Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

A person needs a why. A reason to live. A real one, not something shallow. Usually that reason is a deep desire to help or serve other people, either in a specific way or because you love them with your whole heart. And there’s a direct connection between having a sense of meaning and your health and longevity. There’s no one to make this argument better than a psychologist who survived a Nazi concentration camp. There’s also no great way to write about this book other than to say, if you want to have a real serious conversation with your soul, this will lead you there.

Cosmopolis by Don Delillo

This book is a perfect encapsulation of history at pin point in time, all the mania around the year 2000. There was a real crossroads we were at and a real paranoia and it is captured by this man, a professional currency speculator, spends a day trying to cross Manhattan in a car to get a hair cut while the UN is in town, a street funeral is happening for a rapper much like Biggie Smalls, protestors have overtaken Times Square, and he is slowly losing his fortune because the mathmatically impossible is in fact something that can occur. Don’t ask, don’t watch, I can’t say anything nice about the movie.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. That might as well be our national motto, and every time I am stuck in the very long very slow plebian line at the airport waiting on one TSA agent, while the people who’ve paid to not have to stand near the little people have no wait at all and 6 publicly-funded TSA agents in their line, I think about this.

Wild Mind: Living The Writers Life by Natalie Goldberg

This book is a series of essays and writing prompts that try to free you from all the voices in your head that try to stop you from writing, or over editorialize what you put down on paper. It emphasized that like most other things writing is a practice that you have to do regularly to be good at, it isn’t something people are just born with; and that there’s no such thing as writers block, only self-censorship. It was profound to me at 19 and really shook some things loose, as well as gave me a glimpse into what a future that involved centering freedom and writing might be like.

A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn

This was the book that really, truly taught me about propoganda, specifically about how the official versions of history are generally told that way to benefit the ruling class and support their story about why they should rule the rest of us, and how that official version often betrays the facts of what actually happened and why. Another awakening.

So… I think the books I want to read again for the first time were all a kind of awakening? What are yours?

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