Here are 100 books that As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams fans have personally recommended if you like
As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams.
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I study culture. Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by what people think, feel, believe, have, and do. I’ve always wondered why people need things to be meaningful. Why do people need an explanation for why things happen that puts the meaning outside their own minds? I wanted to get beyond the need for things to be meaningful by themselves, so I began looking into meaning-making as a thing we do. Once I realized the process was infinitely more interesting and valuable, I read books like those on my list. I hope they spark you as much as they have me.
I love that Basso can take me so far inside someone's mind that I can begin to understand not just what they think and feel but how and why they think and feel it.
This book contains the very systems and processes that we use to make knowledge and meaning, and I love learning about a way of knowing and making meaning that is very different from mine—entirely logical, purposeful, valid, and different from mine.
This remarkable book introduces us to four unforgettable Apache people, each of whom offers a different take on the significance of places in their culture. Apache conceptions of wisdom, manners and morals, and of their own history are inextricably intertwined with place, and by allowing us to overhear his conversations with Apaches on these subjects Basso expands our awareness of what place can mean to people.
Most of us use the term sense of place often and rather carelessly when we think of nature or home or literature. Our senses of place, however, come not only from our individual experiences…
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 am Jeff Clarke, author and graphic designer. I have always been interested in origins and beginnings, whether it be the universe, life on Earth, military aviation and ancient societies. I possess a valuable private library of my own and generally prefer to use this rather than on-line sources as the authors’ qualifications are more easily ascertainable. I design the covers for all my novels.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the great masterpieces of world literature, and the oldest, with its origins lost in the mists of time.
It contains a dramatic account of the Great Flood, upon which the much later Noah’s Ark tale was based. The Epicwas current for some 3,000 years and entered the literature of many ancient cultures including those of Sumer, where it originated, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite.
The Epichas been reconstructed from many thousands of clay tablets unearthed from Middle Eastern archaeological sites. The cultures through which it passed moulded their own flesh upon its venerable bones and this I have also done.
The definitive translation of the world's oldest known epic, now updated with newly discovered material
Miraculously preserved on clay tablets dating back as far as four thousand years, the poem of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, predates Homer by many centuries. The story tells of Gilgamesh's adventures with the wild man Enkidu, and of his arduous journey to the ends of the earth in quest of the Babylonian Noah and the secret of immortality. Alongside its themes of family, friendship and the duties of kings, the Epic of Gilgamesh is, above all, about mankind's eternal struggle with the fear of death.…
Alienation from nature has contributed to environmental problems in today’s world. Until recently in human history, our daily lives were intertwined with living things. I've always been keenly interested in the intersection between people and nature, between ecology and society. How should we live, what have we done lately? Observation today can bring much-needed respect, and if we are lucky, we will find that animals, birds, and places intercept us in our wanderings, helping to bring forth distinctive and personal stories. There is danger, the seas are mighty, many monsters lurk in the dark. But can be silence too. Pull up a chair by the blazing fire, come listen to those voices.
In one of the finest pieces of world literature, Robert Bringhurst recounts stories of the Haida mythtellers. The isles of Haida Gwaii are 160 km into the Pacific, drenched in rain, mist, and wind. Here was one of the world's richest traditions of story, place, and nature, where myths thought themselves into people. We have the extraordinary sagas of Raven Travelling, Goose Food, and the Qquana Cycle, some individual oral sagas more than 5,000 lines long. “Wealth has big eyes,” said one storyteller. Raven is the trickster of the North, is ingenious, ever-watchful from high spruce and red cedar. “Bring us good luck,” people called out. Says one, “He always fools everybody, so he gets by easy.” Yet many of the Haida people died on contact with colonial invaders, and the coastal villages and rows of totem house poles stand abandoned.
The Haida world is a misty archipelago a hundred stormy miles off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska. For more than a thousand years before the Europeans came, a great culture flourished on these islands. In 1900 and 1901 the linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last traditional Haida-speaking storytellers, poets, and historians. Robert Bringhurst worked for many years with these manuscripts, and in this text he brings them to life in the English language.
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…
Alienation from nature has contributed to environmental problems in today’s world. Until recently in human history, our daily lives were intertwined with living things. I've always been keenly interested in the intersection between people and nature, between ecology and society. How should we live, what have we done lately? Observation today can bring much-needed respect, and if we are lucky, we will find that animals, birds, and places intercept us in our wanderings, helping to bring forth distinctive and personal stories. There is danger, the seas are mighty, many monsters lurk in the dark. But can be silence too. Pull up a chair by the blazing fire, come listen to those voices.
