100 Books Like Love in the Ruins

This book (actually, this series of volumes) is of course an epic and a classic. And deservedly so—even though most scholars no longer find Gibbon’s account of the causes of Rome’s fall persuasive. 

Right or wrong, the book is a model of a study that is both immersed (sometimes admiringly and sometimes caustically) in individual characters and episodes and yet also intensely interested in the big picture. And the elegant, witty prose makes the book a pleasure to read. 

Analyses of modern Western decline often look for parallels in ancient Rome, and Gibbon’s study is almost a mandatory point of departure.

Barzun, who lived to be 104, was in his lifetime possibly the most erudite human being on the planet. 

And this book, published when he was much younger (as a spry 93-year-old) is an almost perfect history of the modern age: a superb, readable sort-of survey that is not surveyish but rather earnestly engaged with themes that were important in the 16th-century beginnings of our modern civilization and are important still. 

Barzun doesn’t seem to be a gloomy naysayer, and he admires and appreciates the achievements of Western civilization; but as his title suggests, he came to believe that the culture is exhausted and unraveling. An informative and provocative read!

I didn’t know whether to laugh or stage an intervention. This book introduced me to Ignatius J. Reilly, a character so insufferable and absurdly grandiose that I kept turning pages just to see how much worse he could get. I was horrified and hypnotized. I couldn’t look away.

What I love about this book is that it doesn’t ask you to like anyone. It asks you to witness the glorious wreckage of human delusion. It is chaotic, bloated, brilliant, and somehow still moving. Toole gave me a character I wanted to strangle, and a novel I wanted to reread. That kind of friction is rare, and I live for it.

Early in this book, a character uses his kitchen oven to dry out some psychedelic mushrooms harvested from the rooftop garden at his flat in World War II London. Dosing the characters (and somehow the reader) with Amanita Muscaria is an appropriate way to set the tone of this book.

Mushroom experiences are fun and giggly and clever, at times, but they can also open the mind to the evils mankind is capable of and the intricate conspiracies seemingly hiding in plain sight. Which is what I love about Gravity’s Rainbow – Pynchon’s writing is hilarious, but then he’ll hit you with a gut punch so poignant it will linger in your mind for decades. 

A cult novel from the early twentieth century, beloved of everyone from C.S. Lewis to Neil Gaiman to literally Kafka.

It starts at a peaceful suburban garden party, then plunges us into the secret anarchist conspiracy to bring down civilization, and the equally secret police force dedicated to stopping them. Duels, disguises, and mind-blowing revelations ensue, with writing just packed with Edwardian-era wit and charm.

Okay, I’m a big fan of Lovecraftian lore, but who needs me to recommend Lovecraft? I might as well recommend White Castle to stoners.

While this book (which was also an HBO series) isn’t as funny as Ruff’s Sewer, Gas, and Electric (a wonderful spoof of Atlas Shrugged), I reread it after watching the series and found it as thrilling and exciting as the first read. It plays on science fiction as well as horror, and the chapter depicting Hypolita Freeman’s discovery of a portal to other universes in an observatory has haunted me since I first read it.

I’ve never read a book that weaves horror and science fiction so seamlessly. (Note: I love the irony of writing a book about a closely-knit black family tackling the horrors inspired by the openly racist Lovecraft.)

This is a little-known gem by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder (best known for his play Our Town). Published in the 1935, it’s a contemporaneous account of Depression-era America, following the misadventures of traveling salesman and religious zealot, George Brush. 

Coming off as preachy and self-righteous, George sparks ire and outrage wherever he goes. Yet, he’s a sincere and decent person. At the end of his misadventures, George is humbled and begins to broaden his views, making him a complex, sympathetic character.

Though renowned during his lifetime, Wilder has been largely forgotten in favor of flashier contemporaries. All of his works are worth rediscovering, but Heaven’s My Destination is closest to my heart as it was a major inspiration for my own book.  

One of the many great comic novels featuring Bertie Wooster, a rich and likeable but somewhat dim-witted fellow about town and his more than capable butler Jeeves who spends a great deal of his time extricating Bertie from various scrapes in which he finds himself. Wodehouse's light and witty prose and the cast of amusing individuals such as Gussie Fink-Nottle and Tubby Glossop, not only make this book a joy to read but guarantees smiles and laughter.

This book, which I read in my first year as an academic, has powerfully influenced my thinking ever since – more than any other scholarly book, probably.

It is the best treatment I know of that not only diagnoses and explains the futility of modern moral thinking – an ailment that is as apparent in public political debates as in academy philosophy – but also explains how we got here.

In addition, the book offers cogent insights into much else that is wrong with modern culture and politics. And although After Virtue is not exactly light reading, it is succinct, occasionally eloquent, and sometimes wickedly funny.

A book can be vastly overambitious, and hence broadly unpersuasive, and yet still be full of insights. 

Toynbee’s monumental study attempted to order all of human history into a recurring pattern of civilizational genesis, growth, decline, and breakdown. It couldn’t be done, as historians and critics have pointed out.

Even so, the study is rich with ideas and perspectives about factors that contribute to societal growth and decline, the role of “creative minorities,” the effects of religion on civilization and vice versa, and much else.

Hardly anyone (including me) will manage to read all 12 volumes, but Toynbee himself approved a readable two-volume abridgment by D. C. Somervell, which was illuminating when I read it in college and has continued to be illuminating in the years since then.