100 Books Like Reincarnation Blues

I love the unexpected beauty and horror of this book which is a collection of stories and a novella. The title also made me wonder, how do you escape a leper colony? Author Tiphanie Yanique is a Caribbean writer whose stunningly poetic voice haunted me long after I finished reading her book. As I read it, I imagined the narrator's Caribbean accent soaking into every syllable. In the key short story, Yanique sets us down in a leper colony on a deserted island for the dying and yet manages to leave room for the miraculous as well. Describing one leper she says, "And when a man with no hands claims that he can fly, you listen."

Murakami's world is magic realist by default. It's often infused with American pop culture, jazz, secret passageways, and curious cats. The Strange Library is a perfect introduction to the author's world and it makes a nice gift. The book is adorned with pop illustrations and highly saturated colors. In this short novel a lonely boy, a mysterious girl, and a tormented sheep/man plot their escape from a nightmarish library. I have read the author's 1Q84 opus of 1,000 pages but it is his short works -- his short stories and novellas -- that have stayed with me the most.

If ever there was a book that cast a spell over me, it was Incendiary. The novel is written as a letter to Osama Bin Laden; the letter writer is a woman whose husband and son were killed in a terrorist attack. How male author Chris Cleave manages to speak in the voice of a heartbreakingly traumatized, possibly drunk woman is a true act of ventriloquism. I could imagine the whole thing performed on a black box stage as a monologue and it would be riveting. The heroine's rage is understandable throughout the course of the story. What is surprising is her grace, her sense of humor, even her tenderness toward the man who destroyed her family. At one point she urges him to "stop making boy-shaped holes in the world."

I’ll never quite wrap my head around what Machado has done in this memoir about an abusive relationship. It’s written in the second person, which imbues it with a chilling immediacy. The setting is a home the two women share: a cabin in Indiana, the Dream House of the title.

The Dream House is also the concept of an idealized queer relationship and family life that are not available to the narrator, try as she might, in the context of this relationship. Machado takes fever-dream diversions to places where the narrator is gaslit by a charismatic, emotionally vampiric partner. The Dream House is many-chambered; each holds a vision of the narrator denying her very being, and she has to fight to recover it.

It’s not often you read the opening chapter of a novel (in this case the Prologue) and go back to read it again before continuing with the rest of the novel because you’ve never read anything like it before. And the book just gets better from there. Combine an African culling song with a tortured journalist investigating crib deaths and a heroine real estate agent who sells haunted houses, then put that all in the hands of Chuck Palahniuk, and you have a supernatural horror dark comedy/satire unlike anything you’ll ever read. Except maybe another Chuck Palahniuk novel. After reading this, I was inspired to write Breathers.

Christopher Moore is one of those rare authors who can actually make you laugh out loud, and there are plenty of those moments to be found here. Secondhand store owner and beta-male Charlie Asher becomes a death merchant, retrieving soul vessels before those souls end up in the hands of the forces of darkness. Set in San Francisco, A Dirty Job features a colorful collection of characters that includes Goth teens, Buddhist monks, and the Emperor of San Francisco. This was the first of Moore’s books that I read and it remains one of my favorites.

Ten years before What We Do in the Shadows comically imagined what everyday life might be like for vampires, David Sosnowski published Vamped. Set in a world where vampires outnumber humans, the story stars a bloodsucking bachelor bored with his existence and all of the modern vampire conveniences, and inconveniences. Like missing coffee. And chocolate. And sunlight. And not having any more fresh humans to hunt. But when our hero stumbles across a human child, his existence gets complicated. A sharp, smart, charming, and occasionally heart-warming black comedy with an anti-hero who you end up rooting for.

This is a surprising book because while it is certainly macabre, it’s not morbid (at least not for me) and is strangely entertaining. It demystifies the human body and the process of death and dying. 

Even as the author delves into every aspect of dead bodies, she does so with compassion and humor. Rooted and backed up with science, this book held my interest from beginning to end, and I read it non-stop for over a day and a half. Despite its grave subject matter, this book is not dark or scary. It’s matter-of-fact and very educational.

A few years ago when my wife suddenly died, on the second day I spoke to a dear friend who also happens to be a longtime monk on my spiritual path. He mentioned a book by a psychologist who took people to see the greater arc of their soul’s journey—their ‘lives between lives’. That doctor was Dr. Michael Newton, and this is my favorite of his series.

At the time, reading it had a profound effect on my growing understanding of the greater arc of the human soul and provided an immense sense of peace. Above all, it soothed my tattered mind at a moment when life felt incomprehensible and helped me make sense of our larger purpose for being here even while still grieving. Through 70 case histories of real people who were regressed into their ‘lives between lives,’ Dr. Newton reveals life continuing on the other side, ways… show more.

I’ve never read a series that made me feel both highly spiritual and completely grounded like Michael Newton’s Soul series did. These books shifted everything for me. They helped me see that my struggles—and even the difficult people in my life—from a higher perspective. This is when I began to understand that this life isn’t supposed to be all rainbows and butterflies.

Life here on Earth is a school, and we’re all here to learn. These books helped me remember that we’ve all played every role—every gender, every skin color, the villain, and the hero. I come back to them when I need perspective, when I forget that challenges are part of the soul’s evolution, and when I need a reminder to not take things here too seriously. They didn’t just change how I think—they changed how I feel about being human.