100 Books Like Dreaming the Soul Back Home

The concept of whether a woman can truly be the subject of her own life has always fascinated me. It was an invisible struggle I didn’t know I had. Until I set out to finish the 54 unmet dreams of my late father, whose life had been cut short in a car crash. It wasn’t until I looked at the world through main character lenses, the kind that just seem to come more naturally to men, that I was able to see myself truly. This is just one lesson from my book. If you’ve ever felt different, remember: you’re not. You just haven’t seen yourself as the main character yet. These books will guide you.

Until my early 50s, I detested all things spiritual. These books showed up practically on their own, without dogma or jargon, mainly to convince me that the divine existed. They’re easy to read and open to interpretation. They tricked me into a spiritual life by making it seem logical and simply a place to explore at my leisure. I try to write things that are clear and simple, and these books persuaded me that the ineffable isn’t so hard to write about. Also, I could return to these books years later, and they still speak to me. Each is capable of opening something new to me later in life.

I have more than 20 years of experience in the field of leadership development and assessment. I am a trained theologian and English/German linguist, and I hold a passion for the more fundamental questions concerning the human condition. In my business consulting practice, I invite clients to become better versions of themselves and to transform their organizations as well as societies by consciously adhering to doing the right thing. 

I’ve spent most of my life fascinated by what happens when women stop editing themselves. As a former television reporter, health educator, and memoirist, I’ve lived on both sides of the polished story and the private reckoning in my search for truth. Writing my own memoir forced me to confront how often women are encouraged to soften conflict, spiritualize pain, or tidy up the truth to make it more palatable. I’m drawn to books that refuse that impulse—stories where healing isn’t performative, and transformation isn’t neat.

When my Mexican maternal grandmother died the month before I was born, she left the door between the worlds ajar. Conversations with my nana’s spirit instilled faith that I could converse with all spirits, from the consciousness of land to trees, herbs, and even ideas. Being raised a Christian Scientist taught me the power of mind over matter and instilled the authority and responsibility for my own wellness through my Divine essence. This upbringing prepared me for my Witchcraft path that considers self-care as tending of my Divine spirit, illuminates the Divine light in all of Life, and teaches how to manifest Magick through our relationships, self-love, and personal healing.

I’ve been a connoisseur of all things terrifying and fantastical since I was 5, and so scared of my Baba Yaga book downstairs I couldn’t sleep. I pursued the delicious fear of a well-written monster through my teens and into adulthood but found that so many books within the horror and fantasy genres are aimed at younger readers. So I wrote the books I wanted to read. I’d always planned to write, but it was developing extreme anxiety that inspired me to nurture my creative side and finally do it. I was having terrible nightmares at the time, and these awful dreams became the central scenes of my novels.

I started my scientific career as an Astrophysicist. However, I have always been interested in Archaeology. This finally led me to conjugate the two passions when I started working in Archaeoastronomy, in 2003. Working in Archaeoastronomy first means having a direct experience of the sites (preferably, of every single stone, although in places like Giza they count in the millions…). So I have made fieldworks in Italy, Egypt, Cambodia, and, recently, on Chinese imperial necropolises. I currently teach Archaeoastronomy as a professor at the Politecnico of Milan. I have always been interested also in scientific communication on TV and social media, and my introductive Archaeoastronomy course is available for free on the Coursera platform.

I am an Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University. I have been writing books on later prehistoric and Romano-British and Roman provincial cults and customs since the 1980s, and my fascination with this subject remains undimmed. I have travelled all over the world as a visiting lecturer and in 2015 my book Bog Bodies Uncovered won two US Books of the Year awards. I have always been of the view that research is pointless unless it is shared and easily communicated, and so I try to avoid academic jargon and to present my publications both as accessible to general readers and as relevant to people at the cutting edge of their own research.

As an undergraduate at the University of Leeds in the 1960s the principal influence on my life and thinking was Trevor Ling an Anglican Priest and Buddhist who eventually became a Professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester. He was the start of my research on Islam and Asia and my peripatetic career having lived in Scotland, Germany, Holland, America, Australia and Singapore. I became a professor of the sociology of religion in the Asia Research Center at the National University of Singapore. I have published two books on Singapore, a handbook of religions in Asia, and several works on the body, medicine, ageing and human vulnerability.

I’m an avid fantasy reader and enjoy stories filled with magic, danger, and a mix of humor and romance thrown in. When I’m not writing my own fantasy novels, you might catch me tucked away in a corner, reading a book, and fueling my imagination. Since my own book, The Wayward Wizard, features a secret organization trying to intercept the supernatural, I knew similar stories would make a perfect list to share with fellow fantasy readers.