Books like My Degeneration — picked by fans

I love “Persepolis” because the author very accurately and with a great amount of humor describes, and through graphics, portrays the very heavy topic of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. 

She makes it easy for people who weren’t there at the time and are not a part of the culture or history to imagine what happened. I like how she describes family relationships, especially with her parents, in a tribal culture. In a very transparent way, she accurately describes the differences between private family life and the one that is portrayed publicly.

Joe Saccos’ work has had such an impression on me.

In 1991-1992, Sacco spent two months in the occupied territories, collecting stories for this masterpiece of journalism and comics. He was breaking new ground; Comics Journalism as a form did not really exist before this book.

On the ground, Sacco found that as a cartoonist, he could delve deeper into the experiences of the Palestinians he interviewed; all knew their identities were safe as the book would be drawn, with no identifying photos, no names. Their stories and pain pour forth. 

Looking back on this publication thirty years later, the situation has become far, far worse for Palestinians. This book is an excellent primer to understand the atrocities of the present and the context of their past.

I am not recommending a particular volume or compilation. In general I love the work of Harvey Pekar. He has brought me closer to Documentary Comics than any other author. He worked with reflections and anecdotes and was one of those authors that from the writing was able to defy the common places in comics making. Yes, he was a scriptwriter, but he pulled out so many amazing comics from the graphic formula and made them work. I remember seeing gigantic balloons with blocks of text. Pages and pages of close-ups, and they weren’t boring. A comic about him reflecting on his masculinity by unclogging the toilet. Amazing.

Virus Tropical is a Latin American Book, a Colombian book, an Argentinian Book, an Ecuadorian Book. Virus tropical talks about the nineties, if you are from Colombia you recognize the towns, the T-shirts, the music, the buses. So many peripheries mixed up and telling you about the coming of age of the main character. So many important things touched while touching on the most vapid-everyday things. The accents, the way the characters interact, I was able to identify with all of this while reading this graphic novel. Virus Tropical is a great book, I’m glad it was translated into English.

We've all got an opinion on the musings, motivations, and state of mind of Bruce Wayne and Batman.

Instead of just idle musings, Travis Langley goes on a deep dive into the tormented and traumatized (or is it really?) life of the Dark Knight. Reading Batman and Psychology gave me a different perspective on the blurry lines separating Bruce Wayne and Batman.

Highly recommended read!

There is no better place to start learning about attention than from The Principles of Psychology.

I have always been captivated by the writings and deep insight of William James, known as the father of psychology. This is not a pop science book by any means—it was written in the 19th century, and you’ll see how gorgeous the language is. If you don’t want to plough through all 720 pages, I suggest you start with Chapter VIII on Attention. As James says, “Everyone knows what attention is.” But do we really? You will find some amazing gems in it.

It is available for free by Project Gutenberg.

The title appeals to me, and the list of books I love is overwhelming. I’m rounding out my recs with this out-of-print, self-help book published in 1939 that I came across it in a second-hand bookstore. You can open the guide to almost any page and find something simple and deep, or if not, old phraseology like, Preventing Unwholesome Behavior Due to Tedium, is amusing. Technology may be changing the way people meet and how we process information, but we have most of the same emotional needs as before.

Firstly, I absolutely love that this book is presented in the form of a podcast!

Maybe it’s just me, but epistolary novels always makes me feel the story is more “real”! I love how Wesolowski cleverly blurs the lines between madness, evil, and the paranormal, asking whether “monsters” really exist or are simply manifestations of our human selves.

This resonates so much with me as a clinical psychologist, because mental illness have been demonised and “monstered” throughout history, and I am always working to educate and defeat stereotypes and stigma.

Reading this book will help you achieve emotional freedom. I came across Steven’s book in my pursuit of finding the best way to help my clients learn how to make the right choices when looking to find what gives them energy and what can take energy away. His book is a guide that masterfully helps you understand how you are likely to behave when overwhelmed and gives you a breakthrough approach to solving your behavior hijack.

I loved how something that can be so abstract and complex, like human behavioral patterns, can be simplified in a five-pattern model and be shared as a guide that shows you how our self-defense mechanism gets created, how it can high-jack us, and most importantly how we can get out of the trap. It helped me figure out, from an emotional perspective, what behavioral patterns I run whenever I am overwhelmed and which… show more.

Early in my medical career, I spent a year as a country GP, also worked in an old county mental asylum, and this book set in the rural west of England brought back many memories of those times.

It involves the relationship between four characters, a doctor and a farmer, and their respective wives. Both women are expecting their first child. Their isolation and hardship during the freezing winter of 1962 increase the tensions among them.

The landscape is vividly described in this detailed and evocative literary novel.