100 Books Like The Philosopher's Secret Fire

I lived in Germany as a teenager and have only warm and exciting feelings for the country.

It seemed that everything from the food to the place itself was, somehow, far more interesting than England, my homeland. That was, no doubt, largely because it was not England and I was an agitated youth.

But this book also gave depth to my feeling because of Goethe’s presence in the German imagination, who is quite as important there as Shakespeare to England or Dante to Italy.

I am appreciative of this book for opening up the life and times, ideas and art, of this massive imaginative figure, about whom I previously knew very little. He knew that imagination is truth-bearing, carrying us to the heart of life.

I read this book when I was struggling. 

I kept walking into wonderful medieval cathedrals or looking at extraordinary works by Renaissance artists and feeling the loss of an enchanted worldview that was theirs and is no longer ours. This is what C.S. Lewis calls  the “discarded image.”

With a depth of knowledge particular to his nonfiction, he reveals how the stars used to shine with life in the medieval imagination, not just light, and myths spoke of a living vitality because they illuminated a deeper perception of things, not just offering moral insights.

This book taught me that the world can be viewed afresh with the right imagination. 

I was surprised and delighted by every page of this book: it tells a pacey story of history, from the first farmers to our lives today, by unpacking the meaning of words from across time.

It's the story of our deep inner life conveyed in language. I love etymology because words are what Barfield calls “fossils of consciousness”. To dig up when words first appeared or how they have profoundly shifted in meaning is to truly rediscover the inner lives of our ancestors.

Did you know that nihilism only surfaced in the 18th century or that the ancient Greeks had no word for “blue”? Such details delight in this book.

I never knew Kathleen Raine but wish that I had.

A poet and scholar of William Blake, she is one of those people who can only ever say fascinating things – not just in terms of insight, but the kind of things that are arresting because they change your experience of life.

I found my sense of what the imagination is profoundly deepening with each chapter of this book. She quotes lots of Blake, so you have the energy of his poetry to enjoy, and Raine was a poet, which must be why her prose packs loads of punch.

Of course, the characters in this book are the stuff of legend: King Arthur, Guinevere, and the narrator of this tale, Lancelot.

But I think what is great about Mr. Kristian's approach is that he makes them all completely and recognizably human, with all the frailties and failings of ordinary people who are forced, by world events, to rise to the extraordinary.

Men who will be myths are, at heart, only men. A beautifully realized setting, a credible and incredible world for one of the great stories to play out against.

Campbell, to me, is the dean of writers on myth. I met him once, through a professor at Hollins University who, at her graduation, had awarded Anna, my wife-to-be, the first three volumes of The Hero of a Thousand Faces, as a prize in English Literature (the fourth, Creative Mythology, was yet to be published).

After we met, I learned that Campbell had edited the Penguin Portable Jung – and it is that book that set me on a course of study and writing on myth and literature that I have pursued ever since.

As a final note, Campbell also co-authored A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, a book that many years later led me into James Joyce’s masterwork, Finnegans Wake – to me, the apotheosis of mythic literature.

I love the originality of this book—who ever would have thought to write about the geology of hell but a geologist? As a big-time nerd, I loved the deep dive into science, mixed with the stories and legends of people around the world.

What happens when you take the meritocracy to extremes and you can only access the best of food and housing etc when your Q is the highest? Dalcher creates an interesting future world, damning of social engineering and genetic manipulation, and reminds us that it was less than a hundred years ago that certain war-hungry fellas (and a few women) salivated over thoughts of a perfect Aryan race. A great page-turner but with a few ‘Deus ex Machina' plot twists with which I’m still struggling. Nevertheless a very worthy read.

When I found my second-hand copy for £5 in Acorn Antiques in 2006 (I still have the receipt!), little did I know I was holding the most magical, exquisite, resourceful, fascinating, beguiling, and immersive book on fantasy!

Each page is filled to the edges with intriguing folktales, legends, myths, and old wives tales (more than I could have wished for) and beautifully illustrated throughout. What more could I, an avid reader and writer of fantasy, want?

I still take joy in flicking through the pages until my eyes rest on another intriguing entry to be inspired by. I love losing track of time just reading about all aspects of fantasy, whether it’s the Broth of Oblivion, Floating Islands, the Hammer of Thor, The Bottle Imp, or Fomorians.

I knew the basics of the Norse Gods and Goddesses, but told in the perspicacious words of a master storyteller like Gaiman, really painted the ruined walls with all the color needed!

I love processing what the minds who birthed these Gods must have thought, dreamed, meant, and saw!