Books like Subculture

How do jazz musicians think about what they are doing when they are improvising within a group? How do they learn to do such a thing in the first place – going their own way, but still going there together?

This is an immersion into the minds of musicians, starting with their earliest days and going through the rigors of learning their craft and then mastering it. The combination of discipline and freedom, hard work and wild inventive joy, finding an individual voice, and being part of the larger whole – the things that make improvisation a breath-taking artistic high-wire act – come together in this book.

I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but this book made me wish I was a jazz musician.

What I love about this book is the way it delves into all the intimate details of a group of artists/writers/creators in early 20th-century England who rebelled against the day-to-day strictures of a buttoned-up society and embraced eccentricity in even the most humdrum aspects of their lives.

What did they eat? What did they wear? Where did their children go to school? I wouldn’t necessarily imitate absolutely everything that these iconoclasts did, but the allure of their example is intoxicating.

On top of having written one of the most profound novels of the 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston was a fierce and fearless proponent of authenticity in literature and art – and she paid the price for that.

Boyd’s biography of her is the best, delving into this complex woman who was both deeply of her time and way ahead of it. Boyd quotes Hurston in one of my all-time favorite lines by a writer responding to a demeaning critic: “I will send my toe-nails to debate him…” An inspiration for all creative people facing rejection for being true to themselves!

We tend to think of “creativity” as an individual attribute – some people have lots of it, some not much at all. But this book challenges that entire way of thinking.

Farrell’s fun and fascinating analysis of six case studies (the Impressionists, Sigmund Freud and his friends, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and the First Wave feminists, among others) shows the importance of friendships and group dynamics in fostering creativity in much the same way that any type of gang can foster other forms of deviance.

Farrell goes into specifics of the different roles – like “scapegoat” or “lightning rod” – within these collaborative circles and how they function in the group. We see why creative movements flourish in certain circumstances and flounder when circumstances change.

This is a book about many things—guilt, artmaking, and love among them—but when I think of it, I think of a novel that depicts the complexities of making and sustaining a life more deftly than anything else I’ve read. How things like cruelty and beauty, innocence and evil, truth and lies all coexist. How we move forward despite this uneasy balance.

The novel follows Fee, a boy who grows up in Maine and sings in an all-boys choir. The choir director turns out to be an abuser, and his actions haunt Fee and the other boys in the choir into adulthood.

On a prose level alone, Chee’s writing is unparalleled, his sentences sharp enough to cut glass. I don’t see how anyone could read this book and come away unchanged. 

Ignore the word “youth” in the title, because this is not just a book for kids and teens! Jamie is a young, queer activist who has achieved some impressive activism victories at a young age, but best of all, she combines real activist know-how with a sense of hope and optimism that’s hard to find in older activists. This book is an excellent guide to getting involved and staying involved anywhere from the local level up to a global scale. This is a must-read for people who are fired up to take action but don’t know where to start.

This is a slightly biased choice as a historian of LSD and psychedelics, but to me, this book offers the most staggering illustration of acid-infused idealism by telling the riveting story of a group of California hoodlums turned LSD crusaders.

This dizzying page-turner takes you through the rise of evangelical acid chemists who manufactured millions of doses and had them distributed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, who made very little profit and often gifted their acid. A book I would have loved to write! 

I love Alderman’s writing. This book is dense. It isn’t long but it does take a bit of work to get through it, but it’s worth it.

He does the heavy lifting I’ve always wanted someone to do, looking carefully at the writings of Derrida and pointing out where these ideas bend back unhelpfully on themselves. He brings a Jungian lens to this exploration, battling back the nihilistic implications of deconstruction and finding again the helpful bedrock of meaning. 

I’ve devoted my life to helping teen girls know their God-given worth, thrive mentally, and live purposefully. When I was 18 and 21, I was hospitalized for depression and suicidal thoughts—something rarely talked about then. Today, one in three teen girls seriously considers suicide.

Social media is fueling this crisis, and I share Jonathan Haidt’s righteous anger. His research confirms what I’ve seen: social media isn’t just correlated with mental health issues—it causes them. His solutions, like restoring a play-based childhood and holding off social media for kids until age sixteen, echo my own.

This book is essential reading for every adult who cares about kids. It will stir you to act. This is a book every parent, educator, mental health professional, and adult should read. It is full of practical tips and suggestions that will protect kids. This should make you so righteously angry you’ll want to do something… show more.

Another vampire one I’m afraid. But trust me this is so worth your time. 

I read this for the first time when I was in college and well into my Goth phase, this book became my aesthetic afterwards. It’s a different take on vampires, explored through a few different groups of vampires. The characters are wonderfully portrayed and unique but what really hooked me into this book was the setting. It's got depth and feels like you could walk through the book and be in Missing Mile. 

This was the book that made me try Chartreuse.