100 Books Like The Spire

I abhorred Robert Moses from the first time I opened this book 20 years ago.

This power-grabbing bureaucratic functionary made me ill on some level, mad as hell on another, and want to take a shower after each time I opened the book.

In the end, I still hated Moses for his gall and immoral audacity, but you could not deny his accomplishments, as he saw them. Nevertheless, I had to love a book that could take such a scoundrel whom I grew to loathe and make me glad I read it.

Like Golding, Garner is best known for his children’s books – tales that spring from the ancient mythology of his local Cheshire and wander into realms of high fantasy. But it is this slim novella, a collection of four stories binding as many generations of Garners (they have inhabited the region for centuries and they were, all of them - up until Alan, craftsmen, builders, laborers) that moves me to raptures. Beginning with a wide-eyed child’s discovery of cave drawings, the stories haul stone up above ground to lay out the longwalls of Garner’s mason progenitors and erect the spire of the local church, worn by Garner’s grandfather "like a dunce-cap.” The imagery and wordplay are stunning, binding dialect and landscape like a spell.

Another parable, another legend, another work of manual labour turned mystical. In this tale of a bridge-building gone wrong, Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare considers the harms and inevitabilities that come from spanning disparate cultures. This book features a human sacrifice at the altar of erection; it feels antique and yet timeless; it explores the boundaries of human endeavor. Notes the narrator, a silenced sceptic, “all great building works resemble crimes.” It is a recognisable concern from Kadare, an exile of Hoxha’s totalitarian regime.

Among Robert Moses’ many divisive projects, the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge hits three Power Broker criteria: superlative (longest suspension bridge in the world); tyrannical (an entire neighborhood evicted from their homes); and indelible (who can imagine New York without its soaring Brooklyn-Staten Island link?). A sidebar to Moses’ expansion from Triborough to all-borough authority is the role of a bridge in birthing a fresh literary genre. A mid-century stylist of creative nonfiction, Talese wanted to celebrate the men who risked life and limb to span the narrows. His brand of detached observation has aged awkwardly (the stance on women, for example, or on Indian ironworkers “incapable of enforcing discipline, only capable of handing dollar bills around”). But it is a canonical work of New Journalism, written one year before the legendary essay, “Frank Sinatra has a cold.”

The Metaphysical Club is about the Pragmatist philosophers: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. This sounds forbidding, but it’s anything but. Group biography shows how and why particular ideas occur to particular people at a particular moment, and this is a brilliant example of it.

The worn and dog-eared copy of Strange News From Another Star has graced my bookshelf for almost 50 years. (Note that this and not the more recent edition, which is missing some of the best original stories, is what I’m recommending.)

Hesse spoke to me at a time in my life when I didn’t realize fiction existed that could reflect my own metaphysical experiences. His stories mirrored my own dreams and visions and confirmed that I wasn’t alone in the world. And he did this in a timeless way that embraced the philosophical along with the political.

Dussel does what Latin American philosophers allegedly should not do. That is what I love about this book.

Whereas Latin American philosophers allegedly should take for granted assumptions from supposedly “enlightened” philosophers who have worked in the Global North, Dussel rejects such assumptions, say, the one that philosophers should never talk about imperialism as if this political issue were philosophically irrelevant.

Whereas Latin American philosophers allegedly should only tackle disputes in metaphysics raised by philosophers from the Global North, Dussel articulates disputes these likes usually ignore, e.g., the dispute on how or under which conditions a liberation could exist.

Whereas Latin American philosophers allegedly should import Northern right-wing policies of depoliticization, Dussel politicizes philosophy in a left-wing vein while opposing the war-driven attitudes of the likes of Henry Kissinger. 

Immanuel Kant is one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy – specifically regarding metaphysics – because he discovered the internal logic and organization for all of philosophical metaphysics. The book with which Kant accomplished that monumental feat is extremely difficult to read and understand. Therefore, Kant wrote an easier-to-read version, and that is the book that I am recommending: Philosophy of Material Nature. This book is highly affordable and readable.

The book that the Philosophy of Material Nature paraphrases is, of course, the Critique of Pure Reason. What all of these works show us is that philosophical metaphysics naturally divides into theological metaphysics, cosmological metaphysics, and psychological metaphysics. Kant’s achievement is standardly characterized as the articulation of philosophical metaphysics as a science. The general term for such a science is “transcendental philosophy.” Thus, the rest of the books in this recommendation list relate to… show more.

I had read another of Glenn Kleier’s books, The Knowledge of Good & Evil, which is a Dante-like trip into Hell – so, I was very excited when he released The Prophet of Queens, a book that plays in practically all of my ballparks: quantum physics, time anomalies, autocratic religious practices, and the sheer, almost lustful need to pursue a goal even though the consequences may shatter reality.

With the clever use of fairly mundane, workaday characters, Glenn Kleier throws open the doors to possibility and the repercussions of raging ambition.

I love this book – and, as with his others, is well-written.

This is a popular, reliable, wide-ranging introduction to metaphysics by two respected philosophers. It covers topics such as personal identity, fatalism, time, God, free will and determinism, possibility and necessity, and criticisms of metaphysics itself. It asks why there is something rather than nothing, and whether distinctions between good and evil and between right and wrong have any objective reality. Ted Sider is a leader of new developments in contemporary metaphysics.