100 Books Like The Greeks and the Irrational

Williams was one of the most creative and engaging moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a student at Oxford of E.R. Dodds. While Dodds reminded his readers of how strange the Greeks are to us, in terms of their religious practices, Williams reminds us that the Greeks are also very like us in the moral problems they confronted. Rejecting the idea that modern people have given up on “shame” in favor of “guilt,” Williams showed that we still share the same concerns as the conflicted characters of Greek tragedy – like them, for good and for ill, we gain our sense of ourselves and our moral worth from the reactions of the those around us. 

The United States today still bears the scars of our long and terrible history of slavery. In this new and wonderfully thoughtful history of ancient Greek slavery, Sarah Forsdyke brings us face-to-face with the lived experience of a very different, but also harrowing, history of human bondage. Forsdyke delves into the question of how slaves lived and worked, how they resisted their oppression, and how the fact of slavery defined Greek society and economy. The intertwined development of a market economy, a citizen-centered democracy, and the systematic extraction of labor from unfree people is a stark reminder that our American story, although in many ways distinctive, was not unique. 

Barry Strauss is among the best writers ever to address the history of ancient Greece and Rome. In this exciting book, Strauss retells the great battle of Salamis – the naval battle that turned the tide of the Greek-Persian wars of the early fifth century BCE and inaugurated the Athenian Golden Age. He does so through the eyes of a wide range of those who participated in the battle – on both sides. This is military history that attends closely to the human element, and that reminds us that at various points in the past, the future of the world hung in the balance – and that the result was never foreordained. 

Full disclosure: Adrienne Mayor is my wife. But that is not why I chose this book: It is a mind-blowing account of ancient dreams of technology and ancient scientific wonders. Mayor is a master storyteller. She recreates the ancient myths to reveal the timeless fascination with “artificial life” – with beings that are like us in some ways, except that they are “made, not born.” Long before humans could create real mechanical men and thinking machines, the Greeks dared to imagine what that would mean for humans and our relations with one another. And they imagined the inner lives and torments of the semi-machines themselves. Read this book and shiver to learn that our modernity was dreamed of 2500 years ago. 

In modern neuroscience there is a resurrection of a line of research on altered states of consciousness. We must not think that this fascination started with Woodstock or Timothy Leary… At all times mind-altering rituals and substances were used. Uptight professors of antiquity hardly spoke of what happened in ancient Greece where mind-altering rituals were part of society for spiritual insight, prophecy, and healing. Yulia Ustinova gives a fascinating account of how in ancient Greece sensory deprivation in caves, often in combination with the practices of fasting or use of psychedelics, induced altered states of consciousness in selected individuals.

This is an outstanding short introduction to Greek history – with a really neat gimmick. Instead of writing a standard kind of history, Cartledge picks on the eleven most prominent cities of ancient Greece and writes up their story in about ten or twelve pages. But the chapters are also organized chronologically, so that the first two cities, Cnossos and Mycenae, illustrate Greek prehistory. Then we move on to the Archaic Period (four places, including Sparta), then the Classical Period (three, including Athens), and then the Hellenistic period (one: Alexandria, the greatest city in the world before Rome). He ends with a leap into late antiquity and the eastern Roman empire with Byzantium. I’m always on the lookout for books that can turn people on to Greek history, get them to share my (and Cartledge’s) passion: this one does it brilliantly.

Athens is where I lived as a student in the 1970s, and I’ve loved the place ever since! People who visit Greece often miss out on the capital or find the modern city ugly and noisy. But this book explains the magic effect that Athens has exercised on natives and visitors for at least two thousand years – all the way from the legendary wisdom of Solon the lawgiver to the gritty problems of a decade of enforced austerity (only recently overcome), and of a new multi-culturalism that comes with mass migration across Europe’s front line into Greece.

Lumley is steeped in both the occult detective and the Lovecraftian tradition, and it shows most clearly in this set of pulpy occult detective stories featuring his cerebral-yet-tough Titus Crow, and involving wild flights of fancy in time and space that also arguably show some influence from Doctor Who. We get a lovely creepy origin story here, and several vignettes, but the highlight is the longer tale of the mysteries of the wyrm, and festering, crawling things in an ancient manor house and its library. It fairly oozes supernatural evil and is one of my favorite things.

This novel takes a more serious tone from the outset, though there are humorous situations in the later books. This is one that will keep you up at night, reading and biting your fingernails as the characters struggle to survive. It begins somewhat slowly, but quickly gains steam and keeps you wanting more. The action is fast-paced and realistic and the military aspects are spot on. There is a character for everyone in this series, and it was the idea of Sky that loosely inspired a character in my own series.

The way that Campbell wrote this heroine and followed her progress from a young and naïve college girl to powerful and able to face down every threat thrown her way was so engaging and powerful that I bought the entire series as soon as it was released. The male characters were so diverse and far-ranging that none of them… show more.

I’ve never seen this take on demons before! I’m a sucker for a unique story line and Jeniffer delivers time and time again.

Compassion, intrigue, magic, action, and deception all form part of this series and the characters are hilarious! I love this world that she’s built and I can’t wait to see if she continues to build on it.