Books like The Dream of the Ridiculous Man

I love The Tale of Genji for its brilliant depiction of a prince and his many lovers.

I’m in awe of the fact that this is one of the first novels ever written by a woman – a court lady of the Heian era of ancient Japan, writing in the early 11th century. The love affairs of the prince reminded me of the early days of coeducation at Yale, when the Sexual Liberation movement was in full swing.

Of course, there are many differences between the romances of ancient Japan and life on college campuses today, but as I immersed myself in all 1,200+ pages of this book, I found myself relating to the women whom the Shining Prince seduces, one after another, and their heartache. Even though it was a long book, I couldn’t put it down.

Why not start with the oldest surviving long-form narrative there is. While purporting to account for the late reign of the very real King of the very real Sumerian city-state Uruk, the epic of Gilgamesh—very like the epics that the Greeks would offer some 4 to 14 hundred years later—trots out a world replete with the goddesses, monsters, magical drums, forests, and sacred undersea plants. The flavor of this world is first and most memorably signaled by the deliberate creation of a rival for its protagonist. Sculpted from river clay, then sexually domesticated by a temple maiden, the wild man Enkidu fights his way into a lifelong bromance with Gilgamesh that eventually confronts each with his own mortality. Again, for being the oldest such tale we know of, and for having to be chiseled on tablets, the whole thing holds up as a very living document, wildly entertaining, psychologically… show more.

The Bible, by committee. Well, sure. Provided we can leave to others—or maybe just to each individual reader—the problem of deciding which parts are the history, which the myth, and which seem to be, let’s just say, imaginatively conceived (and which of these can claim the firmest purchase on the Truth we should probably also leave to the reader), the Good Book remains the deconstructed prototype for the kind of literary braid we’re talking about, the all-time album of mirrors, fashioned from pretty much all the same genres we still write in—poetry, philosophy, allegory, parable, vignette, epistolary, horror, and IKEA instruction manual.

Regarding the blend of the natural and supernatural, the moment I’ve been looking at with students recently—this for a class I’ve offered on the subject of mental health and literature—is the meeting of Jesus and the Gerasene Demoniac,… show more.

No, not the Donna Tartt novel, which I also like a lot, but the 6th-century text from which she copped her title, the one by Procopius about the reign of Justinian and Theodora (admirably and unflinchingly translated by Richard Atwater). I have a weak spot for the work of “contemporaneous” historians, especially when their self-interest is so patent. The great virtue of such texts is that they remind us: as wild and wonderful as the human imagination may be, there’s some stuff you just can’t make up. In the case of Procopius, however, it’s not clear that he isn’t making this stuff up, the Secret History being an alternate account of his experience in the Imperial court, the one he kept in a locked drawer just in case the Barbarians ever took over and needed proof he wasn’t just a toady to the former regime.

To that end, he offers… show more.

GdS and HvD have assembled in this book such an overwhelming superflux of fascinating tidbits about ancient history, literature, and myth that reading it you barely notice that every conclusion they come to is completely bonkers and necessarily false.

There really can’t be any connection between ancient civilizations in Polynesia, Mesoamerica, India, and Finland—but the fact that someone dug up stories about whirlpools (!) from each place and located points of convergence among them is amazing! 
I feel like such a killjoy even bringing up my objections (that cloud doesn’t really look like a castle! that Rorschach blot doesn’t really look like your mother!) that I’ll just shut up. Hamlet’s Mill is a great work of science fiction, the most exhaustively detailed what if? you’re likely to find.

I read this book years ago, and it has become such a part of my DNA that I barely remember not knowing the ideas it introduces. A lot of screenwriting books focus on structure and premise, trying to decide what kind of event should happen by which page. This book gave me a freer, more spiritual way to think about and structure stories.

Vogler’s book—heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces—showed me how to think of stories as mythical journeys, almost Jungian in their symbolism. How even the most modern or intimate story can be seen as a warrior’s journey into an unknown land; How stories can benefit from being a few degrees closer to dreams or the unconscious.

I've been an avid fan of the book ever since, and can barely think of storytelling separately from the ideas in it. 

This short punchy book is written by ex-policy advisor Alex Evans, following his disillusionment with high power international climate politics. Having worked for the British Government and for the UN Secretary-General in the 2000s, Evans realised that scientific evidence and rational arguments were not enough to change the world for the better. In The Myth Gap, he therefore makes the case to recognise – or else to create – different stories, or myths, which provide the orientation and motivation for different people groups to act out change in their own different worlds. No one story will do the job; we need many.

Point blank, this book changed the way I see the world. While on its surface, it might not seem like a mental health book, it is a powerful testament that story is the bedrock of consciousness. In reading it, I was asked to reevaluate many of my ideas and truths.

It illustrated how much of what I think makes us different is a shared story and a place where I can connect to others if I’m willing to rattle the cage of the stories I “know” to be “immutable.” This translates into every story I tell about myself and my world. I’ve read it repeatedly, and every time, I pull something new from it.

It has helped me grow by expanding my worldview and has led me to a more comprehensive understanding of the mind, humanity, and the stories we share.

Wolves may be more prevalent in literature and film than they are in reality. For an ecocritical perspective on canid cameos in American narrative, Robisch examines 200 texts to understand the real and imagined wolves and their places across cultures and what that tells us about humans and nature more broadly.

Cameron Battle has to be one of the most tenderhearted characters I’ve ever read.

He’s a sweetheart, and just the right hero for this African-inspired fantasy as Cameron portals with his friends into the world of Chidani. There are dangers at every turn, but Cameron handles them all by trusting in his friends, his compassion, and his desire to learn what happened to his parents.

Along the way, I was inspired by Cameron learning more about his family ancestry as well as his own identity.