100 Books Like The Worm at the Core

We humans, for all our accomplishments in science, art, engineering, architecture, and literature, are haunted psychologically by the stark awareness of the reality that we all die. The various individual, group, and collective unconscious ways of trying to deny the reality of death are legion.

Becker stunned me with the way he organized a penetrating discussion of how many domains the effort to deny the reality of death enters. In the process of exploring these roads of travel to deny death, I found myself searching my own efforts to get meaning in my own life and try to prepare for my death.

I found this book to be well-written and well-documented. While it does not focus solely on food systems, it does explain how a lack of food contributed to the demise of the societies explored in this book, such as the Greenland Norse and Easter Island. Diamond offers a stark warning about how a weak food system can undermine an entire civilization.

In this lively, elegant biography, Andrew Curran retraces the intellectual itinerary of a major eighteenth-century philosopher, Denis Diderot. Very few people ever lived and wrote with as much confidence in the power of posterity to recognize their greatness and the importance of their intellectual contribution after their death. Diderot, indeed, had to hide a significant proportion of his writings because they were just too controversial and ahead of their time. He believed that nothing was more inspirational than to work for the admiration of those who have yet to be born. Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely is a marvelous introduction to the Enlightenment through the portrait of one of its major thinkers, and a great way to understand why people write books for those they will never meet.

When it was published in 1992, Rinpoche’s superior translation replaced the first English translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead from 1927. This has been a go-to for anyone preparing for their own death or that of a loved one, when the Western way of dying falls short. This book is an indispensable guide to the process of life and death. 

While The Swerve is not exactly a book about posterity, it nonetheless provides a wonderful case study of a text that remained on the verge of destruction for centuries, before going on to play a tremendously influential role in shaping our modern world. This book is none other than On The Nature of Things by Lucretius –one of the foundational texts of Western culture, whose impact was postponed to the fifteenth century, as it would not have seen the light of day without its serendipitous rediscovery in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). This gripping work offers a fascinating example of the delayed reception of a prominent cultural object, a proof of its extraordinary resilience, and, at the same time, an illustration of the role played by chance and accidents on the transmission of texts to posterity. 

In his seminal The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins suggested that humans (and all other living organisms) exist to further the evolutionary fitness of the self-replicating information packets (“genes”) carried in our DNA – not the other way around.

In the closing section of his book, Dawkins theorized that a similar dynamic might hold true in cultural evolution, playing out through another type of self-replicating information packet, which he termed “memes”.

Some twenty years later, as the dawn of the Internet Age was giving new relevance to this idea, scholar Susan Blackmore took it up and ran with it, essentially singlehandedly creating the new academic field of “memetics” with the publication of The Meme Machine in 1999.

I first read this book as a teenager and missed the full force of its ferocious satire. Re-reading it years later, I laughed out loud. Waugh’s genius is to set his story of a love triangle in a Los Angeles funeral home. This way, he gets to poke fun at Hollywood and the American funeral industry while giving the dead a prominent role in the drama.

When, for example, embalmer Mr. Joyboy starts wooing young cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos, he does it through the expressions he puts on the faces of the corpses he sends to her makeup studio. When Aimée falls for his rival, a poet and pet mortician, the beatific smiles of Mr. Joyboy’s death turn into ghastly grimaces. It’s one of my favorite moments in the book—but there are many more.

This may seem like an odd recommendation, but Jules’s exploration of the way death keeps the earth going is not only fascinating, but it also widens the perspective away from humans to the animal kingdom—a handy reminder that we’re as much a part of said kingdom as any others species. It’s always a useful reminder that, despite what our individualist culture and stories and tell us, death is not always an aberration, something a sneaky lawyer hid in the small print; it’s normal, necessary, and actually very helpful.

I could not resist this book partly because I was already familiar with Doughty’s, “Ask a Mortician” YouTube series. I loved the way that she used her own experience as a young crematory operator, weaving in details of her personal life along the way, to show us all the different things that happen to bodies after they die.

I loved the dark humor she brought to subjects like embalming, cremation, and funeral directing. The poignant stories about collecting bodies from the places where they died, cremating bodies, and talking to family members or loved ones, helped me see the deeply human side of death care, and I certainly came away understanding a lot more about the realities of different body preparation and disposition options!

The only fiction book on my list, I picked up Owen’s book of short stories while I was at a writer’s residency in Vermont, writing my own book. It’s a delightful collection, wickedly funny, with the exact mix of dread, terror, humour, and lightheartedness I was looking for.