Here are 100 books that Shield of Winter fans have personally recommended if you like
Shield of Winter.
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I was an avid reader as a child. Then I became a teenager and started hating it! Why? Because the teachers at school started pushing classical literature on me. I didn’t read for years until a friend introduced me to fantasy. I fell in love and haven’t looked back. I love commercial fantasy fiction that has lots of action, where the writer focuses less on elegant prose and more on plot and characters. I aim to write the kind of books that readers get addicted to, where they can disappear into another world and forget they are reading – the kind of books I love to read!
This book had a main character who had a major flaw – she couldn’t allow herself to feel emotions otherwise she’d be outcast from her own kind.
She was a strong female lead but strong in a way that almost destroyed her. It was a great premise for a book with a romance at the centre. But it wasn’t only romance, there was a big mystery to solve making this an addictive read.
I loved following the development and evolution of the characters and their relationship throughout the book and was so sad when it ended. Singh is such a talented writer, I love everything she writes!
THE FIRST PSY/CHANGELING NOVEL from the New York Times bestselling author of Shards of Hope, Shield of Winter, and Heart of Obsidian... The book that Christine Feehan called "a must-read for all of my fans." In a world that denies emotions, where the ruling Psy punish any sign of desire, Sascha Duncan must conceal the feelings that brand her as flawed. To reveal them would be to sentence herself to the horror of "rehabilitation"-the complete psychic erasure of everything she ever was...Both human and animal, Lucas Hunter is a Changeling hungry for the very sensations the Psy disdain. After centuries…
Planetary blockades. Rampant viral outbreaks. Can two ex-lovers forge a path through the stars to save their world?
Independent trader Gavril Danilovich is slowly slipping into madness. Stuck in quarantine on a dying planet, his raw talent to feel everyone’s emotions has him wrestling with waves of terror and rage.…
A couple who have been claimed by Korea—Bruce as a US Peace Corps volunteer there and Ju-Chan as a native Korean and an English teacher—and its culture, society, history, and especially literary heritage. We have been translating modern Korean fiction into English since 1980. Bruce was fated to become involved with Korean literature by virtue of being born on October 9, the day in 1446 when Great King Sejong promulgated (officially announced) the creation of the Korean alphabet, hangŭl, to the people of Korea.
At a time when academics tend to look down their noses at Korean popular culture (Hallyu, literally “the Korean wave”), which in recent years is driving popular culture worldwide, The Birth of Korean Cool is a refreshing analysis based on the supposition that Korea is finally “getting even” with the rest of the world for being underappreciated for thousands of years.
A FRESH, FUNNY, UP-CLOSE LOOK AT HOW SOUTH KOREA REMADE ITSELF AS THE WORLD'S POP CULTURE POWERHOUSE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
By now, everyone in the world knows the song "Gangnam Style" and Psy, an instantly recognizable star. But the song's international popularity is no passing fad. "Gangnam Style" is only one tool in South Korea's extraordinarily elaborate and effective strategy to become a major world superpower by first becoming the world's number one pop culture exporter.
As a child, Euny Hong moved from America to the Gangnam neighbourhood in Seoul. She was a witness to the most accelerated part…
I’ve been a journalist and writer my entire adult life. I’m a mid-30s mother of two who accidentally had my mind blown by ChatGPT a year ago. I felt this burning need to try and express what I was feeling and learning as I discovered this new thing. As I used it more and thought and thought about it, I started questioning my own humanity. I felt alone and alienated, consumed by my thoughts.
Writing Human Again didn’t feel like a choice. My hope is that other people will find some comfort, a renewed appreciation for critical thinking, and perhaps a dash of inspiration and self-improvement along the way.
Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life was the first true narrative nonfiction book I ever read, and it’s the one that made me fall in love with confessional, voice-driven writing. I’ve always loved reading other people’s diaries, and that’s what it feels like reading this book.
The themes of this biography, written thirty years ago, don’t overlap with technology or the efficiency pressures of today, but the emotional experience is timeless. It has radical honesty, vulnerability, and the kind of immersive storytelling that makes you feel like you’re living inside someone else’s skin. In a modern age defined by speed, tech, and algorithms, that kind of authenticity is its own form of rebellion.
