100 Books Like Hunting and Gathering

A male author describing the adulterous passions of an unhappy woman, Flaubert tears into Madame Bovary as superficial and ridiculously narcissistic. Yet Flaubert was a terrific writer and also shows how empty and purposeless the restricted life of a middle-class woman was in his time–not poor enough to be preoccupied with surviving, but not rich enough to lead a glamorous life. It’s not like Emma Bovary can go to law school!

Flaubert’s dissection of Emma’s forbidden love life is brilliant. It’s downright painful to see Emma’s hopes and fantasies when the men in her life take what they want from her, and she pours all she has into them. I can relate.

Beneath her shabby scarf and thick glasses, Ophelia hides singular gifts: she can read the past of objects, and walk through mirrors, into other worlds.

Unexpectedly betrothed to an icy foreigner, Thorn, Ophelia is torn from her peaceful home and must learn to survive in a new place, cold and cruel. She quickly comes to realize that she is at the center of a conspiracy that could threaten the entire universe.

This fantasy novel is richly layered and incredibly gripping. But while the plot and world are brilliantly crafted, what truly stuck with me is the “will they, won’t they” love story at its core, so emotional you won’t be able to put the book down. 

This book perfectly showcases how, for centuries, people have been fascinated by the seediness that potentially lurks behind the rich and powerful. And wow, is this book saturated with seediness?

While the complete disregard for another human’s existence and happiness is at the forefront of it and is presented as the focus of the story itself, I found myself understanding that it is also a cautionary tale on why these heinous behaviors cannot be allowed to become commonplace. The fact that these characters remain to be considered heinous gives me hope for the future!

Set in the mid-19th century, in Paris, this novel follows Armand Duval, a young bourgeois, as he recounts his passion for the beautiful Marguerite Gautier, a “demi-mondaine” and courtesan. Rebelling against the social conventions of the time, Armand pursues his "unseemly" love affair, and unsurprisingly, pays the price for his defiance.

I love this novel for how richly it describes France’s society at the time. Inspired by the love affairs of Alexandre Dumas fils, with Marie Duplessis, a courtesan, The Lady of the Camellias also serves as the basis for Baz Luhrman’s film Moulin Rouge. 

This book began the entire City Mysteries genre. When French novelist Eugène Sue published it serially in 1842-1843, it took the world by storm and became an instant bestseller. I love the intrigue in the novel. The main character, Prince Rodolphe, is in disguise as a working man in Paris among criminals and the poor with the intent to help them.

I love how the novel shows the complex personalities of the different characters and their backstories, explaining how many became criminals. The novel is full of Gothic atmosphere and helped to change the Gothic from being set in crumbling castles and the past to the present-day and the modern city. This Gothic cityscape reflected the trauma and displacement many felt living in crime-ridden metropolises.

The course I took from Paul Shepard in college was one of the most thought-provoking courses I ever experienced. Find an image of the original cover of the book and you'll see what I mean—it's a strange synthesis of a post-modern bow hunter emerging from his paleo ancestor. Shepard contends that the key to understanding human happiness is recognizing that we are genetically hunters and gatherers living in a post-modern age. Reclaiming our hunting and gathering impulses will help us lead fuller lives. He does a fascinating job, in this book, of describing what hunting and gathering culture childhoods looked like and then suggesting how we should parent our children with these old genetic impulses in mind. 

To understand human nature you need to take a deep dive into anthropology, particularly into the lives of hunter-gatherers. Because humans are the most flexible animal on this planet, it can be incredibly difficult for an outsider to tell which lessons from any one society are general and which relate to just their small part of the world. The beauty of this book is that the brilliant anthropologist who wrote it does the hard yards for you, narrating a fascinating and highly accessible trip through the lives of hunter-gatherers.

The secret to mastering your apocalypse experience is to think of it not as surviving, but as thriving—in the way that humans did for over 300,000 years as hunter-gatherers.

This book will drop you into that mindset as you read about how far our modern civilization has deviated from our original lifestyle, and the huge price we have paid for all of our comforts, conveniences, and technological wizardry.

This book may make you want to adopt an apocalypse-ready lifestyle even in the absence of societal collapse, since the new path he proposes offers so much in terms of improved health and wellbeing, rewarding outdoor activities, and IRL interaction (enjoy more sex, he says).  

This book revolutionized our common understanding of human history by showing that the smallest and simplest (most “primitive”) human populations, mobile rather than sedentary, subsisting only on wild foods, contra the standard Hobbesian characterization of primitive life, actually had relatively light workloads and often were better nourished and more disease free than contemporary agriculturalists [and I might add many historic civilizations].

This book excited me and started me on my counterintuitive interpretation of the evolution of human economies.

This is actually an edited book of papers dealing with the social organization among prehistoric and ethnographic hunter-gatherers. It is one of the few publications that discusses issues like inequality from a variety of different viewpoints, including diametrically opposed views about Upper Paleolithic societies – whether they were egalitarian or non-egalitarian. Another important aspect of this volume is the inclusion of ethnographic hunter-gatherers to generate insights into how prehistoric hunter-gatherers could have organized themselves. Some unique features include the examination of dogs as indicators of inequalities and the nature of the cave paintings as indicators of inequalities. Mobility, population densities, surpluses, and many other factors all create a heady brew of debate and intriguing ideas. This book is highly recommended, even if a bit technical.