Books
When you watch a movie, you see exactly what everyone else sees. When you read a book, you read what exactly what everyone else reads—but, crucially, you imagine it differently. The author provides the framing and the walls, but the reader can decorate them as they so choose.
This, to me, is the magic of reading—and it’s why a favorite book is often held much closer to the heart than a favorite movie. Below are my all-time favorite books, my current reads, all the other books I’ve read in the recent past.
Greatest Hits
Books that have changed my life. If you ask me for book recommendations, these are the ones you’re getting.
Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
Based on a true story, Shantaram is written from the first person, and follows Lin as he escapes prison in Australia and starts a new life in 1980s Bombay, India. I have genuinely never read a book that is so sweepingly epic, so all-encompassing, so thrilling, so horrifying, so wonderful, so philosophically wise, and so full of heart. This is the book.
“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”
Memories of Ice: Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book 3
Steven Erikson
I think this is the first time I’ve ever cried real tears from a fantasy book. Set in the truly awe-inspiring Malazan world, the book covers a vast array of characters as they navigate a very real-feeling war against a cannibalistic cult. The sheer scale of the epicness and the horrible darkness, offset by moments of stunning beauty, will rock your world.
“We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned, T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the word. It must be given freely. In abundance.”
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
I think I found this book from Googling “greatest novels of all time”—and it lives up to the praise. The book follows the competing destinies of two different families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, as they make their livings in California’s Salinas Valley from the mid-1800s through World War 1. Steinbeck’s lifelong wisdom is ingrained on every page, the core idea being that no one—no one—is beyond redemption, so long as they choose it.
“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
Gates of Fire
Steven Pressfield
You probably know of the Battle of Thermopylae, where the brave 300 Spartans held off up to two million Persians for multiple days, securing the ultimate Greek victory at Plataea a year later—but Gates of Fire will make it real to you in a way you never thought possible. This book gave me a profound sense of gratitude and connection across time to those soldiers who actually fought and died in such a tragic manner, and whose actions may very well have preserved the West as we know it. But most importantly, it made me want to be a better man.
“For what can be more noble than to slay oneself? Not literally. Not with a blade in the guts. But to extinguish the selfish self within, that part which looks only to its own preservation, to save its own skin. That, I saw, was the victory you Spartans had gained over yourselves. That was the glue. It was what you had learned and it made me stay, to learn it too. When a warrior fights not for himself, but for his brothers, when his most passionately sought goal is neither glory nor his own life’s preservation, but to spend his substance for them, his comrades, not to abandon them, not to prove unworthy of them, then his heart truly has achieved contempt for death, and with that he transcends himself and his actions touch the sublime.”
Dreamcatcher
Stephen King
Stephen King apparently wrote Dreamcatcher when he was recovering from a car accident and high on pain meds. You can definitely tell—it follows four lifelong friends as they try to survive a horrific alien invasion up in rural Maine. The heart of the book, though, is the deep bond these friends formed in their youth with a Down syndrome kid named Douglas, whom they saved from bullies—and it will make you want to be a better person.
“Once things were different, but now they're the same. He reckons he can live with that; for a guy like him, the rule of thumb is just SSDD, and so f*cking what. You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.”
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
Rolf Potts
This is a dangerous book. While I can’t cite it as the actual driving force that inspired all my travels, I can certainly say it provided the means—it showed me just how possible, and just how easy long-term world travel really is. Potts intersperses all his knowledge on the subject with entertaining stories from his extensive trips around the world, making this a remarkably page-turning read given that it’s not a novel.
“Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.”
Currently Reading
Books that I’m actively going through now. I’ll write a short summary about them once I’m finished.
The Fellowship of the Ring: The Lord of the Rings, Book 1
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Already Read
I may elaborate more on these in the future.
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
