Books like The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 — picked by fans

I find this book answers questions many people ask: Why aren’t we always logical? What gets in the way of our making effective decisions?

I first read this book when I started my consulting practice and realized I needed to combine psychology with philosophy in teaching critical thinking in professional settings. People want to understand why we can be unreasonable in the first place. Kahneman’s book helped me improve my own thinking, making me aware of the ways my previous experiences quickly provide interpretations of new experiences.

I find the ability to “hit the pause button” regarding my response to a specific situation and to ask myself, “Is my immediate, intuitive response useful or misleading me?” is one of my most important insights from this book.

When I visited Asian countries of China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore, food was always a highlight. But what also stood out for me was the social nature of eating. I was also struck by the simple gestures of people that indicated politeness and respect. We might think of culture as influencing behavior, but this book argues that culture can penetrate our thinking.

Nisbett contrasts how eastern and western cultures think differently about context, the individual vs. the group, and our relationship to the environment, among other differences.

In our age of the Internet, cultural differences on the surface may be eroding globally but there may be deeper influences of culture on thought that are harder to erase.

This book starts in a similar historical location as Bod’s book but quickly moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—settling into the “information theory” era established by Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and others in the 1940s-1960s.

I love this book because it situates the intellectual climate leading to our current dystopia of information overload. Gleick’s teasing of chaos theory inevitably pushes the reader to explore his book on the subject from the 1980s: Chaos: Making a New Science (1987).

This is, in many ways, the book that introduced the concept of flow to the world. I’m in awe with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. While I never got to meet him, I imagine he was a most wonderful person–wise, curious, thoughtful, kind, warm, approachable, creative, quiet, yet profound.

I agree with almost everything he wrote, and I think his ideas about happiness, flow, and the meaning of life were spot on.

In my view, this is the finest book on consciousness ever written. William James was one of the leading minds of late 19th and early 20th century America. His book, published in 1890, was written as a textbook for his psychology class at Harvard. At that time “psychology” was understood to be the study of consciousness. Here James introduces consciousness as a “stream of thought,” an idea that later influenced many 20th century thinkers, including American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and early quantum physicist Niels Bohr. It is written with an elegance and clarity of style to match that of his brother, the writer Henry James.

James’ broad interests in consciousness, seen in this book, is consistent with the fact that he was an original co-founder of The American Society for Psychical Research, and was deeply interested in mediumship and questions regarding mind beyond the brain.

Alice James changed my life as a writer. It completely opened up the field of biography and pointed the way to the work I’ve been doing for almost four decades: writing women’s lives. Before Alice James, biographies had to be of famous people, usually men. Here was a book about the little sister of the great novelist Henry James and the eminent philosopher William James, a woman who had essentially done nothing with her own talent and brilliance except—luckily!—keep a diary. Jean Strouse read that diary and used it as the entry point for a whole book about the dynamics of an extraordinary family, about women’s choices in 19th century America, about invalidism and suppressed ambition. It’s a riveting psychological tale full of poignance and unexpected heroism.  

Early in my medical career, I spent a year as a country GP, also worked in an old county mental asylum, and this book set in the rural west of England brought back many memories of those times.

It involves the relationship between four characters, a doctor and a farmer, and their respective wives. Both women are expecting their first child. Their isolation and hardship during the freezing winter of 1962 increase the tensions among them.

The landscape is vividly described in this detailed and evocative literary novel.

I found this book to be full of literary and film examples of mental illness that I could bring into the courses I teach in abnormal psychology and medical ethics.

The writing is clear and engaging, and the book introduced me to numerous films that I had not previously seen. I was especially interested in the discussion of films that illustrate (a) positive psychology and (b) movies that depict therapists in action.  

I’m cheating a little here, but I made the rules and there’s a little clause in the rules I made that says I can break them as long as I announce that I am breaking them. Herewith, I announce. 

This isn’t a book about readers. It’s a book about watchers—specifically the Dutch audience for the soap opera Dallas. But this book is so good and so wild, it changed forever the way I think about “reception,” including reading. I recommend this book all the time and if you want to understand the freedom and creativity of readers, you have to read it.

Once upon a time in the deep woods, a kind woman invited twelve family members and friends to Thanksgiving dinner. But not burning the turkey became the least of her worries. Wolf at the Door is a kick-ass nightmare, a ghoulish debut novella that will keep you sitting rigid in bed with your eyes and ears wide, long after its done. You may never walk in the woods again. How will our hero save her dinner guests from becoming the main course for two brutally vicious werewolves who just happen to be the neighbors? How well do you know the couple next door?