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.

I could not put down this book; it was so good.

I read it late at night, I read it on the metro going to work, I read it on my lunch break, I even took it to a birthday party and read it there between the toasts and the jokes.

I’ve always liked mythology, but at times it was too dry and gloomy. So I always looked for a different story about the ancient myths, and this book delivered it. I especially loved the notes at the bottom of the page, which were even funnier than the text. 

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.

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.

This will be one of my more controversial picks – there are plenty of people who disagree with Campbell as a folklorist, a mythographer, and with his depiction of the Hero’s Journey. But, what is important about Campbell is his exploration of why the elements that appear in stories have the impact they do on our psyche, and how they fit together. One may not agree with all of Campbell’s conclusions, but I don’t think there’s a writer out there who won’t benefit from his exploration of the subject. I know I did.

In this short story collection, SFWA Grand Master Nalo Hopkinson gives us heaps of imagery to roll around in with delight and horror. Calling a snowflake “six-clawed” or relating a tree’s memory of how it “felt to unfurl your leaves to the bright taste of the sun” all add to the mood-heavy stories of a teenager overcome by her desires after swallowing a cherry pit, children who must survive their parents’ frightening transformations, and more. Through all the tales, humanity shines through, our rough edges and our beautiful scars. And the characters themselves play with language to pass the time.