The Unsettling Reading List

10 books to take you out of your comfort zone

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An unavoidable feature of public discourse and political culture in the age of the Internet is the almost universal tendency people have to sequester themselves away into silos of like-minded comrades, comfortable viewpoints, and constant reinforcement. Aside from the detrimental effect this has had on politics and civil society, existing in an echo chamber is just so unrelentingly boring. Just as the physical stress of exercise can strengthen and invigorate the body, so can the intellectual and emotional stress of unsettling ideas invigorate the mind. Plus, it’s fun!

The following is a reading list of both novels and nonfiction books that will challenge and unnerve many readers. You don’t have to agree with everything they say, or be persuaded by every argument they make, but the mindset with which you approach them can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reading them from behind the citadel of your emotional defenses will mostly be a waste of your time. As Bertrand Russell once observed, “To read an author simply in order to refute him is not the way to understand him.”

Nonfiction

Nothing: A Very Short Introduction (2009) by Frank Close

On its face, reading a book about “nothing” might seem dull, bizarre, or even comical. One imagines a gag book with all its pages left blank. But it turns out there is much to say about nothing. Physicist Frank Close’s fascinating exploration of the concept of nothing, which delves into history, philosophy, physics, cosmology, and quantum mechanics, drills down to some of the most central questions of reality and existence. Nothing lies at the heart of everything, and yet for the most part, we fundamentally don’t even know nothing. It’s a humbling reality check about the limitations of human knowledge and the vastness of the unknown.

Free Will (2012) by Sam Harris

The sense that we are, in some inherent sense, the authors of our own lives, choices, and actions defines the way people think not only about themselves, but about relationships, ethics, fairness, success, policy, and justice. Challenging this belief with a succinct yet multipronged and multidisciplinary series of arguments, Harris elegantly lays bare the unworkable incoherencies with the very concept of free will. Free Will examines the ways in which its adherents are forced to redefine and denude the concept to salvage it, preempts most of the common objections and comfort-blanket quips, and addresses the psychological and societal implications. Some folks are very deeply invested in the idea of free will, but even most who aren’t still intuitively feel that they have it. Shaking that belief can be disturbing for some, exhilarating for others.

Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (2019) by Annaka Harris

If someone told you that consciousness may be an intrinsic property of all matter — the concept in the philosophy of mind known as panpsychism — you’d probably dismiss it out of hand. Human experience holds that consciousness must surely arise from highly sophisticated brains and nervous systems. And yet we don’t know how, why, or when along the developmental or evolutionary scale supposedly non-conscious matter “becomes” conscious.

The early chapters of Conscious establish how little we definitively know about the mind and explore the many weird and counterintuitive phenomena that have been observed among humans (especially split-brain patients), animals, and even plants. As the book’s panpsychist thesis unfolds, chipping away at preconceived notions about the nature of consciousness, time, and identity with one argument, experiment, and observation after the next, the reader is left, not necessarily convinced, but disquieted and much less certain.

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) by Alan Watts

Drawing from various strains of nondual Eastern philosophy, Watts focuses on two of the central illusions ingrained in human experience: the ego or “self” and the sense that the world is a collection of separate things and events. Everything we could ever care about in life either originates from or filters through our minds, which ultimately renders everything a matter of perspective. Seen one way, we are atomized egos — distinct agents moving around in a world of other things. Seen from a different perspective, everything is an inseparable part of a larger whole whose nature we confuse ourselves about with our fixation for labeling its various parts. The Book is a kind of focus shift, a way of looking at everything from your mind to the world around you at a different intellectual focal length — one that most people are probably unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable with.

The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (1988, 1997) by Marjorie Spiegel

Discussions about the ethics of how humans treat animals often skirt uneasily around associations and similarities with the most heinous things man has done to man. To draw the comparison directly is seen as uncouth, fraught, offensive, and even racist. The Dreaded Comparison cuts incisively across the polite but dishonest squeamishness we often feel over animal ethics and boldly “goes there” to build an airtight case with an unavoidable conclusion: oppression is oppression. I recommend the later expanded edition from 1997, which includes a powerful foreword from author Alice Walker (The Color Purple (1982)).

Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021) by Charles Murray

In Facing Reality, Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve (1994) infamy, lays out the data on differences in IQ scores, standardized test results, and rates of criminality between the various population groups commonly defined as “races.” Murray’s reputation as a “race and IQ” guy obviously comes with a lot of baggage, and the blunt manner in which he presents the data is guaranteed to put big smiles on the faces of some of society’s most odious characters. And yet the information the book conveys is factually accurate (as of the time of writing). Murray’s writing is more nuanced than critics might expect — he takes time to address objections, acknowledges the multifactorial complexity of these issues, and admits that the existing data is not always as robust as it should be. Therein lies the easy out for those who want to reject the contents of the book outright.

What we fear most when it comes to the issues surrounding certain kinds of group differences are their implications. But, as the previous books on this list can attest, those implications are largely a matter of perspective and interpretation. Facing Reality makes for uncomfortable reading in parts, but believe it or not, Klan robes will not materialize on your person while doing so.

Fiction

Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This book was mentioned in my 2021 article “The Liberal Arts Crash Course.”

Dostoevsky’s tale of a confused and desperate man’s terrible crime, and his implacable spiral toward punishment, transports the reader inside the psyche of the young protagonist as thoroughly as any work of fiction in any time, place, or medium. We don’t merely ride along with Raskolnikov, we become him. The depths of his despair, guilt, angst, and psychological agony become ours, revealing insights into the human condition more gripping and viscerally affecting than any dispassionate examination could ever convey.

The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis

One of the pioneering novels that helped to shape the Gothic genre, The Monk follows its namesake’s literal fall from grace and slide into almost exponential emotional darkness. Archaic in literary style and superstitious in premise, but a nevertheless moving, jarring, erotic, violent, and sinking experience. Lacking the moral and philosophical undertones of Crime and Punishment, The Monk is simply a meditation on the descent into pure human misery — one you won’t be able to look away from.

Pet Sematary (1983) by Stephen King

This book was featured in my “2023: My Year in Books.”

An intensely disturbing and emotionally harrowing masterpiece of horror, Pet Sematary charts the depth of grief and chills to the bone — not through ghouls that jump from the shadows, but from the inexorable march of the damned that, however doomed, is one we can all too easily picture ourselves walking. There’s a reason why this book troubled King so much it was almost discarded. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to the Pet Sematary is paved with love. Few things could be more haunting.

Quantum Night (2016) by Robert J. Sawyer

What if a significant portion of humanity were philosophical zombies? That is to say, what if vast numbers of people were not, in some fundamental sense, real people possessed of conscious minds, but rather mere automatons? What would the ethical implications of this discovery be? A fusion of science, philosophy, and politics, Quantum Night explores fleshed-out thought experiments on the boundaries (or beyond) of most people’s comfort zones. Whether it’s the nature of consciousness, free will, moral responsibility, utilitarianism, psychopathy, abortion, government surveillance, or mind control, Sawyer relentlessly leans into the space where the rubber of ethical dilemmas hits the road of real-life scenarios. Quantum Night marries the thought-provoking and sometimes unsettling reaches of science/philosophy writing with the immersive and well-paced flow of a thriller. Sawyer doesn’t just ask us to ponder these questions — he shows them dramatically (and sometimes disturbingly) playing out.

Happy Uneasy reading!

See also: The American Dreaming Books section

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To see more book reviews, check out my GoodReads page, from which a few of these entries have been adapted.

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