This Boy’s Life reminds us why human storytelling matters and why empathy is perhaps the most important practice of all. It captures a sort of self-reflective and philosophical humanness every book on this list carries, and exactly what…
Planetary blockades. Rampant viral outbreaks. Can two ex-lovers forge a path through the stars to save their world?
Independent trader Gavril Danilovich is slowly slipping into madness. Stuck in quarantine on a dying planet, his raw talent to feel everyone’s emotions has him wrestling with waves of terror and rage.…
I began studying philosophy, both western and Asian, as a college freshman, and I never stopped. Much of my career in philosophy was devoted to building bridges between western and Buddhist traditions. The best philosophers try to make their ideas as clear as possible. But standards of clarity can differ across traditions, and this sometimes makes it difficult to present the theories and arguments of one philosophical tradition to those who think in terms of another. I have struggled with this in my own efforts at bridge-building, and I am always appreciative when I see other scholars of Buddhism achieve the sort of clarity I aim for.
Buddhist philosophers had much to say about how we should live our lives and how we should treat others. Modern scholars of Buddhist moral thinking have presented these ideas in a number of different ways. Gowans’ book is a fair and balanced discussion of what Indian Buddhist moral philosophers had to say about ethics and the different ways in which recent scholars have interpreted their claims.
The first book of its kind, Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction introduces the reader to contemporary philosophical interpretations and analyses of Buddhist ethics. It begins with a survey of traditional Buddhist ethical thought and practice, mainly in the Pali Canon and early Mahayana schools, and an account of the emergence of Buddhist moral philosophy as a distinct discipline in the modern world. It then examines recent debates about karma, rebirth and nirvana, well-being, normative ethics, moral objectivity, moral psychology, and the issue of freedom, responsibility and determinism. The book also introduces the reader to philosophical discussions of topics in socially…
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS University of London and Fellow of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. Among over a dozen honorary appointments all over the world, Adib-Moghaddam is the inaugural Director of the SOAS Centre for AI Futures.
First published in 1947, this iconic book of the “Frankfurt School” could not be a study of AI and 21st-century technologies per see.
Instead it is a phantasmic explainer of how the mistakes of the past impinge on our humanity and the prospects for a better future. "What we had set out to do," Adorno and Horkheimer famously wrote in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."
With spectacular erudition, the authors clearly show how the terror regime of the Nazis was rooted in the nefarious legacies of enlightenment Europe and its obsession with racial purity. As such, Adorno and Horkheimer presaged why it is that our polluted history feeds into racist AI technologies: Bad data, Adorno and Horkheimer would agree, produces bad outcomes.
Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."
Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the…
I am fascinated by humanity’s search for meaning. That is what I am exploring as I read philosophy and as I write my biographies of extraordinary individuals. Sue Prideaux has written award-winning books on Edvard Munch and his painting The Scream, the playwright August Strindberg, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. She acted as consultant to Sotheby’s when they sold The Scream for a record-breaking $120 million.
Nietzsche said; “Only those with very large lungs have the right to write long sentences.” Montaigne was of the same opinion. He pre-dated Nietzsche in couching his philosophy simply and clearly in short, sharp aphorisms. Like Nietzsche’s aphorisms, they are often very funny.
How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live?
This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, readers still come to…
As a writer, I’ve always been interested in ambiguity and ambivalence. How does that apply to the self? What does it mean to present myself to others? How do I appear to the world and how close is that to what I see myself to be? Are we ever truly seen—or willing to be seen? In a world where cameras exist everywhere and we are encouraged to record rather than simply be, how do we look in a mirror? Hannah Arendt said that we could tell reality from falsehood because reality endures. But I feel that nothing I experience endures; nothing remains the same, including the reflection. If anything lasts, it may be my own make-believe. Everything I write is, in some way, this question. Who is that?
The relentless and erudite work of Arendt never ceases to challenge me. In the books included here—Thinking and Willing—she explores what it means that the self knows itself to be a self, and how that knowledge refracts and splits upon encountering others, and then changes when returning to solitude again. I read her knowing that she has not just considered but felt her ideas. “To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display. . . .Up to a point we can choose how to appear to others.”
