Here are 100 books that The Stone Book Quartet fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve read more than a hundred biographies over the years, mostly because I want to know what makes great people great. In doing so, I have sifted through some real crap along the way. I don’t typically read many stories about losers. Sad to say, and most people don’t want to hear it, but losers are a dime a dozen and unmotivating downers. My book list gives others the benefits of my 40-plus years of work in identifying books about brilliant, accomplished people written by first-rate historians and narrated by the ”cream of the crop.”
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.
The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro is 'simply one of the best non-fiction books in English of the last forty years' (Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times): a riveting and timeless account of power, politics and the city of New York by 'the greatest political biographer of our times' (Sunday Times); chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time and by the Modern Library as one of the 100 Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century; Winner of the Pulitzer Prize; a Sunday Times Bestseller; 'An outright masterpiece' (Evening Standard)
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
When I published Orphan, Agent, Prima, Pawn, in which Soviet-era psychological warfare plays a heavy role, I happily washed my hands of Russian intrigue and turned to more benign, pastoral inspirations – my life-long relationship with an idyllic cathedral town in Wiltshire, for example. Just days later, the world learned that a certain Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov shared my fondness for Salisbury’s “world-famous 123-metre spire,” the glories of which prompted their 72-hour visit from Moscow (and overlapped with the botched poisoning of a KGB defector living down the road). Since then, I find myself drawn to works that explore the interstices of morality, criminality, and great construction projects.
Golding was living in Salisbury when he wrote The Lord of the Flies, and his day job as a teacher at a local boys' school left a clear imprint on his dystopic view of young men left to their own hierarchical devices. But the classroom also provided a very literal view of the inspiration for The Spire, a dense and disturbing parable in which rationality and physics crumble under evangelical mania and corporal lust. It is the story of Jocelin, Dean of a medieval cathedral, who, obsessed with a divine “vision in stone,” insists that the spire be raised to impossible heights. There is no happy ending in this cautionary tale of construction hubris, yet I return to it regularly in search of solace.
Succumb to a churchman's apocalyptic vision in this prophetic tale by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies, introduced by Benjamin Myers (narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch as an audiobook).
There were three sorts of people. Those who ran, those who stayed, and those who were built in.
Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire. His master builder fearfully advises against it, for the old cathedral was miraculously built without foundations. But Jocelin is obsessed with fashioning his prayer in stone. As his halo of hair grows wilder and…
When I published Orphan, Agent, Prima, Pawn, in which Soviet-era psychological warfare plays a heavy role, I happily washed my hands of Russian intrigue and turned to more benign, pastoral inspirations – my life-long relationship with an idyllic cathedral town in Wiltshire, for example. Just days later, the world learned that a certain Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov shared my fondness for Salisbury’s “world-famous 123-metre spire,” the glories of which prompted their 72-hour visit from Moscow (and overlapped with the botched poisoning of a KGB defector living down the road). Since then, I find myself drawn to works that explore the interstices of morality, criminality, and great construction projects.
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.
In the Balkan Peninsula, history’s long-disputed bridge between Asia and Europe, the receding Byzantine empire has left behind a patchwork of warring peoples who fight over everything, from their pastures of sheep to the authorship of their countless legends.
One such gruesome tale declares that a castle under construction cannot be finished until a young mason’s bride has been walled up alive, one breast left exposed to suckle her growing infant even after her death. Myth becomes perverse reality when a mason is plastered into a bridge over a strategically important river, where his will not be the last human…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
When I published Orphan, Agent, Prima, Pawn, in which Soviet-era psychological warfare plays a heavy role, I happily washed my hands of Russian intrigue and turned to more benign, pastoral inspirations – my life-long relationship with an idyllic cathedral town in Wiltshire, for example. Just days later, the world learned that a certain Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov shared my fondness for Salisbury’s “world-famous 123-metre spire,” the glories of which prompted their 72-hour visit from Moscow (and overlapped with the botched poisoning of a KGB defector living down the road). Since then, I find myself drawn to works that explore the interstices of morality, criminality, and great construction projects.
