23 Books Like So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

Max Zajack's life is cheap rooms, dead-end jobs, and suicidal fantasies until he meets the alluring and mysterious Olivia Aphrodite, and everything goes to hell.

Max is a struggling musician and wannabe writer. His life is in a rut until one night, while playing a gig at a local club, he gazes out into the crowd and sees Olivia. Before long, they are sharing a bed and host of dark vices that begin to consume them. Their love turns toxic, sending them spiraling downward toward the inevitable. Violently romantic, viscerally honest, Hating Olivia is the story of two loners whose obsessive love brings them to the edge of destruction.

A collection of Southern's short pieces: two dozen sketches which expose the hypocrisy of American social mores.

I love Richard Brautigan, and In Watermelon Sugar was my first Brautigan book.

I was in the ninth grade and ready to be transported to a land that was hippie without trying to be so. A living room with trees and a stream. A sun that shines a different color every day, especially on Thursday when the sun shines black and there is no sound.

Written three years before the summer of love, the seeds of the hippie dream-turned-nightmare are already sown. Too much whiskey. And yet, this book lit the way for a life of creativity. Still does.

I listened to Slaughtehouse Five narrated by actor Ethan Hawke. Yes, a difficult story to experience, filled with profanity and the conjuiring of graphic images. But the writing? Brilliant. Sometimes, we're meant not to like what we see and hear, and Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier who witnessed the destruction of Dresden during World War II is the foundation for fantastical story. His searing descriptions, unsympathetic characters, and cynisicm may belie his anti-war message. Many dislike Vonnegut's tome, and the book remains banned in some libraries. But I discovered a story worth my time and consideration. The classics, like Slaughthouse-Five, remain the classics.

I saw my first raven near Mount Rainier. The bird looked me in the eye, hopped to the left, sized me up, and continued his business. The advancing Russian army drove Bernd Heinrich and his family into the forest near Hahnheide, Germany, where they lived in a small hut for five years.

There, he began his lifelong quest to connect with insects (especially bees), owls, trees, antelope (he runs ultramarathons), geese...and ravens. The mind of the Raven is a deep, scientific meditation on the intersection between being human and raven. It concludes that “ultimately [our differences are] less a matter of consciousness than of culture” (342).

I wonder how culture has dulled my imagination, a struggle Heinrich clearly has fought more successfully than I have.

I came late to this book, which was written in the 1940’s, and not published for the first time, until 1977, but it instantly became one of my all-time favourites, and the one I would take to a desert island should the occasion arise. It’s an astonishing piece of writing that runs counter to everything in our contemporary fast-paced, consumer-driven society. Nan Shepherd is writing about a single mountain, with a depth of knowledge that seems unavailable now that tourism has become a massive part of our economy, and there is no far-flung place on the planet that some celebrity hasn’t been filmed in.
In my edition, Robert Macfarlane has written the introduction, and Jeanette Winterson the afterword. Macfarlane suggests that The Living Mountain is a kind of ‘geo-poetic quest’. Shepherd herself described it as a ‘traffic of love’, and in fact only love, in the truest sense, could give… show more.

This American classic by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Larry McMurtry, is read by university students worldwide. It’s set in its own time of indulgent decadence where little value is placed on the lives of individuals met by Danny Deck, the sad-sack protagonist, who denigrates his published work to the point of tearing up a copy of the novel he carries with him before drowning his own sorry self in the river of the Rio Grande. Yet, Danny is as much at fault for the sloppy treatment of the company he keeps as his company is for being disingenuous.   

What McMurtry calls normal life, or mundane happiness, through the voice of novelist Deck, is seen as obtainable if one wants to pursue the creative arts. His conclusion is that the two simply don’t mix. As he explores this idea in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, Deck sets about self-destructing, which has nothing to do… show more.

Americans can be crazy, but at their best they have an outrageous, defiant Bugs-Bunny-esque candor and optimism I admire as a foreigner. This is an extremely silly book about a deposed princess in Seattle who falls in love with an outlaw arsonist, symbolized by a pack of cigarettes and pyramids, possibly or possibly not inspired by an ancient alien race of red-heads. Add in the narrator continually complaining about his typewriter. None of this chaos and randomness makes much sense when I describe it, but imagine a warmer, happier version of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Sign me up for all the postmodern trickery and authors-arguing-with-characters, when it's done with heart and wit.

I find this a fascinating book in part because it has an original concept of the “imago”. Hendrix’s concept of the “imago,” that we are unconsciously attracted to someone to heal old wounds, is not something I buy—that is, I don’t think it is usually true as a primary cause of our attraction—but I do think it is worth considering both in my own marriage, and also in the work I do with couples. 

I was a few years sober from alcohol, and in my first heterosexual relationship in quite a while when I read this book. Just being sober during sex, and having a penis involved, kept things interesting for about a year or so. But after a while, I wanted a deeper connection with my partner during sex, and more frequency. This proved to be challenging. One day I was crying on the phone about the state of my carnal life to a mentor and she recommended Passionate Marriage. So, I dug into the 408 pages of this relationship masterpiece. Spoiler alert, it didn’t save that relationship, but it did change my life.

It taught me about the erotic charge that can come from differentiation and how to navigate “relationship crucibles.”  I also first learned about open-eyed orgasms from Schnarch. I had been squeezing my eyes shut since I started having… show more.