through a medic’s eyes. The books I’ve highlighted here will contribute to peace if they are read with care, with love. Never underestimate the power of words.
How can I not be mesmerized by a master storyteller?
Adania Shibli, a Palestinian author born in the West Bank, begins with a tragic incident that occurred in the Negev in 1949. I admire her precision and nuance, especially her depiction of an Israeli officer who devolves into an emotionless psychopath.
I was a combat medic in the Vietnam War. I know first-hand the insanity of war, which Shibli reveals in her own unique way. The unnamed Israeli officer dominates the first part of Minor Detail, and a young woman, an amateur sleuth who investigates the officer’s crimes, takes center stage in part two.
I was horrified and enlightened, in equal measure.
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba - the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people - and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this 'minor detail' of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience…
Peace has been my passion for more than half a century. In 1970, I refused to carry a weapon while serving in Viet Nam as a combat medic in an infantry battalion commanded by Colonel George Armstrong Custer III. I have witnessed enormous violence inflicted upon human beings, primarily civilians, and the earth which sustains us all. My knowledge of war comes from treating wounds. I have read numerous books about Palestine and Israel through a medic’s eyes. The books I’ve highlighted here will contribute to peace if they are read with care, with love. Never underestimate the power of words.
This is among the bravest and most original books that I’ve read in the past decade.
To quell violence, to truly make peace, one first needs to contemplate what James Baldwin wrote many years ago: “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man with nothing to lose.”
Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been violently oppressed for decades. Nasser Abufarha, an anthropologist originally from Jenin, explores the conditions that almost inevitably lead to violent confrontations.
I have been in the West Bank and worked side-by-side with Palestinians and Jewish Israeli activists and other international volunteers who share one goal: ending the occupation. I admire Abufarha for exploring the roots of violence and telling difficult truths.
In The Making of a Human Bomb, Nasser Abufarha, a Palestinian anthropologist, explains the cultural logic underlying Palestinian martyrdom operations (suicide attacks) launched against Israel during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-06). In so doing, he sheds much-needed light on how Palestinians have experienced and perceived the broader conflict. During the Intifada, many of the martyrdom operations against Israeli targets were initiated in the West Bank town of Jenin and surrounding villages. Abufarha was born and raised in Jenin. His personal connections to the area enabled him to conduct ethnographic research there during the Intifada, while he was a student at a…
In books, essays and reportage, I've been writing about Israel and the conflict since moving from the U.S. to Israel in 1982. Even as I write from within my Israeli consciousness, I have tried to understand and convey other perspectives. For Israelis and Palestinians, there is nothing abstract about this conflict; it is, instead, a matter of life and death. My writing is an attempt to simultaneously convey the passions of this conflict and offer an empathic voice for all those caught in this seemingly hopeless situation.
In this extraordinary memoir, Yousef Bashir describes growing up in Gaza during the Second Intifada of the early 2000s. At age 15, an Israeli soldier shot him in the back. Paralyzed, Yousef was sent to an Israeli hospital, where he gradually recovered, making Israeli friends in the process. That experience of “love and pain” helped transform him into a peace activist. Yousef is one of the Palestinians who wrote a response to my book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. (His letter appears in the epilogue.) I know of no better window into the Palestinian experience than this beautiful, wrenching book.
A Palestinian-American activist recalls his adolescence in Gaza during the Second Intifada, and how he made a strong commitment to peace in the face of devastating brutality in this moving, candid, and transformative memoir that reminds us of the importance of looking beyond prejudice, anger, and fear.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
This lexicon of the destroyed Palestinian villages of 1948 illustrated to a wide readership the scope and meaning of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe. In short installments, a whole history that is wiped out is reconstructed as part of the struggle against denial.
This authoritative reference work describes in detail the more than 400 Palestinian villages that were destroyed or depopulated by Israel in 1948. Little of these once-thriving communities remains: not only have they been erased from the Palestinian landscape, their very names have been removed from contemporary Israeli maps. But to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in their diaspora, these villages were home, and continue to be poignantly powerful symbols of their personal and national identity.
