Books like Black Spring — picked by fans

Looking around me as a young man I found a grey world that had been stripped of all its glory and fabulousness by the exploitation and utilitarianism of human beings. 

Alexandra David-Neel was an amazing explorer. She was the first European woman to meet the Dalai Lama and in 1924 became the first to enter the forbidden Tibetan capital, Lhasa. She had already spent a decade travelling through China, living in a cave on the Tibetan border, where she learned about Buddhism from hermits, mystics, and bandits. 

She describes in this book how these people learnt such seemingly impossible skills such as telepathy, defying gravity, running for days without food or drink or sleep, and surviving with hardly any clothes in the subzero Himalayan blizzards. 

This magical world vanished when the Chinese invaded in 1947. 

To think that this miraculous way of life existed in the same century as me… show more.

Great art and literature liberates – from whatever ties that are constricting you. And it can be found anywhere. As a kid, Marvel comics rescued me from what I saw as a banal existence. And Spider-man was the first. It literally changed my life because I ended up working for Marvel, writing for them, and coming up with Earth 616, which in the Marvel multiverse is the one where all the stories including the movies take place.

Reading them, my mind was totally blown away. What was the secret of their haunting magic? 

To my young mind, it seemed as though Stan Lee drank in the heavens and ate the entire Earth. He swallowed the cosmos and moved through the universe like a transformer. 

He was prodigious. Everything he touched turned into mercury, luminous and alchemical. His output consisted of multiple dimensions containing an infinity of beings. He metamorphosed constantly,… show more.

My favorite of Miller’s books, Tropic of Capricorn is based on Miller’s life in Brooklyn in the 1920s. It’s a dizzying stream-of-consciousness array that sweeps you along. Miller’s occasional poignant reminiscences about the magic of his boyhood and friendships contrast with the soul-sucking realities of adulthood and workplace bureaucracy that try to stamp out the embers of wonder and passion like a boot heel. Like most of his books, Capricorn celebrates the absurd miracle of consciousness. Miller’s influence on my education as a writer was indispensable. His books didn’t serve so much as a template as how to write, as how to be a writer, specifically how to observe and appreciate the vast madness of the world, reject conformity, and the embrace the anarchist spirit of artistic creation.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this book because it was suffocating.

The idea that "groupthink" could weigh on everyone so much that they learn to live with something terrifying, and still choose cruelty over kindness, unsettled me more than any jump scare. I remember setting it down one night and realizing what I was witnessing: a trainwreck in slow motion.

It reminded me how horror works best when it holds up a mirror, and sometimes what stares back is uglier than a monster, or in this case, a witch.

I couldn't put this book down, and I stayed haunted by the ordinary people of the town long after the last page.

What unsettled me most was the chilling reality of what people tolerate to preserve an appearance of peace. I have always been more frightened by the way a community polices its own silence while rot spreads beneath the floorboards. It forced me to see how denial is more dangerous than any haunting because it protects power instead of truth.

This story remains a low hum in my bones, proving the real horror is how easily we turn on each other.

I read this book as a young person in college, but it wasn’t until I re-read it about 10 years ago that I was able to experience the depths of its power.

This classic collection of 19th-century poems was a beacon at the time and holds true today for modern people who long to re-claim our interconnectedness with the natural world and embrace ourselves in all of our complexity. It’s a book I keep in my campervan to read on camping trips and one that I go to when I need inspiration with my own writing. 

This fifth pick isn’t fiction. But like the best fiction, poetry can pierce through to the very essence. Although shaggy poet Whitman was the furthest thing from a soldier imaginable, he was deeply involved in the war effort nonetheless. After the Battle of Fredericksburg, Whitman traveled to Virginia to find his wounded brother. He then chose to remain in Washington, DC, nursing wounded soldiers. Whitman’s war-time experiences gave rise to some of the finest poems in Leaves of Grass such as “The Wound-Dresser,” “Come Up from the Fields Father,” and “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.”

I was pulled into this book as I entered the world of a secret society of Flaneurs or Wanderers. I loved the secret intrigue of how the author found the symbol for this secret society in a used book and how it spurred a curious exploration of why we wander.

I used the ideas in the book to slow down, use my curiosity, and re-engage with my human qualities that are so often buried in the busyness and connection to tech all day long. This book was a welcome, cool drink of water on a hot day, filled with great stories and illustrations. 

A full-length rewrite of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that preserves only the first and last letter of each line, Shelf is a consummate work of potential literature—from the “why on earth would someone do that” all the way to the “wait, this is actually dope.” Without ever estranging himself from Whitman’s transcendentalist trumpeting, Quintavalle burrows deep into the poem’s form and instills a disenchanted eloquence all his own.

Here’s another book that I love because it’s a story about love, the love of two boys who are unlikely companions: one is a former football player, taciturn and withdrawn; the other is openly gay, a short, slender, fine-boned boy who idolizes the poet Walt Whitman, whose words become a leitmotif of this remarkable novel. Told in the form of. letters that the two boys exchange, it follows their emerging friendship as it gradually turns into a love that’s as poetic as Whitman’s well-chosen words. The relationship of the boys – who are characters to die for – is riveting and their story, unforgettable. Another terrific addition to gay literature for teens.