100 Books Like Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos

I used this book to relieve the boredom of a long daily commute.

Instead of looking out of a train window at the same old scenery I'd passed a thousand times before, I was now taken to a dystopian society in which everything which I had taken for granted about family life was turned upside down. Where humans are manufactured to a specification instead of being born. A new pseudo religion where everyone makes the sign of the ‘T’, to signify their devotion to the original Ford Model T, which was the first vehicle to be manufactured on an assembly line.

This novel features a strong protagonist, separated from his love by an evil emperor.

I love characters that aren’t just fighting for a good cause, but are fighting for love, and this series features a gripping love story. The characters find a way to beat impossible odds using wits, magic, and courage. It’s one of the few books I was excited to read more than once.

There are several “big questions” that have long been contemplated by prophets, philosophers, and me. “Does life have meaning? What’s my place in the universe? How can God do all those things people say He’s done?” Even though Douglas Adams was a dedicated atheist, his trilogy provides answers to these and more while keeping his readers laughing. The atheist helped me understand God.

The Star Wars universe started as one movie, then three, then six. It then experienced its own “big bang,” exploding with books, movies, television shows…  My favorite is one small part of that universe, which hardly anyone pays attention to. Traitor is Book 13 of the New Jedi Order series. I expected normal good guy/bad guy, dark side/light side dichotomies, but my expectations were overturned. Jacen, previously a good guy Jedi, comes under the tutelage of Vergere, a mysterious creature of indeterminate allegiance. I couldn’t tell whether she was Jacen’s teacher, protector, torturer, or captor. I was fascinated that all these concepts were meaningless here. There are many great stories in Star Wars and the New Jedi Order. This one outshines them all in what it teaches me about good and evil.

This is to me is the best book ever written for understanding what human beings are, how we are similar to and different from other animal species, how we develop from helpless newborns to fully functioning adults, and what we are striving for in our lives. Most nonfiction books make a point and then repeat it over and over with examples and anecdotes. In contrast, The Birth and Death of Meaning begins with evolution and progresses logically from its first page to its last. When you finish this book, you will have a much better understanding of yourself, the people in your life, historical and current events, and problems ranging from anxiety and depression to interpersonal conflict to prejudice.  

This is the darkest of Hermann Hesse’s well-known spiritual journey novels. Unlike works such as Siddhartha, and Demian, Harry Haller in Steppenwolf is a despondent, surly, and suicidal misfit, incapable of coming to grips with the bourgeois culture around him, which seems to him irreparably antithetical to the classical art and literature he worships.

Haller’s eventual spiritual awakening is far more subtle and less dazzling than those Hesse portrayed in other works, and for me, therefore, in many ways more relatable. Deeply ingrained in my mind is Hesse’s image of the gramophone playing tinny, distorted works by master classical composers—which Haller at first despises— but then comes to see that it is much like his trying to decipher mystical truth, which manifests to him in a sort of abridged and imperfect form—because that is all that we, as corporeal humans, are able to discern.

Back when I was an atheist undergraduate college student, this book, among others, saved my life.

I’d walked away from everything religious and hence lacked all moral grounding. Although I was ambitious, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. Only what I didn’t want to do with my life.

My animosity against all things religious was huge, but the stoic philosophy of discipline and self-control kept me from throwing my life away.

This is one of the books I love most. It is a delightful small book in which Nobel Laureate Frances Crick, who together with James Watson discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, addresses the questions: “What is Life?” and “How did it originate?”

This takes him to the origin and evolution of the Universe and to how life may have originated from the world of atoms and molecules, either here on Earth or, in his view more likely: long before the Solar System and Earth formed, in other places in our Galaxy. His idea is that from its place of origin, long ago near another star, it spread to other planetary systems, in the form of spores of bacteria.

His speculations in this book are scientifically well founded and ingenious. Crick is a wonderfully clear writer and this book, with its brilliant explanations and ideas, is a beauty, which I… show more.

This memoir was written in 1955 but its wisdom is evergreen because, nearly seventy years later, it’s still very difficult to be a woman.

We are many things to many people and it’s easy to lose ourselves in that swirl of activity and to-dos, which is precisely what happened to me. Depression and anxiety had reading off limits to me for a time, and this was the kind, gentle book that brought me back to the page, the one that said, Yes, yes.

That’s how it is, to love. It’s hard, not because you’re doing it wrong, but because you’re doing it right.

In philosophy that focuses upon the meaning of life it is not long before one comes across the name of Joshua Seachris.

He wrote the introduction to this book and each of his fellow editors introduce their respective sections.

Thaddeus Metz introduces ‘Understanding the Question of Life’s Meaning’; John Cottingham introduces ‘What Does God have to do with the meaning of life?’; Garrett Thomson introduces ‘The Loss of Meaning in a World without God’; Erik J. Wielenberg introduces ‘Finding Meaning in a World without God’; and John Martin Fischer introduces ‘The Meaning of Life and the Way Life Ends: Death Futility and Hope’. 

Each section consists of about six different essays, from authors as diverse as Bertrand Russell, C.S. Lewis, and Leo Tolstoy.