Here are 100 books that Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss fans have personally recommended if you like
Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss.
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I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
I am fascinated by the contradictions of Tolkien’s women and by the tension between Christian and pagan in his writing.
This book is particularly valuable for its explication of Tolkien’s integration of Marian and Valkyrie imagery, resulting in female characters of transcendental beauty and heroism. And the writing is absorbing and informative.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
Verlyn Flieger is the doyenne of Tolkien criticism, and this collection sees her at her best.
I’ve often found that her brilliance lies in pointing out what’s been hiding in plain sight–and once you have seen it, your view is forever changed. “But What Did He Really Mean?” and “Politically Incorrect Tolkien” are my favorites, but there are many gems here worth excavating.
Devoted to Tolkien, the teller of tales and co-creator of the myths they brush against, these essays focus on his lifelong interest in and engagement with fairy stories, the special world that he called faerie, a world they both create and inhabit, and with the elements that make that world the special place it is. They cover a range of subjects, from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings and their place within the legendarium he called the Silmarillion to shorter works like "The Story of Kullervo" and "Smith of Wootton Major."
I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
If you are anything like me, one of the reasons you keep coming back to Middle-earth is the landscape. This is the field guide I want to take on my next trip!
This is a very thoroughly researched compendium of information and folklore about real-world plants in Tolkien’s world—and about his invented plants as well. It's nicely illustrated, too!
The book considers the importance of plants in Tolkien's conception of Middle-earth. It develops the theme that Middle-earth is our own world - and will awaken the reader to the connection between the plants of Tolkien's legendarium and those growing in our gardens and local natural areas of the Northern Hemisphere. It also demonstrates the connection between the various plant communities of Middle-earth and the elven and human cultures that occupy them, including those environments degraded by warfare, industrialization or pollution.
The heart of the book is an alphabetical listing, arranged by common names, of all of the plants mentioned…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
I love a good, solid, chewy book of critical essays around a specific theme—I know, it’s a specialized taste. This is a good one.
Yes, I’d love to tramp peacefully around Middle-earth with the field guide I reviewed above, but there are horrors there as well, and this collection gives Tolkien’s dragons, wolves, spiders, and other monsters their due.
Fear and horror are an inextricable part of Tolkien's great mythology and his use of medieval sources for his evocations of fear and horror contribute to the distinctive tone of his work. This collection of essays shows how his masterly narrative techniques transform his sources, both familiar and unfamiliar, so that hitherto benign characters, objects and landscapes, as well as his famous monstrous creations, engage with deeply rooted human fears. The essays, by an international group of scholars, confirm Tolkien's worldwide reputation. They highlight the depiction of the fear associated with marginalised characters; explore the moral implications of light and…
Thanks to developing interests in both psychoanalysis and German idealism during my time as a student, I came across Slavoj Žižek’s writings in the mid-1990s. Žižek immediately became a significant source of inspiration for my own efforts at interfacing philosophies with psychoanalysis. By the time I began writing my dissertation – which became my first book, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive – I had the great fortune to meet Žižek. He soon agreed to serve as co-director of my dissertation and we have remained close ever since. I decided to write a book demonstrating that Žižek is not dismissible as a gadfly preoccupied with using popular culture and current events merely for cheap provocations.
One prominent feature of Žižek’s oeuvrethat initially brought him to fame is his impressive ability to make Lacan’s writings and ideas crystal-clear and tangibly concrete—and this by contrast with Lacan himself, who often is described as “notoriously difficult.” Écritsis Lacan’s magnum opus, containing his most important essays and articles from the 1930s through the mid-1960s. Although the volumes of Lacan’s Seminar are comparatively easier to read, Écritsprovides the single most comprehensive survey of Lacan’s thinking provided by Lacan himself. This 1966 book contains such Lacanian contributions to psychoanalytic theory as the mirror stage, the unconscious structured like a language, and the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary triad. Neither Lacan nor Žižek can be fully comprehended without a tour of the Écrits.
Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan's seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career.
I am a professor of philosophy and editor or author of 12 books. I started out in ‘Freud Studies’ in the 1990s with no agenda, just a deep interest in Freud’s ideas. Since then I’ve written quite a lot on it. Unfortunately, the field is so contentious, so overrun with books by former patients and analysts, that casual readers couldn’t possibly make heads or tails of it. Readers are best served by reading complete works of Freud and making their own assessments. After that, they can look at Freud’s voluminous and eye-opening correspondence with colleagues. Then they can consult good books, and lists of recommended works, that put them in the right direction.
