100 Books Like Melmoth

There is nothing like this groundbreaking memoir—it is as good as it gets—and it has probably influenced every memoir since (including my own).

Kingston is a poet, and I find it impossible not to sink into the striking, gorgeous language and imagery as she describes growing up between multiple worlds: the China her parents emigrated from, the California of a first-generation daughter of immigrants, the ghost-filled China of her mother’s “talk stories,” and her inner life and growing awareness. She weaves family stories, famous myths, and her own girlhood experiences into a beautiful and unforgettable narrative.

I probably re-read it once a year.

My mother is a member of the exact same generation as Rushdie, kids born at the moment when India gained independence, so I grew up in the shadow of that legacy—the optimism, the violence, the huge historical question mark. But when I picked up Rushdie’s magical-realist novel, it was the prose that spoke to me first: vivid, exaggerated, a cacophony, evoking India itself.

Our narrator, Saleem Sinai, was switched at birth with another child, and throughout the novel, images and phrases recur in different contexts. Often, these are puns that, by the second or third time they appear, have accumulated the weight of metaphor. I’ve read this book half a dozen times, and find more to enjoy with each reading.

When I read So Far From God, it did two things. First, it helped me understand this genre that was created by Latin American authors. Lois Parkinson Zamora said, “Magical realism is characterized by...its capacity to create (magical) meanings by envisioning ordinary things in extraordinary ways.” I understood what that meant when I read So Far From God. In the first chapter alone, one of the main characters, La Loca, dies and comes back to life. Her death was ordinary and extraordinary. I was hooked. 

Perhaps more importantly, in reading Castillo’s novel, I saw our shared Latina history, culture, and perspective through the stories she told. It was the first book that validated my experience as a Latina which is why it’ll always be close to my heart.

Several Luis Alberto Urrea novels feature powerful women, but this one resonates with me the most. One reason is that, like my novel, his also reimagines the history of a real-life great-aunt from Mexico. Urrea’s protagonist, Teresita, Saint of Cabora, is so full of heart that she gives me hope more readers will embrace Latinas in American literature.

Teresita Urrea exemplifies the strength teenage girls can wield when people encourage them to speak up instead of pipe down and when people value all their gifts regardless of whether those gifts were once labeled “masculine,” like boldness, or “feminine,” like empathy. For me, Teresita offered timeless wisdom: because she led with love, she saw through the lies of the powerful to the hearts of people who needed healing and justice. 

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Occult Roots of Nazism is arguably the first scholarly monograph to take the relationship between occultism and Nazism seriously, providing a fascinating overview of the “secret Aryan cults” and “Ariosophic” beliefs that ostensibly influenced Nazi ideology.

While Goodrick-Clarke stops short of drawing a direct connection between prewar occult doctrines and Nazi policies during the Third Reich– indeed, his study concludes in 1935––no historian before or since has done as thorough a job, based on copious empirical research, of chronicling the eclectic and ubiquitous occult underground that helped shape the interwar folkish movement that produced Nazism.

Corinna Treitel’s Science for the Soul did for the occult what Goodrick-Clarke’s Occult Roots of Nazism did for Ariosophy, providing the first comprehensive account of the wide array of occult doctrines and esoteric sciences that flourished in Germany and Austria at the turn of the twentieth century.

While she does include a chapter on occultism in the Third Reich, Treitel is careful not to blame occultism for Nazism, showing how Theosophy and Anthroposophy (the progenitors of Ariosophy), astrology, parapsychology, spiritualism, and other esoteric doctrines provided a socially and politically diverse group of Germans a range of alternative beliefs and practices to help make sense of a modernizing, post-industrial, “disenchanted” world.

One of the two best books, with Anne Harrington’s Reenchanted Science, on the history of German occultism and “border science”.

This book is another that has a similar vibe to The Dresden Files and my books. This one had a really unique take that I liked, mixing in ghosts with the other supernatural creatures and elements. The main character has some fun, memorable quirks that I enjoyed, and the plot had some great twists that I didn’t see coming. The world is really broad, and there’s a lot more to uncover about how things work, so I liked that it didn’t tell everything in the first book, so it left me with the desire to read more.  

A long time ago, back in the mid-1970s, my Greek history professor told me that Dodds’ Greeks and the Irrational was one of the most important books on Greek history of the 20th century. He was right. It is a wonderful book, full of amazing facts about magic, ritual, and religion. It has had a huge impact on the field of classical studies and is still in print 70 years after its first publication. Dodds was a distinguished Greek scholar (the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford) but wrote for a wide audience interested in not only Greek civilization but social science as well. I have thought hard and long about his book ever since reading it on my professor’s recommendation. 

Mya Spalter is a New York witch who learned the ropes by way of her ancestors as well as the Enchantments occult shop. Learning from both guides and NYC witches, I love the way this book shows how Spalter’s magic was conjured by personal connections to survival and home.

Gaining knowledge on both our magic and ancestral practices can be a difficult journey for queer folks, navigating the ultra-conservative laws of mainstream spirituality. However, magic is not conservative nor heterosexual—it is universal and a tool we can all access. This book showed me the divine connections between Wiccan history, self-care, and surviving as a queer person of Color in America.

This book chronicles the changing landscape of Western spirituality as it encounters “the wisdom of the East,” primarily India’s religious heritage, alongside its fascination with and assumed similarity to the archaic and “pagan” European past.

The ideas of the primacy of solar worship are entertained side by side with the notions of the importance of phallic worship and fertility cults. The title of the book is a tip of the hat to Frances Yates’ study of Rosicrucian Enlightenment–in both cases, the suggestion is that the project of Enlightenment does not consist of the “cult of reason” exclusively but that it contains important undercurrents best described as esoteric, which in Godwin’s book have their focus on the Theosophical Society of Madame Blavatsky and its many associated propagators.