Poetic Outlaws Weekly Recommended Books
"So many books, so little time."
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron
Happy Friday Subscribers.
It’s that time of the week when I throw out a few mind-blowing Poetic Outlaws books that I think you should read. At the bottom, I have a short list of the books that I’m currently reading. I really appreciate you curious and poetic humans following this page.
You can check out the last two week’s recommended books here and here.
Let’s go!
1. “The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society” by Carl Jung
“It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption.” — Carl Jung
From Amazon: One of the world’s greatest psychiatrists reveals how to embrace our own humanity and resist the pressures of an ever-changing world.
In this challenging and provocative work, Dr. Carl Jung—one of history’s greatest minds—argues that civilization’s future depends on our ability as individuals to resist the collective forces of society. Only by gaining an awareness and understanding of one’s unconscious mind and true, inner nature—“the undiscovered self”—can we as individuals acquire the self-knowledge that is antithetical to ideological fanaticism. But this requires that we face our fear of the duality of the human psyche—the existence of good and the capacity for evil in every individual.
In this seminal book, Jung compellingly argues that only then can we begin to cope with the dangers posed by mass society—“the sum total of individuals”—and resist the potential threats posed by those in power.
2. “To Have or To Be?” by Erich Fromm
If we were consciously aware of what we really know about ourselves and others, we could not go on living as we do, accepting so many lives. — Erich Fromm
From Amazon: To Have Or to Be? is one of the seminal books of the second half of the 20th century. Nothing less than a manifesto for a new social and psychological revolution to save our threatened planet, this book is a summary of the penetrating thought of Eric Fromm. His thesis is that two modes of existence struggle for the spirit of humankind: the having mode, which concentrates on material possessions, power, and aggression, and is the basis of the universal evils of greed, envy, and violence; and the being mode, which is based on love, the pleasure of sharing, and in productive activity. To Have Or to Be? is a brilliant program for socioeconomic change.
A few of my favorite excerpts from this exquisite book:
The dream of being independent masters of our lives ended when we began awakening to the fact that we have all become cogs in the bureaucratic machine, with our thoughts, feelings, and tastes manipulated by government and industry and the mass communications that they control.
We have made the machine into a god and have become godlike by serving the machine. It matters little the formulation we choose; what matters is that human beings, in the state of their greatest real impotence, imagine themselves in connection with science and technique to be omnipotent.
3. “The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett” By John Calder
In this book, John Calder examines the philosophy of one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century. Calder writes:
”It seems self-evident to me that Beckett is the most significant writer of the twentieth century: he represents the culmination of the achievements of his three most important predecessors, Proust, Kafka and Joyce. The key elements in their work, Proust’s demonstration of the elasticity of time, Kafka’s brooding sense of menace, prescient of the horrors to come in his own Germanic and Jewish world, and Joyce’s ability to blend myth with daily life through language – all find their synthesis in the literature of Beckett.”
Though Beckett dealt with the darker side of the human condition in his art— boredom, meaninglessness, exile, confusion, death — he still remained a life-affirming writer.
Calder reminds us that Beckett’s works were written with a purpose: “to make us face, head-on, the realities of the human condition; and nowhere does he offer us a hopeful message, only a positive attitude and an injunction to face those realities with courage and dignity… Beckett is not only talking to artists in the message obliquely woven into his work, but saying to as much of humanity as will listen that if it can learn to forego personal ambition and think in terms of co-operation, compassion and companionship, it will be happier. It would in fact be moving closer to the condition of the artist.”
Currently Reading:
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth As Metaphor and As Religion by Joseph Campbell
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost Mereloo
Happy reading, folks. Hope you all have a great weekend. Cheers till next time.
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