Books like Moon Magic — picked by fans

I find that Frankenstein transcends eras by posing critical questions about the ways we develop and use new technology.

I first read a comic-book version in elementary school and have returned to Shelly’s novel over the years because it stimulates my critical thinking about technology, particularly the current rise of AI and our response to it. Frankenstein raises a fundamental ethical question about technology in real life: just because humans can create something, should they actually create it?

For me, the novel also creates the opportunity to explore questions about how we engage technology once we choose to invent it. Dr. Frankenstein abandons his creation, and the creature becomes an angry monster. I ask myself, is this an allegory for our own response to technology?

This book took me to places that I never knew existed.

Once I began to read the book, I was drawn into a land of beauty and realism that I could literally see as I read the story. I learned so much about the strengths and weaknesses of a human being. It made me examine my own inner self.

I saw terrible things happening to deep and intense people in the story, and I saw them react in the best and the worst ways. The beauty and pain that Donaldson put into this book were far more than I had expected or been ready to face myself.

Few people can claim the title The Wickedest Man in the World bestowed upon one of the most vilified and revered characters of the nineteenth century, Alistair Crowley.

Writer, mountain climber, occultist, and dare I say visionary, Crowley has rubbed shoulders with both literary giants and personalities of the early nineteen hundreds. A member of several secret societies and founder of his own Temple of Thelema and surrounded by some of the strangest characters one could hope to meet in a single lifetime.

This biography recounts passages from his own diaries and manuscripts bequeathed to the author after his death and anecdotes both funny and disturbing about a man who lived a most extraordinary life. Eventually dying in poverty at a rooming house in Brighton.

John and Caitin Mathews have a vast body of work on the subject of spirituality. This is one of their first and, in my opinion, one of their best.

I recommend this title to anyone who feels a deep connection to Celtic heritage and the old Gods and Goddesses of early British and Welsh ancestry. I was especially entranced by the pathworking techniques, a guided visualisation journey into the ‘otherworld’ of our native ancestors. Having undertaken several of these guided visualisation journeys, I had some deeply personal and life-enhancing experiences that I still vividly recall some thirty years later.

A great introduction to the Western Mystery Tradition.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics marks the beginning of attempts to articulate the philosophy of metaphysics as a science. Retrospectively applying Kant’s division of metaphysics as transcendental philosophy to Aristotle’s writings: Aristotle’s Metaphysics is an in-depth examination of cosmological and theological metaphysics.

I personally enjoy Aristotle’s Metaphysics because it is mysterious. It is difficult to read, and the fact that it was written with an entirely different alphabet is exciting. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is his attempt to systematically blend his particular preference for empiricism with metaphysical insights learned from Plato’s philosophy.

The history of Aristotle’s Metaphysics – in terms of, for example, its title and organization – is fascinating in itself; however, what always stood out for me was recognizing Aristotle’s own excitement. Book 5 of his Metaphysics is often thought of as a kind of metaphysical dictionary, and shortly after this summary of vocabulary terms, it is as if Aristotle grabs hold of… show more.

The Metaphysical Club is about the Pragmatist philosophers: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. This sounds forbidding, but it’s anything but. Group biography shows how and why particular ideas occur to particular people at a particular moment, and this is a brilliant example of it.

This selection of essays focuses on the important concept of “downward causation” (a designation first employed by Donald T. Campbell), that is, the idea that, in addition to the “upward” causal influence of parts on wholes, which is the focus of stereotypical (bottom-up) reductionist views, wholes also exercise top-down emergent causal influences on their parts.

This has been a vital recurring issue and an identifying principle in most theories of emergence. Campbell and Mark H. Bickhard provide the culminating chapter in this book.

I’m drawn to novels that combine the ordinary with the extraordinary, the mundane with the spiritual, and Drawing in the Dust does both. By turns, suspenseful, mysterious, and thought-provoking, this transformative story provides insight into the world of biblical excavation—with a twist! Archaeologist Page Brookstone discovers the bones of prophet Jeremiah locked in an embrace with the bones of a mysterious woman. Amazing stuff, especially for me, who has loved archeology since my days in college. I categorize Drawing in the Dust as visionary/metaphysical fiction, the genre I write and most love to read, a genre that bridges science and spirituality with paranormal and supernatural underpinnings.

I’m a physician, so it’s probably not surprising that a book by a physician about an alien physician might hit my list of meaningful space operas.

What is surprising is Star Surgeon’s double-twist—the patients aren’t who we think they are, and the secret to getting Earth into the prestigious Galactic Confederation isn’t what we think it is—both of which actually had huge real-world thematic implications.

On face level, it’s a medical thriller: the protag’s the first alien to graduate from human medical school, and he’s got to prove himself by curing an epidemic on a remote planet without arousing the ire of his human teachers. (I felt like this in residency.) But on a metaphysical level, Star Surgeon is a quiet manifesto dissecting the origins of racism—and the very biology of sentience itself. 

The worn and dog-eared copy of Strange News From Another Star has graced my bookshelf for almost 50 years. (Note that this and not the more recent edition, which is missing some of the best original stories, is what I’m recommending.)

Hesse spoke to me at a time in my life when I didn’t realize fiction existed that could reflect my own metaphysical experiences. His stories mirrored my own dreams and visions and confirmed that I wasn’t alone in the world. And he did this in a timeless way that embraced the philosophical along with the political.