Books like Encyclopaedia of Hell — picked by fans

I especially love this novel as Camus applies his background in existential philosophy to elevate the medical thriller genre into the realm of the metaphysical.

I love how the novel uses the plot device of an outbreak of the plague to force me as a reader to move beyond the surface questions of “What?” “When?” and “Where?” to ask the deeper question of “Why?” and “What now?”

Dan Carlin is here to get the facts straight. The wildly intelligent and passionate historian released this book while I was working on mine, and it was a great resource for me. I’d recommend it to anyone looking to educate themselves on how civilizations fail. Hint: We keep making the same mistakes again. Read this and break the pattern!

Prefer something a bit more visual as the world falls apart? Stanley Donwood fills a book with full-page black and white linocut illustrations, the same medium I use for my illustrations. Without relying on any text, Donwood is able to use classic sequential art techniques to move us through the continual destruction of a wild and devolving island habitat. You may recognize his work from his decades-long collaboration with Radiohead, but his distinct style of storytelling and art stands alone.

A little levity may be required as we watch the world crumble around us. Anne Washburn’s play reads as a multi-generational game of telephone. Beginning shortly after the apocalypse, with television now obsolete, people gather round a campfire and begin retelling what they remember from random episodes of The Simpsons. In the second act, the retelling has evolved into an oral tradition far from the original. By the third act, we’re eighty years removed from the apocalypse, and the story has become its own bizarre and surreal performance. I read Mr. Burns and saw the play in person years ago, but I still think about it and laugh. It might also somehow be a fairly accurate depiction of our post-apocalyptic world.

One of my early motivations for becoming a geologist was reading my father’s very old book on Geology in the Service of Man. I quickly saw the vital importance of Earth Science in providing the raw materials, energy resources, water, and soils, and the foundations for engineering that we need to survive. I wanted to be part of that grandiose story.

Now, on reading Lewis Dartnell’s sweeping coverage of human history through the lens of our planet’s natural resources and how we use them, I am taken back to how my childhood passion developed. I agree with Lewis Dartnell that today, as the planet’s population soars and environmental concerns take a back seat, it is more essential than ever that we learn to manage Earth’s finite resources. 

This is a much lesser-known book than the others I’ve picked, and I feel it deserves a load more attention. Walter Alvarez was instrumental to the development of the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped-out by an asteroid impact. Here, he casts his professor-of-geology eye across the whole of Earth’s history to show us the astonishing ways that our world – and the cosmos around us – have nurtured life on the planet and influenced the human story.

I loved this book because it’s hugely informative and completely inspiring.

It charts the way in which nature restores the author after he has slid into a period of severe depression, one where the entire foundation of his existence—a unique bond with the natural environment, established in childhood—suddenly seems pointless and irrelevant. He moves to East Anglia and, with the support of friends, slowly recovers a sense of meaning as he starts to write again about the changing seasons. 

There is a wonderful eloquence to the way that he describes his regeneration. Nature is never a question of dry facts, it is a living, sensual experience that elevates the human soul. You also feel you’re in the presence of a very special observer, one who really understands the ancient rhythms of the universe in a way that few do.

The book is an educational experience that also manages to be… show more.

I love this book because it is a science and philosophy education bound together between two covers.

The book is thick, and its title is intimidating, but once I started reading it, I became engrossed in the story it tells. The mystery of the fine-tuning of the cosmos is the same mystery encountered by thinkers throughout the ages.

In recent decades, this mystery has evolved into the anthropic principle, the notion that because we are participants in this finely tuned universe, the properties of the universe must, in some way, be geared to allow us to exist.

Last, I enjoyed this book because it combines insights and ideas from science, philosophy, and even visionaries, like Pierre de Teilhard Chardin, as it ends with the thought that life evolves to the Omega Point, where life finally gains control of the inner workings of the universe.

Wow, what can I say about this little gem? It still makes me dizzy to think of myself as a sort of ‘intracellular organelle’ belonging to the great organism Gaia. Can more be said in fewer pages and with such humility from the master?

I recall the words of physicist Richard Feynman (which, incidentally, Klein quotes in my previous recommendation) when he says something like If you think you understand quantum mechanics, that can only mean that you don’t truly understand quantum mechanics.

Well, how can you not love Lovelock, who, after more than 50 years since he first proposed the Gaia hypothesis, admits that after the first decade or so, he still didn’t really understand it himself? There can’t be a more pedagogical pocketbook that you can read at a bus stop. Lovelock had to have come very far to explain it all so well and in so few… show more.

Most books about the future are real bummers. Climate change, war, inequality... the problems seem insurmountable. This book helped me get past those feelings. Yes, we’ve royally screwed things up, but in lyrical prose Ackerman shows us that while it was our ingenuity that led us to screw up the environment, it’s also our ingenuity that can fix it, if we accept the challenge and responsibility. “We can become Earth-restorers,” she claims, “and Earth-guardians.” I like that.