While some thinkers, such as Ernest Jones and Philip Rieff, had noted Freud’s lifelong reliance on 19th-century biology, it wasn’t until Sulloway’s tome of 1979 that a systematic investigation of Freud’s embarrassing biology was published. Hence the demystification Sulloway offers of a ‘psychoanalytic legend’ that routinely erases the foundational roles that Lamarckian inheritance and Haeckelian recapitulation play throughout Freud’s oeuvre. This dense, difficult, but well-argued and undeniable work is meant for experts but is key for all serious students of psychoanalysis.
In this monumental intellectual biography, Frank Sulloway demonstrates that Freud always remained, despite his denials, a biologist of the mind; and, indeed, that his most creative inspirations derived significantly from biology. Sulloway analyzes the political aspects of the complex myth of Freud as psychoanalytic hero as it served to consolidate the analytic movement. This is a revolutionary reassessment of Freud and psychoanalysis.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
I started out as an economics major in college but soon realized that the discipline was based on totally unrealistic assumptions, so I switched to philosophy and literature. I started reading Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche with some of my roommates and then chose UC San Diego for graduate work because of its focus on what became known as “theory”—which was taught there by luminaries including Jameson, Lyotard, and Marin.
I have been researching the psycho-dynamics of markets and capitalism ever since, and have become convinced that rescuing markets from capital is the only way to save the planet from environmental catastrophe.
Long before running into Norman O. Brown while on sabbatical leave at UC Santa Cruz, I was fascinated by this book’s attempt to re-assert the priority of psychology over the political economy and history by claiming that infants’ refusal to accept the limits of parental care creates separation-anxiety that causes the historical dynamic known as “progress.”
But it wasn’t until much later that Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that capitalism represses the death instinct provided an alternative explanation that rescued Brown’s insights for me by putting the explanation back in the realm of political economy and history–because dependence on the market produces separation anxiety, too.
I have taught psychology in UK universities for over 35 years. I love finding a 'way in' to the subject for my students. I challenge them to find a passion, and I love seeing that passion 'take off' in someone. In my experience, these are five books that have helped psychology students (me included) to find their passion.
Before I studied psychology, I wanted to know more about it, so I read this book. I loved how well-written and informative it is. Whether or not you end up taking Freud seriously isn't the point. Knowing about his ideas is the point because, rightly or wrongly, they underpin a lot of ‘everyday’ thinking in Western societies.
Even though Freud is no longer at the heart of mainstream psychology, his ideas remain intriguing. I am by no means passionate about psychoanalysis. Quite the opposite, in fact. What I am passionate about is the thoughtful consideration and exchange of ideas among people who may or may not agree with one another.
My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.
Forrester’s excellent, yet sadly unfinished, Thinking in Cases, advanced a radical new way to consider the history of the human sciences and their modelling of the self or the individual. Whereas Hacking and Foucault focused on population-based statistical styles of reasoning as the means by which the modern state operated, Forrester argues that these ‘styles of reasoning’ were always supported by what he has termed ‘case-based reasoning.’ In doing so, Forrester considers how biopolitical power has been advanced via both legal and medical cases. He describes his approach as being informed by ‘three rhizomic structures,’ namely ‘the psychoanalytic case history; the historical sociology of the sciences; and the individual in the human sciences.’ This rhizomic model is unique to Forrester’s approach, and allows him to move freely between law, anthropology, medicine, politics, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences, in his reflections on the case. He asks us to reflect on…
What exactly is involved in using particular case histories to think systematically about social, psychological and historical processes? Can one move from a textured particularity, like that in Freud's famous cases, to a level of reliable generality? In this book, Forrester teases out the meanings of the psychoanalytic case, how to characterize it and account for it as a particular kind of writing. In so doing, he moves from psychoanalysis to the law and medicine, to philosophy and the constituents of science. Freud and Foucault jostle here with Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking and Robert Stoller, and Einstein and Freud's connection…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
For as long as I can remember, it has been of the utmost importance to find meaning in life, both for myself and for everyone else sharing this planet. I have spent much of my time over the course of the past few years pushing for a continued level of discourse in the field of philosophy. I have studied at and attended various educational institutions including Eastern Florida State College, The Florida Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and The University of Cambridge – the studies at such range between philosophy, psychology, behavior analysis, and engineering. I hope that my work will be of some assistance in pushing humanity towards positive progress.
In this text, the famed clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, gives his analysis on the world around us, in a way that aims to provide the reader with a higher level of understanding of the effects of such a world on our minds as individuals. For me, this piece really highlighted the ways in which the governmental powers above us have a grasp on the ways in which we live our lives, and are subsequently affected mentally.
Written three years before his death, The Undiscovered Self combines acuity with concision in masterly fashion and is Jung at his very best. Offering clear and crisp insights into some of his major theories, such as the duality of human nature, the unconscious, human instinct and spirituality, Jung warns against the threats of totalitarianism and political and social propaganda to the free-thinking individual. As timely now as when it was first written, Jung's vision is a salutary reminder of why we should not become passive members of the herd.