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.”
Toward the end of 1964, the Verrazano (or, more properly, Verrazzano) Narrows Bridge―linking the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Staten Island―was completed. Fifty years later, it remains an engineering marvel. At 13,700 feet (more than two and a half miles), it is still the longest suspension bridge in the United States and the sixth longest in the world.
Gay Talese, then early in his career at the New York Times, closely followed the construction, and soon after the opening of this marvel of human ingenuity and engineering, he chronicled the human drama of its completion―from the construction workers…
From dancing on a crane in a meteor shower, to earning a history degree at the top program in my country; bathing under a waterfall to cradling the dying as a physician—I’ve always straddled the line between adventure and hunger for the truth beyond. Some books are the same way: they pull you in with fun and plot, and colors, and they leave you with bigger thoughts and questions about the Universe at large. All genres have this capacity for surprise and depth, but space opera’s best—here’s a list of reads with that special metaphysical power.
I’m a physician, so it’s probably not surprising that a book by a physician about an alien physician might hit my list of meaningful space operas.
What is surprising is Star Surgeon’s double-twist—the patients aren’t who we think they are, and the secret to getting Earth into the prestigious Galactic Confederation isn’t what we think it is—both of which actually had huge real-world thematic implications.
On face level, it’s a medical thriller: the protag’s the first alien to graduate from human medical school, and he’s got to prove himself by curing an epidemic on a remote planet without arousing the ire of his human teachers. (I felt like this in residency.) But on a metaphysical level, Star Surgeon is a quiet manifesto dissecting the origins of racism—and the very biology of sentience itself.
A Sector General Novel In the far future Humans are part of an intergalactic civilization populated with countless alien races. Humans are prized for their medical expertise and make up almost all of doctors in the galaxy. Dal Timgar is the first non-human to attempt to become a qualified physician recognized by the Hospital Earth. But, before he reaches his goal he and his companions find a plague planet that may change the course of history.
Books have the power to do so much more than to simply entertain. I believe it’s my job as a fiction writer to condense research of complex subjects into understandable language and then play it out in story. My Enter the Between fiction series introduces readers to the world of metaphysics—the bridge between the seen and the unseen, science, and spirituality—which serves as a key to understanding consciousness, death, and the meaning of life. I’ve spent twenty years researching contemporary paganism, holistic theory, quantum mechanics, and transpersonal psychology to come up with stories that bridge science and spirituality with paranormal, supernatural underpinnings, and contemplative messaging that aims toward a kinder, wiser, more peaceful world.
I’m drawn to novels that combine the ordinary with the extraordinary, the mundane with the spiritual, and Drawing in the Dust does both. By turns, suspenseful, mysterious, and thought-provoking, this transformative story provides insight into the world of biblical excavation—with a twist! Archaeologist Page Brookstone discovers the bones of prophet Jeremiah locked in an embrace with the bones of a mysterious woman. Amazing stuff, especially for me, who has loved archeology since my days in college. I categorize Drawing in the Dust as visionary/metaphysical fiction, the genre I write and most love to read, a genre that bridges science and spirituality with paranormal and supernatural underpinnings.
UNFORGETTABLE DEBUT NOVEL IS A RICHLY EVOCATIVE AND BOUNDLESS LOVE STORY THAT REVERBERATES FROM BIBLICAL TIMES TO THE MODERN WORLD.
Brilliant archaeologist Page Brookstone has toiled at Israel's storied battlegrounds of Megiddo for twelve years, yet none of the ancient remnants she has unearthed deliver the life-altering message she craves. Which is why she risks her professional reputation when a young Arab couple begs her to excavate beneath their home. Ibrahim and Naima Barakat claim the spirits of two lovers overwhelm everyone who enters with love and desire. As Page digs, she makes a miraculous discovery-the bones of the deeply…
I love writing group biographies (I‘ve written four and my next book, Spellbound by Marcel:Duchamp, Love, and Art, will be another). I enjoy the intellectual scope they offer, the way they let you explore a world. I’m less interested in the details of individual lives than in the opportunity biography offers to explore social history, and group biography is particularly suited to that. They’re not easy to do, it’s no good putting down just one damn life after another, but I enjoy the challenge of finding the shape that will let me fit everyone’s personalities and ideas into a coherent story.