This is the most intense nature-writing and storytelling, as if written by bear or tiger, by the rainforest tree or tropical sea itself. Jay Griffiths becomes Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, as we travel out in life, across the threshold and leaving behind ordinary world. Myth is story, and it is also how we live, battling against personal and historical limitations. Jay finds the secret openings and weaves an Odyssey to the wildness of earth and sea, water and fire. On the heroic journey, we are repeatedly tested, and come back with an elixir. Story itself becomes currency and guide. The monk and mystic, Meister Eckhart of Thuringia, wrote in the early 1300s, “There are many ways, Some are crowded, others less travelled, But every way, is the right one.”
Part travelogue, part manifesto for wildness as an essential character of life, Wild is a one-of-a-kind book from a one-of-a-kind author
'Undefinable, untameable, profound and extraordinary' Observer _________________________
'I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize…
I am eternally fascinated by the way in which a string of words can take on a life of its own. With a mere 26 letters, a good writer can have a reader believe anything. When realist fiction first became a category in the 18th century in England, there was a lot of handwringing over whether readers were being lied to. Of course, they were! That is the point of fiction. My own work has always played with the boundary of realist fiction, fairytale, and truth. I’m interested in the way a story can make meaning—and the more hijinks, the better!
Reading Kenzaburo Oë is like falling into a dreamscape. I love this book because it weaves the personal and the fictional in ways that make it impossible to distinguish them.
Is not all of life a melding of dream, reality, and the stuff we make up? Much of Oë’s writing is influenced by his son, Hikari, who was born with cognitive disabilities. This makes the story of the young man in A Personal Matter, who is struggling with the stress of his sick newborn, a fiction heavily informed by personal history.
To take one’s own story and use it to bring to life another one is the height of art-making. It felt like a healing to read.
From the Nobel Prize–winning author: “One of the great short novels of the 20th century” (The Wall Street Journal).
Internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s most influential writers, Kenzaburō Ōe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this “deathly black comedy . . . dripping with nuclear terror” (The Japan Times).
Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging on to a failing marriage with whiskey. He dreams of going to Africa where the sky sprawls with possibilities. Then, as though walloped by a massive invisible fist, Bird’s Utopian fantasies are shattered when…
I have lived on a small island in Japan for over 25 years. I moved into my aging and empty Japanese abode before akiya—empty houses—became a phenomenon, and I described my experiences in a regular column for The Japan Times from 1997 to 2020. I love Japan’s countryside and wish more tourists would visit places outside Japan’s major cities. The living is simple, the Japanese people are charming and Japan itself is one of the most unique places in the world. These books are written by people who have taken the leap and chosen the tranquil existence of the pastoral Japanese countryside.
This is one of the first books on Japan that I read when I moved to the country in 1997, and it still resonates with me. While still a college student, Alex Kerr buys a rundown farmhouse in the Iya Valley of Shikoku, re-thatches it, and maintains the traditional Japanese architecture of pre-WWII Japanese wooden houses.
Kerr went on to write many more books on Japan, most of which have become classics. He is the foundation of the akiya movement, lectures widely around the archipelago, and is responsible for revitalizing country villages around Japan.
An enchanting and fascinating insight into Japanese landscape, culture, history and future.
Originally written in Japanese, this passionate, vividly personal book draws on the author's experiences in Japan over thirty years. Alex Kerr brings to life the ritualized world of Kabuki, retraces his initiation into Tokyo's boardrooms during the heady Bubble Years, and tells the story of the hidden valley that became his home.
But the book is not just a love letter. Haunted throughout by nostalgia for the Japan of old, Kerr's book is part paean to that great country and culture, part epitaph in the face of contemporary…
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…
I grew up in small-town America, very far from where I was born (London), with a strong desire to travel and explore. I also developed a thirst for history—the older the better! At eighteen, I went to work on European digs before studying Archaeology in the UK and teaching in Southern Africa. Across these adventures I both experienced and witnessed the victimization of young women—an even more common ordeal in the past. So now I write historical fiction about resourceful, brave women who strive to be the active, powerful centres of their own stories. I hope you find the books on my list as inspiring as I do!
I know nearly nothing about the Far East—so was delighted to experience a taste of Japan through this compassionate, original novel told from the point of view of young American nurse, Diana, as she takes the job of nanny to the toddler Yuki, after divorce has forced Yuki’s mother from the family home. Immersed in a different culture, Diana feels confusion, fascination, and a growing love for Yuki. The tension builds as she begins to understand the real danger the child is in. Diana faces psychological peril as she tries to break the chain of damage for Yuki—and herself. As a mother of three, I often can’t bear child jeopardy in a plot, but the author’s intelligent writing is compelling and sensitive, not gratuitous.
