Author Adam Steiner’s Essential Reading List for Those Ready to Reinvent Themselves
In 2008, I had just graduated from university with an MA in philosophy, I exited campus life bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and then my troubles began. The global financial crash happened, and I found myself like so many others on the employment scrapheap before I’d even started. I went back to my parents’ house in the Midlands, England, and returned to my summer job as a hospital cleaner/porter/driver, lifting buckets, delivering medicines and ferrying souls from place to place. This started a renewed but unsentimental education; the hospital library was full of outlier oddities from which I borrowed books like Jerzy Kosiński’s Being There, Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, a far cry from the hospital’s conservative mood, despite the cycle of life/death that had become commonplace.
I started doing music reviews, for free and gladly, for websites that no longer exist, such as Sabotage Times. Eventually, I accumulated enough experience that I was able to write what I know, and so I spent too many years on my novel, Politics of the Asylum, published by a tiny British publisher, Urbane Publications, to whom I am eternally grateful. The book is an account of my working life at the hospital, written broadly in a style that brought Virginia Woolf into collision with William S. Burroughs.
From there, I have gone on to write several non-fiction titles. The first, Into The Never in 2020, is an in-depth account of Nine Inch Nails’ multi-million-selling 1994 album, The Downward Spiral. It was a great experience to tell the story of a major album from my teenage years, and I followed this up a couple of years later with Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters, which told the story of Bowie’s life in 1980 as he vacated Berlin and struggled to make a new life for himself, delivering a power-pop classic that birthed the New Wave era. Most recently, my book Darker with the Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs of Love and Death, a deep dive across his discography, is being reissued by Bloomsbury in paperback and audiobook editions, which is really exciting as Nick Cave continues his great rebirth, touring the world, writing the Red Hand Files and still looking toward the future.
The books below, among many others, gave me escape from the day-to-day grind and inspired me to write myself out of a one-way situation. Maybe they’ll do the same for you.
The best books to read when you’re starting over
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh is the classic English author of black humor and biting social satire. With this book, he dialed back the cruelty and acerbic tone and wrote in his most luxuriant and rich style. This book presents Waugh’s departure to write more deeply about love and to expose the fickle naivety of the British class system, culminating in the never-ending flame of his Catholic faith. It is one of the best books about friendship, and how these early bonds of youth can twist and turn as our lives change shape into adulthood.
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Outsider is great and a typical young man’s novel, but it can read more like a fable, saddled with the baggage of existentialism and a cookie-cutter anti-hero verging on personality disorder. By contrast, The Plague, this time a metaphor for the German occupation of France and North Africa during World War Two, is a more humanizing work in keeping with Camus’s overall outlook. This book is populated by traitors, victims and flawed heroes, but it also displays the compact of sacrifice and exploitation we all make in times of crisis.
Byron by Peter Quennell
Except for gardening, literary biography is my only vice. They are all-consuming, and as a teenager, I was in love with both the image and the idea of Byron. He was, of course, a deeply flawed and contradictory person: handsome but with a malformed leg; an aristocrat raised in debt and disgrace; a man who did nothing but live and love and write—both victim and persecutor. Byron should be remembered not just for the words he wrote, but his poetic life.
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
A fluid and hilarious account of people falling in and out of addiction, and the surreal situations they stumble through towards an uncertain future. Johnson wrote from experience, but the book is neither a warning nor a promise that things will get better; he tells it straight. Never sentimental, always searching, Johnson could write a recipe book and have you on the edge of your seat. A real writer’s writer.
Haunts of The Black Masseur by Charles Sprawson
Sprawson was ahead of his time, writing a memoir of his own swimming adventures; swimming the Hellespont River just as Byron did, interwoven with a history of famous swimmers and writers. Some of these figures, such as Shelley and Hart Crane, famously drowned, while others, like Byron, appear genuinely heroic. Before the trend of Wild Swimming became a mainstream obsession, Sprawson inspired me to pursue swimming as an elemental connection, not simply a lifestyle choice.
Heavier Than Heaven by Charles Cross
When I was a young teenager, just discovering Nirvana and knowing that Kurt Cobain had died when I was nine, this book embedded the impact of the band’s music. Before the more sensational hagiographies still being published, Cross portrayed Cobain as a vain, flawed, damaged individual in a Midwest alternative band who just happened to become a global sensation. In some respects, it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of ambition and success, but also an inspiring story of creative spirit against a background of family break-up, abuse and addiction.
By Grand Central Station…I Sat Down And Wept by Elizabeth Smart
More than J.D. Salinger or Kerouac, Elizabeth Smart portrays the challenge of loneliness in the city. It’s the literary equivalent of u003cemu003eGrey Gardensu003c/emu003e; telling us what happens to the people who get left behind, more often than not, their stories sink along with them. I think we’ve all had those experiences where love builds you up, and the higher it takes you, the harder you break coming back down. You feel her pain, discovering alongside her that the love she felt wasn’t what she thought it was.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy is a very male writer; that being said, I found this book a genuine page-turner. The compelling narrative is as much a mythical history of the Old West as it is a terrifying metaphysical spiral into human depravity and violence. You can feel the depth of McCarthy’s investment: four years of writing and researching the book, learning Spanish and writing on an old typewriter in a dusty desert shack—the commitment bleeds through on every page.