Here are 2 books that Parallel Lives fans have personally recommended if you like Parallel Lives. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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The Mad Emperor

By Harry Sidebottom ,

Book cover of The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome

Ray Keene Author Of Napoleon and Goethe: The Touchstone of Genius

From Ray's 3 favorite reads in 2024.

By Ray Keene Author

Why am I passionate about this?

Author

Ray's 3 favorite reads in 2024

Book cover of The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome Book cover of Goethe: His Faustian Life - The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World Book cover of Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath

Ray Keene Why Ray loves this book

A new take on a much maligned Roman emperor

The Mad Emperor

By Harry Sidebottom ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Mad Emperor as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Buy the book; it's very entertaining.' David Aaronovitch, The Times

A Financial Times, BBC History and Spectator Book of the Year

On 8 June 218 AD, a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy, egged on by his grandmother, led an army to battle in a Roman civil war. Against all expectations, he was victorious.

Varius Avitus Bassianus, known to the modern world as Heliogabalus, was proclaimed emperor. The next four years were to be the strangest in the history of the empire.

Heliogabalus humiliated the prestigious Senators and threw extravagant dinner parties for lower-class friends. He ousted Jupiter from his summit among the…

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Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

Goethe

By A. N. Wilson ,

Book cover of Goethe: His Faustian Life - The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World

Mark Vernon Author Of Awake!

From my list on being free of the fear that you have no imagination.

By Mark Vernon Author

Why am I passionate about this?

When I was a kid at school, I was told that I had no imagination. I wrote a short essay on what I did at the weekend and put my heart and soul into it. I handed in my homework, and I remember waiting one day, then two, then three, when finally my teacher said: “Mr Vernon, I have a bone to pick with you.” I did not know what the expression meant, but it terrified me. It was only years later that I discovered I could, in fact, write, and that the imagination was a friend, not an enemy. I want others to know the same.

Mark's book list on being free of the fear that you have no imagination

Book cover of The Philosopher's Secret Fire Book cover of Goethe: His Faustian Life - The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World Book cover of Golgonooza Book cover of History in English Words Book cover of The Discarded Image

Mark Vernon Why Mark loves this book

I lived in Germany as a teenager and have only warm and exciting feelings for the country.

It seemed that everything from the food to the place itself was, somehow, far more interesting than England, my homeland. That was, no doubt, largely because it was not England and I was an agitated youth.

But this book also gave depth to my feeling because of Goethe’s presence in the German imagination, who is quite as important there as Shakespeare to England or Dante to Italy.

I am appreciative of this book for opening up the life and times, ideas and art, of this massive imaginative figure, about whom I previously knew very little. He knew that imagination is truth-bearing, carrying us to the heart of life.

Goethe

By A. N. Wilson ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Goethe as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Wild, brilliant and has all the intelligence to rival its subject. Five Stars.' - Frances Wilson, The Telegraph
'Exuberant and wide-ranging' - Literary Review
'Passionate' - The Times

A spellbinding recreation of Goethe's life and work from one of our greatest biographers.

Goethe was the inventor of the psychological novel, a pioneer scientist, great man of the theatre and a leading politician. As A. N. Wilson argues in this groundbreaking biography, it was his genius and insatiable curiosity that helped catapult the Western world into the modern era.

A N. Wilson tackles the life of Goethe with characteristic wit and…

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Book cover of The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome
Book cover of Goethe: His Faustian Life - The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World

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