'A mystery, a love story and a fascinating encounter with a different culture, Yuki Means Happiness is an outstanding novel' John Boyne
Diana is young and uneasy in a new relationship when she leaves America and moves halfway around the world to Tokyo seeking adventure. In Japan she takes a job as a nanny to two-year-old Yuki Yoshimura and sets about adapting to a routine of English practice, ballet and swimming lessons, and Japanese cooking.
But as Diana becomes increasingly attached to Yuki she also becomes aware that everything in the Yoshimura household isn't as it first seemed. Before long,…
Early on, I identified with American short story writers Bernard Malamud and Flannery O’Connor. Though firmly ensconced in the American canon, neither had a fear of allowing the comic or fantastic to play important roles in stories with serious spiritual values. I enjoyed fabulous writers as well, the wildness of Nikolai Gogol, the magic of Ray Bradbury, the comic impulses of Mark Twain. I came across Dune and read it several times. Since those days, I have taken in many stories that do not stick to representations of reality, discovering writers all over the world with the same fascinations. I can’t keep myself from trying to join them.
The Elephant Vanishes includes two of my favorite stories by any contemporary writer.
Set in the forested vicinity of a factory that makes elephants, “The Dancing Dwarf” follows the adventures of a marvelous dwarf who once danced for the king, alas, now pursued by soldiers of the revolution. The other side of the spectrum, “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon” partakes of the fantastic only by osmosis. The care this teenage boy takes mowing and trimming his assigned lawns feels so real it reminds me of myself.
This range keeps the reader slightly off balance and full of expectation, which might not be so exciting if we weren’t in the hands of one of the finest practitioners of the craft anywhere in the world.
A dizzying short story collection that displays Murakami's genius for uncovering the surreal in the everyday, the extraordinary within the ordinary
*Featuring the story 'Barn Burning', the inspiration behind the Palme d'Or nominated film Burning*
When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset. A couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's. A woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden. An insomniac wife wakes up in a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible - even death.
Since I came to architecture through classical archeology, writing about design was kind of like coming home. I made the switch to journalism after moving to Tokyo. At that time, Japan’s economy was going strong, boom cranes were everywhere, and the worldwide appetite for information about new construction was robust. An outgrowth of my success documenting architecture, my interest in design was sparked partly by the chairs and teapots created by Japanese architects but also by the superb array of daily-use goods available in Japan. The dearth of information about these items and their designers led me to cover design at various scales.
Several years ago, when I was living in Tokyo, I needed a blender.
So, I went to MUJI and bought the one they had on offer. It was smaller than a US model, but the components fit together so easily, and the blades did their job so efficiently. I had to marvel. Unsurprisingly, the appliance I purchased was the product of Naoto Fukasawa who has a gift for making ordinary, everyday goods better. They practically intuit the user’s movement. Like my blender, these are things one buys to fulfill a basic need. But then cannot imagine living without them.
Filled with first-person explanations, this book is a window into the mind of one of Japan’s most accomplished designers.
A brand new monograph on one of Japan's best-known product designers, featuring more than 100 of his latest works
Naoto Fukasawa's simple, restrained, and user-friendly products have an extraordinarily universal appeal. Featuring more than 100 of his latest designs, including furniture, phones, watches, fashion, luggage, and accessories, Naoto Fukasawa: Embodiment perfectly captures Fukasawa's perspective on the dynamic interplay between people, places, and things.
It places the designer's products into the context of the contemporary design world and offers a first-hand account of Fukasawa's design philosophy.
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…
My name is Stephen McCranie and I'm currently working on Space Boy, a slow-burning high school romance that asks the question, "How do we bridge the gap between us?" I love working in this particular genre because high school is such a formative period for all of us. Also, when a romance burns slowly, the audience gets time to explore the world of the story, which can often be dynamic and lush with detail. And then, when our lovers find each other at long last, it is all the more sweet for having waited.
A girl gets a letter from her future self, telling her to do everything she can to save a suicidal classmate, even if that means falling in love with him. A sweet love story with a hint of time travel that helped me understand the sacrifice love demands. I would love to be able to write a romance like this someday.
Orange: The Complete Collection is a romantic comedy manga series by shoujo author and artist lchigo Takano. This critically-lauded manga series will tug at your heartstrings with its central plot device about time travel and communication with a future self. Seven Seas will release Orange: The Complete Collection in its entirety in two separate 384-page omnibus editions. Each omnibus collection will contain wrap-around covers, colour inserts, and captivating shoujo-style artwork. Everyone has regrets in life. So who wouldn't take the chance to change the past if given the opportunity? When sixteen-year-old Takamiya Naho receives a mysterious letter, claiming to be…