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.
A riveting, original book about the creation of the modern American mind.
The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., founder of modern jurisprudence; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that…
I have pursued escapism in all its forms for most of my life. From studying the otherworlds of ancient civilisations, especially in my native Britain, including Arthurian tales and those of the Welsh Mabinogion to the fictional worlds of Tolkien and Lewis’s Narnia. I am lucky enough to live in the Snowdonia Mountains with a wealth of legends and myth-making landscapes on my doorstep. This led to a practical interest in The Western Mystery Tradition and from there an academic curiosity toward occult societies and their founders. I believe there is a distinct link between our spiritual morality and physical mortality that is worth exploring through experience.
First published in 1956 Dion Fortune recalls her heroine Vivian le Fay, first introduced in The Sea Priestess fifteen years earlier.
In Moon Magic she is conjured as Lilith le Fay, mysterious and alluring. Interestingly, considering Dion Fortune died before finishing the book, its completion was brought about by an acolyte ‘channeling the author’ after her death.
Her play on the dynamic of the male and female polarity allows the story to evolve on different levels, as an interesting, if dated view of a society in need of a spiritual revelation, and a treatise on genuine esoteric practices. Fortune’s clipped prose style gives the reader's imagination free rein, allowing her to influence our understanding of certain concepts and provide an entertaining tale to boot.
Almost 15 years after she first appeared in Sea Priestess, Dion Fortune wrote about her heroine Vivien Le Fay again. In Moon Magic Vivien appears as Lilith Le Fay, and uses her knowledge of moontides to construct an astral temple of Hermetic magic. The viewpoint of Lilith Le Fay is purely pagan, and she is a rebel against society, bent upon its alteration. She may, of course, represent my Freudian subconscious... --'from the Introduction 'Dion Fortune's books sell! Sea Priestess has sold 32,000 copies and Moon Magic has 25,000 copies in print. 'First published in 1938 and 1956, neither Sea…
I’ve always had equally balanced interests in the arts/humanities and the natural sciences. I started as a physics major in college but added a second major in philosophy after encountering the evolutionary theories of Hegel, Bergson, Alexander, Whitehead, and Teilhard de Chardin. This interest continued in graduate school at Northwestern, where my first year coincided with the arrival of Prof. Errol E. Harris, who had a similar focus and would direct my doctoral dissertation in philosophy, whose title was From Ontology to Praxis: A Metaphilosophical Inquiry into Two Philosophical Paradigms. One of the “paradigms” was reductionist; the other was emergentist.
This selection of essays focuses on the important concept of “downward causation” (a designation first employed by Donald T. Campbell), that is, the idea that, in addition to the “upward” causal influence of parts on wholes, which is the focus of stereotypical (bottom-up) reductionist views, wholes also exercise top-down emergent causal influences on their parts.
This has been a vital recurring issue and an identifying principle in most theories of emergence. Campbell and Mark H. Bickhard provide the culminating chapter in this book.
I am a classically and formally trained philosopher. I have a Doctorate in Philosophy from Duquesne University (2011). I've been interested in philosophy for as long as I can remember; however, I began formally studying philosophy when I first discovered the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. I began teaching philosophy at the university level in 2004. I've taught over 100 university-level courses, including graduate-level courses in both philosophy and psychology. I'm presently finishing my tenth philosophy book, along with over 50 professional peer-reviewed articles in philosophy. These days my attention is devoted to sharing philosophy on the internet through The Philosophemes YouTube Channel, @Philosophemes on Instagram, and the Basic Philosophical Questions Podcast.
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 thePhilosophy 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…
This volume combines two of Kant's key works on the metaphysics of nature--the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science --in the preeminent translations of James W. Ellington. Each work is preceded by an expert Introduction by Ellington and is followed by a German-English List of Terms and an Index.