The most intriguing…and thought-provoking book that Hannah Arendt wrote (The New York Times Book Review), The Life of the Mind is the final work by the political theorist, philosopher, and feminist thinker.This fascinating book investigates thought itself as it exists in contemplative life. In a shift from Arendt's previous writings, most of which focus on the world outside the mind, this is an exploration of the mind's activities she considered to be the most fundamental. The result is a rich, challenging analysis of human mental activity in terms of thinking, willing, and judging.
I spent my childhood in the shadow of my father’s mental illness, forced to grapple with its mysteries before I possessed the tools to do so. In other words, I lived the ignorance that surrounds mental illness. This experience led me to study psychiatry, its foibles and tragedies, both past and present. Now, I am a professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico, where I spend my days thinking and writing about mental health and illness. I am working on a new book about the current crisis in community mental health.
Most of us seek out history with an eye to the present. In this book, Allan Horwitz explains the emergence of our current brand of psychiatry. Sometimes called “biomedical psychiatry,” this is the psychiatry of the DSM and ever-rising rates of mental health diagnoses, of Prozac and psychopharmaceutical drugs, of chemical imbalances and neurological accounts of mental disorders.
Horwitz shows how the shift to this present was driven not by science but by professional crisis. In the 1970s, besieged by critics and exposés of their failings, psychiatrists ditched the Freudian-inspired psychodynamic model for one that emphasized diagnosis and medication. But the science was always dubious, and the upshot of this shift is a culture awash in psychiatric diagnoses for seemingly everything.
In this timely and provocative critique of modern psychiatry, Allan V. Horwitz examines current conceptions of mental illness as a disease. He argues that this notion fits only a small number of serious psychological conditions, and that most conditions currently regarded as mental illness are cultural constructions, normal reactions to stressful social circumstances, or simply forms of deviant behavior. According to Horwitz, the formulation of mental illness as disease benefits various interest groups, including mental health researchers and clinicians, prescriptive drug manufacturers, and mental health advocacy groups, all of whom promote disease-based models. Presenting case studies in maladies such as…
I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
An Italian aristocrat who led a magical order in the 1920s, Evola is a fascinating and controversial figure who has become influential in the New Right. Even though I am a Leftist, I find many of his ideas important and helpful—along with his fellow “traditionalists.” Rene Guenon and Fritjof Schuon. Evola believes we are in a period of accelerating decline known as the Kali Yuga, the age of iron and materialism, where the true spiritual knowledge has been almost entirely lost. He argues there is no way to stop the destruction of this civilization and it is best to focus on self-transformation through alchemical and magical practices. His books on Buddhism, eroticism, tantra, and alchemy are also fascinating!
No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress, which together with its corollary notion of the superiority of modern civilization, has created its own "positive" alibis by falsifying history, by insinuating harmful myths in people's minds, and by proclaiming itself sovereign at the crossroads of the plebeian ideology from which it originated. In order to understand both the spirit of Tradition and its antithesis, modern civilization, it is necessary to begin with the fundamental doctrine of the two natures. According to this doctrine there is a physical order of things and a metaphysical one; there is a mortal…
I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to write over 30 books and over 1000 articles. Not even my late beloved mother would have wanted to slog through all of them! Now, thanks to Teachers College Press, I have published my overview book. In addition to collecting the “essays” on Mind that I consider most important, I have also added autobiographical material and “legends,” which provide context for the wide spectrum of themes and pieces. The chance to reflect on a life of research has stimulated me to identify the works that had the greatest influence on my thinking and writing about the range and depth of human cognition.
No American writer of the 20th century could make ideas and personalities come alive as effectively as Wilson; he did this both for the sweep of the Russian Revolution (the Finland Station in St Petersburg is where Lenin launched the Revolution); and for specific individuals, books, and artistic performances. I was delighted to discover that Wilson was also Richard Hofstadter’s literary inspiration.
One of the great works of modern historical writing, the classic account of the ideas, people, and politics that led to the Bolshevik Revolution
Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea―that it is possible to construct…
