100 Books Like Tools for Conviviality

First of all, how could anyone not love a book with an author’s name like that?

This book was on display mere inches from me while I was signing books at an exceptionally enchanting indie bookstore called Sudden Fiction in Castle Rock, Colorado. I couldn’t wait for the signing to be over so I could get a copy for myself. And it did not disappoint, the contents being as beguiling as the cover. 

Sheldrake describes not only the incredible and seemingly irrepressible capacity fungi have for survival and thrival (yep, I made that word up), but also encourages us to practice the same spells. I may have to become a mycologist in my next iteration – it’s good to remake oneself every few months, I think.

Meadows, a pioneer in this arena, had an extraordinary gift for making complex systems thinking accessible without dumbing it down.

She left us all too soon. I do return to this book, especially her concept of "leverage points": places within systems where small shifts create disproportionate change. Her insight that changing paradigms proves more powerful than adjusting surface parameters directly informed my research on organizational edges.

What I treasure most is how she wrote with both rigour and humility. She acknowledged that systems are messy, that we can't predict everything, that unintended consequences are inevitable; yet she shows us how to work with complexity rather than against it.

When I'm helping organizations navigate transformation, her frameworks help me identify where to intervene for maximum impact. The chapter on system traps and opportunities has probably saved me from dozens of well-intentioned but ultimately counterproductive interventions.

This is the book I gift… show more.

When I couldn’t truly see light, I couldn’t really understand it. There is a reason why we don’t notice the subtleties of light in our everyday lives, and it’s because our brains filter it out. This book gave me a key that unlocked the art of seeing so that I could see the world as it really is rather than the simplified version that my brain presented me with.

A must for any visual artist, this book gave me the most fundamental insight that I could ever hope for: it taught me to see the world as I’d never seen it before. This was a life-changing gift.

Until this book, I didn’t realize we live in a culture that applauds starting, growing, and flowering while turning a blind eye to ending, decaying, and dying.

Harald Welzer starts out by calculating how humans turn more living matter on Earth into dead matter each year. We don’t seem able to see that this is a sure way to stop living. Having survived a stroke, he asks the question: "What life do I want to have lived?" This is the framework of the book.

Along the way, he shares wonderful examples of (artistic) endeavors that attend to the ending–of a factory’s life, of insects killed by pesticides, of cathedrals that can only be built by accepting that some of them will crumble before they are finished.

I love this book because Ivan Illich pulls no punches. I love the way he clearly points out how intertwined schools are with the nature of society, in a feedback loop of influence. Our very souls may be wounded by these structures, even when they are established with good intentions.

This “radical” book gave me permission to understand that I could connect the ecological and pedagogical, the theological and the social, the economic and the affective. Our nature permits endless noncoerced learning, but schools pervert that. Even though I understand how this message can be twisted for purposes of privatization and control, I love the idealism and humanism at its core.

Everything is relative…and this book makes me feel like a normal person. Ivan Illich is one of the 20th century’s great thinkers (google him), and he has inspired many of the current critical studies fields that are gaining headway in the academy.

He was a man of principles. In this book, he lays out his principled reasons for why our current medical industrial complex in the West is making us unhealthy and unhappy. And what an alternative would look like. You did google him, right? So, you know what that alternative made him look like in the end…

In the 1960s, radical educational thinkers in the Global North started to question why schools needed to exist at all.

Writers like John Holt, Ivan Illich, and Paul Goodman argued that we should separate ‘education’ from ‘schooling’. Although their views were different, they agreed on a basic set of ideas: children don’t learn much in school; schools are oppressive places, especially for working-class students; and often, they just exist to socialise children for the labour market.

As Holt wrote, "Children are subject peoples. School for them is a kind of jail." Lister’s Deschooling Society collects excerpts from these thinkers alongside Lister’s own views. It’s a brilliant introduction to ideas that are still disconcerting today.

This is a remarkable book (the first of two volumes), taking in a huge sweep of history, making bold claims about social change over the centuries, yet focusing as much on manners, civility, and such everyday matters as how we eat at table as much as it does on the changing nature of medieval society and the rise of the modern nation-state. A deeply serious book, but one with chapter titles that include ‘On blowing one’s nose’, ‘On spitting,’ and ‘On behaviour in the bedroom’. Elias has had a huge impact on modern understanding of social change, not least in documenting and analysing the centuries-long trend toward diminishing violence and increasing shame and ‘civility’ in daily life. 

This choice might surprise you: it’s a famous book in medieval studies circles but not the sort of thing a historian of philosophy would usually pick up. But its exploration of the role of the body in writings by female medieval authors is foundational for understanding what is sometimes called “affective mysticism.” That topic expands our sense of what medieval philosophy could be. Other scholars whose work is worth checking out on this topic include Amy Hollywood and Christina Van Dyke.

This is an engaging and wide-ranging survey of the topic written by one of the leading scholars of philosophy in medieval Latin Christendom. Marenbon actually wrote some earlier general introductions which were also very good. But I recommend this one because he casts a broader net, by looking at medieval philosophy not only in Christian Europe but in the Islamic world too.