76 Books Like Beggars of Life

Simple, lyrical, beautiful.

Siddhartha is the story of an epic journey of a man traveling through ancient India, with life lessons subtly woven through the narrative.

Ultimately, this book is about how all things are connected through nature, and more specifically, how attaching too much weight to individual events—good, bad, happy, sad—misses the totality of appreciating how those events work together to make a more joyful, meaningful life.

I studied under the distinguished sociologist, Immanuel Wallerstein. One day in class he said, if you read only one book, it should be this one. So I read it. 

Koestler was a Hungarian Jew who joined the German Communist Party. He became disillusioned with communism, in part because of the Stalin trials of the 1930s, in which many of Stalin’s own former allies were tortured and executed. 

The protagonist of the novel is Rubashov, a dedicated Communist who is accused of treason, tortured, and eventually executed despite confessing to his supposed crimes. The novel is a great way to learn not only about the Stalinist Soviet Union, but about any society that brain-washes its victims. 

LaFarge’s first novel, Laughing Boy, about the love affair between a reservation Indian and one who had been raised in a religious school, won the 1930 Pulitzer Prize. LaFarge spent much of his life fighting for Native American rights, sometimes in the “dark of Washington.” I wanted to grow up to be an Indian. I still do.

Being a New Englander, I don’t care much about Southern literature but Wolfe transcends it and also influenced Jack Kerouac, who would be my sixth choice. It was recommended to me by Joe Fineman, son of novelist Irving Fineman, after I flunked out of Caltech (Joe didn’t), saying “This is your book.” I have no idea who my influences are but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that they thought Thomas Wolfe was one of them. He probably is. 

Well-known American author Jack London experienced a genuine decline into vagrancy in the US during the late nineteenth century.

In his 1907 memoir, he depicts the realities of the vagrant’s life without flinching. The detailed descriptions of begging for sustenance from strangers’ homes, risking death to evade detection on fright trains, and the life of inmates in the state penitentiary are as gripping as they are appalling.

The only US book in this collection of recommendations, The Road confirms very similar experiences and challenges facing the homeless on both sides of the Atlantic.

Curiosity about hobo life led Ted Conover to drop everything and ride the rails for a spell. What he learned became the basis of his first book, Rolling Nowhere. It’s filled with the things I love best about these books: fascinating characters, indelible scenes, and movement through landscapes both sublime and gritty. On every page, there’s a reminder of Kerouac and London. Reading it, I am filled with longing, the urge for going, wanderlust. I’m older now; I’ve done my share of traveling and written about it, too. But maybe I’m not totally done with it: a half-mile from my comfortable house, my street intersects with the road out of town, the city limits sign visible in the distance. And beyond: desert, wide sky, open road. A boundless dreamland.

I learned so much from reading anthropologist Susan Phillips’ fantastic account of Los Angeles over the last 100 years. Exploring the history of the city from the ground up, she combines a microscopic analysis of the city’s diverse graffiti cultures–from the graffiti of hobos to that of surfers, prisoners, and punks–with a macroscopic account of the changing nature of this most famous megalopolis.

I loved the beautiful, intimate images Philips included, as well as her refreshing, first-person appearance throughout the book. More than anything, though, I really enjoyed the way that Phillip's approach extends the understanding of 20th-century graffiti beyond the traditional East Cost (and hip-hop-centric) focus, seeing an entire world within the traces the most marginalized leave behind and showing how graffiti reveals as much about the changing nature of a city as of society itself.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see deeper into a country. Raban was a respected English novelist and critic when he moved to the USA and settled there – something I would later do myself. He proceeded to produce a series of brilliantly vivid travel books about his new homeland, of which this was the first. Avoiding the inevitable road trip (though he did those later), he takes a motorboat for a solo journey down the Mississippi River. Long periods alone allow him the chance to reflect on the river, nature, and the USA, but he also has lively encounters with the people who live by the river, revealing their passions and their pains.

“The cruise of a ship is a biography,” wrote Raphael Semmes about his ocean-straddling tall ship, CSS Alabama. “The ship becomes a personification. She not only, ‘walks the waters like a thing of life,’ but she speaks in moving accents to those capable of interpreting her.” In this excellent biography of Carondelet’s career, a squat, ugly, ironclad gunboat also becomes a major character along with the men who designed and built the revolutionary vessel, stoked her engines, and fired her big guns. In tactics and technology, riverine warfare was invented from scratch and indispensable to victory. This work (and Smith’s entire series on brown water war vessels) provides fresh and enlightening perspectives on every major battle down the Mississippi from Forts Henry and Donelson through Vicksburg to Red River.

As a teenager, Abraham Lincoln built a flatboat and floated down the Mississippi to New Orleans to sell the produce his family and neighbors had grown. This and a similar trip three years later were his only exposure to the Deep South. They immersed him in a culture of riverboat men that was archetypical of the era and included events that became part of the mythology surrounding him, an attack by runaway slaves that could have killed him, and his rescue of fellow boatman from drowning. Campanella is a university professor, tireless researcher, and excellent writer.