Books like Twice-Told Tales

This is to me is the best book ever written for understanding what human beings are, how we are similar to and different from other animal species, how we develop from helpless newborns to fully functioning adults, and what we are striving for in our lives. Most nonfiction books make a point and then repeat it over and over with examples and anecdotes. In contrast, The Birth and Death of Meaning begins with evolution and progresses logically from its first page to its last. When you finish this book, you will have a much better understanding of yourself, the people in your life, historical and current events, and problems ranging from anxiety and depression to interpersonal conflict to prejudice.  

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.

This book summarizes the contributions of Otto Rank, the brilliant and influential psychoanalyst. Rank focused on two core psychological motivations, the desires for psychological security on the one hand, and for stimulation, growth, and creativity on the other. His work illuminates how these desires often work in concert but also often can be in opposition over the course of the lifespan, contributing to guilt, anxiety, and stunting growth. Rank’s analysis inspired the development of both existential psychology and humanistic psychology. Rank’s approach to psychological well-being is based on accepting and even affirming the limitations of life, understanding what you really want in life, and developing the will to move creatively toward achieving those goals so that one can live an authentic and satisfying life.   

This is a psychology book, maybe not what some would consider about “behavior,” and it’s a fairly heavy and dense one. But I feel I must include it as it has helped me understand human mental struggles more than any other book I’ve read. And a key part of understanding human behavior, especially the broader societal and political aspects, is understanding those dark, often under-the-surface struggles that we all deal with. It is the wisest book I’ve ever read, and I have bought it for many people. Yalom has become a sort of secular guru for me. It is that good.

Gorgeously illustrated and elegantly written, Lena Orlin’s new study of William Shakespeare shows her great skill at doing research to give us new ways to understand the playwright. She puts the evidence of his life within the context of other Elizabethan documents. Orlin proves that we can know more about Shakespeare by examining the lives of the people in his circles. As she tells us, this is neither a literary biography nor a full biography, but it is a book that follows the evidence to tell us much more about Shakespeare the man. Shakespeare cared deeply about his father and his marriage to Anne was much less contentious and a more pleasant partnership. Though there have been so many books about Shakespeare, Orlin helps us understand him beyond the myths. Her brilliant and thorough reading of documents presents a wonderful read.

I absolutely adore the concept of taking the epic Star Wars franchise and transforming it into a Shakespearean play. It is humorous and so totally unexpected, which is the best thing about reading adventures—I love surprises! Blending ideas or combining very different styles resonates very deeply with me because of my own blended background as a German-Italian-South African. I absolutely love it when the unexpected melding of two different things bring forth something entirely new, like fusion cooking.

Alan Green hosts a popular Youtube channel that explores the mysteries and secret codes built into the works of Shakespeare and his decryptions are quite extraordinary in their depth.

Green has been investigating these hidden “Bard codes” for more than 15 years and his book reflects the incredible effort he has put into his work. He was at one time the musical director of The Monkees!)

Shakespeare’s Dog is the craziest Shakespearean book I’ve ever read. Not only is the young Stratford Shakespeare’s tale told by his dog, Hooker ̶ the dog speaks a kind of faux-Shakespearean: full of Elizabethan-esque vocabulary and syntax, Anglo-Saxon bawdry, new-coined usages of common words (“the wind flummoxed”; “I knelled the truth”). Moreover, Rooke must really know his dogs. Because the dog-viewpoint (a frustrated Shakespeare “bites his toenails”) seems right on the money. The struggle of a prodigy youth and his prodigy dog to escape the tawdry, shallow, raucous banality of provincial small-town life is told with vividness, wit, and pathos.

Also known as The Ornithology of Shakespeare, James Edmund Harting published this book in 1871 as a detailed analysis of all the references to birds in Shakespeare’s plays. He shows that to Shakespeare and his audience, birds and field sports were second nature. His book starts with Shakespeare’s general knowledge of natural history and then tackles different types of birds, such as those with song and the owl and its associations. Harting was an extremely knowledgeable ornithologist and hawker, and his book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand Shakespeare.

This is one of the many books that have delved into the old question of who William Shakespeare really was. And it is one of the more clever ones, drawing clear parallels between Shakespeare's texts, on the one hand, and the travels, experiences, opinions, and facilities of the main suspect, the Earl of Oxford, on the other. Looney’s book was the first one to propose and present exhaustive evidence that the Earl of Oxford was the sole author of all of Shakespeare’s works – a hypothesis that is now dominant among those who doubt the role of the relatively uneducated and untravelled “Stratford-man”.