Bookshelf
A library is not a list of books. It is a record of intellectual formation, a map of what has shaped the way you see.
These are the books that have shaped mine. Organised not by genre but by the three layers of the worldview they correspond to.
Layer One — The Ground
Consciousness, spirit, and the nature of reality
The deepest layer. Books that address the fundamental question of what reality is, what the self is, and what it means to know anything at all.
- Bhagavad Gita, translated by Eknath Easwaran
- Upanishads, translated by Eknath Easwaran
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
- Shunryū Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
- Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
- Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics
- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
- Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
- Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul
- Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment
- Henry Shukman, One Blade of Grass
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
- Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads
- Hanzi Freinacht, The Listening Society
- Moore & Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover
Layer Two — The Middle
Life, ecology, and regenerative systems
The biological expression of the deeper aliveness. Books about how life organises itself — and how human civilisation can learn to do the same.
Systems Thinking
- Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems
- Donella Meadows, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
- Fritjof Capra & Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life
- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
- Jan Rotmans, Omarm de Chaos
- Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
- Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game
- Geoffrey West, Scale
Enlivenment
- Andreas Weber, Enlivenment
- Jeremy Lent, The Web of Meaning
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
- Arne Naess, Ecology of Wisdom
- Joanna Macy, Coming Back to Life
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
- E.O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence
- E.O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth
- Charles Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet
- Daniel Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures
- E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
- Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics
- Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
- Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations
- Carol Sanford, The Regenerative Business
- Carol Sanford, The Regenerative Life
- Carol Sanford, The Responsible Business
- Carol Sanford & Ben Haggard, Indirect Work
- Giles Hutchins, Leading by Nature
- Giles Hutchins & Laura Storm, Regenerative Leadership
- Looby Macnamara, People and Permaculture
- C. Otto Scharmer, The Essentials of Theory U
Layer Three — The Surface
Culture, politics, and the civilisational diagnosis
Where the deeper pathologies become visible. Books about what has gone wrong in modern Western civilisation — and what a rooted, coherent alternative might look like.
Cultural Diagnosis
- Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
- Philipp Blom, Nature's Mutiny
- Philipp Blom, Het Grote Wereldtoneel
- Philipp Blom, De Onderwerping
- Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
- Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
- Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society
Political Economy
- Michael Lind, The New Class War
- Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation