John Gray's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books John Gray recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of John Gray's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

Civilization and Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud

4.1

It stands as a brilliant summary of the views on culture from a psychoanalytic perspective that he had been developing since the turn of the century. It is both witness and tribute to the late theory of mind—the so-called structural theory, with its stress on aggression, indeed the death drive, as the pitiless adversary of eros.

Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books,

Recommended by John Gray, David Bell, and Sam Freedman.

John Gray

Civilisation, as Freud understands it, begins with the restraint of violence… which means that the civilisational condition is one of discontent. [source]

David Bell

A dispassionate view of the cost of civilisation to the individual. [source]

Sam Freedman

A rough synopsis of the book is that love is a social construct designed to prevent us from murdering each other, at the expense of creating profound neurosis, so definitely a bold choice for a second date. https://t.co/pEnlgR6aiL [source]

The Invisible Writing

Arthur Koestler

4.6

Taken together, Arthur Koestler's volumes of autobiography constitute an unrivalled study of twentieth-century man and his dilemma. Arrow in the Blue ended with his joining the Communist Party and The Invisible Writing covers some of the most important experiences in his life.

This book tells of Koestler's travels through Russia and remote parts of Soviet Central Asia and of his life as an exile. I

Recommended by John Gray.

John Gray

Koestler may have had flaws as a human being – which his biographers have examined – but he is a giant figure, and has something to teach us today which is not at all dated by the Cold War. This is the second volume of his autobiography, The Invisible Writing, dating from 1932 to 1940, which were the years of his deep immersion in communism and his emerging out of it before moving to Britain in 1940. [source]

The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages

Norman Cohn

4.5

Recommended by John Gray and Ian McEwan.

John Gray

I first read Norman Cohn back in the sixties. It stayed with me and had a profound effect on me, and emerged in my own work. [source]

Ian McEwan

It’s a historical account of the fanatical millenarian sects that swept across Europe from the 11th to 15th centuries. [source]

The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

Frank Kermode

3.7

s/t: With a New Epilogue
Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished and beloved critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisits the book which brings his highly concentrated insights to bear on some o

Recommended by John Gray.

John Gray

I’m interested in The Sense of an Ending for some of the same reasons that McEwan was. In the book, Kermode talks about myths and fictions – how they differ from one another, and how they play a role not only in literature but also in politics and history. He takes the view of the great 20th century poet Wallace Stevens that we find ourselves having to live on the basis of what we recognise to be fictions, and that fictions create meaning in human life that wasn’t there before. Kermode argues that fictions are, in a way, hardly necessary. That much of our life consists of living in the context of fictions which have a tight hold on the lives they give meaning to. Kermode says that myths and fictions have reached the state where their human authorship has been forgotten. [source]

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Hello America

J Ballard

3.6

A terrifying vision of the future from one of the twentieth century’s most renowned writers – J. G. Ballard, author of ‘Empire of the Sun’ and ‘Crash’.

Following the energy crisis of the late twentieth-century America has been abandoned. Now, a century later, an expedition from Europe returns to the deserted continent. But America is unrecognisable – the Bering Strait has been dammed and the whole

Recommended by John Gray.

John Gray

This is a vision, relevant to our discussion of apocalypse, of a century or so from now when climate change has made most of the American continent uninhabitable, with large parts of it covered by rainforest or desert. The ideas it puts forward are presented in the context of an adventure story, of a group of Europeans who explore this almost abandoned continent and come across various groups and tribes who live in the ruins or jungles. JG Ballard himself lived through what might be called an apocalypse – that is, the collapse of life in Shanghai under Japan in the Second World War and his subsequent internment in a camp. [source]