100 books like Fingerprints of the Gods

When I was fifteen, I stayed up reading the end of this book under the covers with a flashlight because I could not put it down.

A scandalous bestseller in 1847, this was the first romance to feature an antihero. Mr. Rochester is far from pure and kind. He mocks Jane, who describes herself as small and plain and stands up to him. He has an immoral secret and when Jane learns of it, she leaves him. I doubt I would have.

Ayla’s amazing story of survival in ancient times no doubt influenced me in writing my own book, although I didn’t realize it until I was deep into telling my own story.

Both Ayla and Na’amah were, in a way we find difficult to grasp today, intimately connected to nature. Their very survival turned on that deep understanding. Both women were considered “different,” a feeling that resonated with me.  

I was particularly drawn to the premise that explored how two distinct, but related tribes of humans could have evolved with different innate characteristics and capacities (one relying more on instincts and the other on problem solving).

Not to mention how fascinating that Auel imagined a course of evolution that modern anthropology is only recently vindicating!

I’ll admit it. Usually, when I see an “award-winning” book, I’m turned off because I’ve seen so many of these books fail to live up to the hype. This book was an amazing exception. It deserved its 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella and Nebula Award for Best Novella.

The entire book can be summed up with this one tongue-in-cheek sentence from the protagonist: “As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.” This android is very capable of killing efficiently and coldly. But it’s also very “human.” Humans are exploring other planets and security androids are mandatory. Murderbot is self-aware and is most content when alone–limiting its contact with humans, but what would be the fun of that in this sci-fi adventure?

At a whopping 1,152 pages, Stephen King’s The Stand was just too much to capture in a single movie.

That’s why, in 1994, CBS adapted it across four, ninety-minute episodes of a limited run “mini-series” (a fancy way of saying “a really long movie”). In all fairness, it had a great cast and was better than it had any right to be, and was far more enjoyable than CBS’s 2020 attempt at a do-over.

But even with a total six-hour runtime, it couldn’t capture all the story, heart, and nuance that made the book so incredible. It’s a feat to read, one I did to pass the time when bored in school, and one I will surely do again in the future.

I adore this book for its incisive portrayal of familial expectations clashing with personal desires. The way Austen unfolds the Bennet sisters' stories against societal norms speaks to me about the courage it takes to pursue true happiness, regardless of the pressures that surround us.

What really resonated with me was Elizabeth Bennet’s necessity to maintain a facade while internally struggling with her true wants and needs within the constraints of her family.

More on the wacky side, and far more entertaining, is Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. For those who will never try “heroic doses” of psilocybin mushrooms deep in the Colombian jungle, this is a wild, vicarious ride, an amalgam of science, literature, myth, and exotica from an adventurer whose genuine inquisitiveness in things psychedelic goes hand in hand with mythomania—what an exuberant explosion of literary and philosophical high kitsch! If not persuaded, there follows the endorsement from The New York Times: “The polysyllabic sentences he lards with intellectual references are an attempt to lend credibility to the otherwise debunked subject of drugs.” Yes, a hatchet job from The New York Times could not make for a more valuable endorsement.

I love Stephan Hawking’s A Brief History of Time because it was the first book that inspired me to become a cosmologist. It is a terrific overview of the science behind the modern belief in the Big Bang and what has followed.

It is told with Hawking’s wry sense of humor and unique ability to make complex concepts understandable to the layperson and budding scientist, which I was at the time. It is a fantastic start for my readers of all persuasions.

Christopher Dunn's research is impressive, as he shares over 30 years of study and nine trips to Egypt in Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt.

He explains the unique marks left by skilled craftsmen that today, with modern technology, we would have great difficulty reproducing. Dunn writes about the precision found in the monuments of Egypt. He uses digital photography and computer-aided design software to give the reader an appreciation for the ancient Egyptians' remarkable achievements.

He includes over 280 photographs of Egyptian monuments to support his theories, and his examination of the underground tunnels of the Serapeum is worth the price of the book alone. His explanation of the precision engineering achieved by our ancient ancestors leads the reader to question long-held beliefs about ancient people. 

This book is not about UFOs. It is not even clear if Cremo believes in UFOs or not. However, one of the tenets of the ancient alien hypothesis is that not only are UFOs a real phenomenon now, they (and we) have been here for thousands upon thousands of years. To this end, it is tangentially interesting to dig into suppressed archaeology and out-of-place artifacts. Forbidden Archaeology is the go-to for those topics, with over 900 pages of painstakingly researched and presented evidence from the geological record that mainstream archaeologists deny, ignore, or rely on handwaving to dismiss. A must-have for any ancient aliens fan.

With scholarly discipline but also with a decidedly English sense of humor, The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena 2 takes a path along that shadowy territory between the known and the unknown, between the dogmas of mainstream scientists and the reality of phenomena that happen regardless of (or even in spite of) such dogmas, much as, in a dramatic reversal, Galileo said centuries ago, after being forced to recant his claim that the Earth moved around the immovable sun: “And yet it moves.” (Back then, science, in its nascent state, was based on unbiased inquiry and rejected dogmas de facto. Today, mainstream science has morphed into a scientific priesthood.) The late John Michell was the author of, among others, View over Atlantis, one of the cult reads of the 1970s; Bob Rickard is the founder and editor of the Fortean Times.