- The Ultimate Book List for learning about Men -
Because what and who we understand, we may truly come to love.
Last year, it occurred to me that it might be helpful to understand what it means to be a man.
Why?
Well, I’m pretty engaged with the figuring out of what it means to be a woman, so that I can mirror to my own daughter the okayness of being so.
And I also have a son, and I’d like to support him in his becoming a man, and so it just occurred to me last year, that I might learn a bit more about these men people.
And so, as I do with most things when seeking to figure something out, I reached for my friends: the world of books...
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Below, are some that have taught me the most over this last year of investigation into this men people.
Pls note it’s not an exhaustive list, as we’re currently out of our home as it’s having some work done to it, so most of our books are in storage. This means that the books mentioned below are the ones that I can remember. I.e. the ones that’ve I’ve spent time reflecting on, and have taught me the most.
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So what have I learnt?
Well, namely that there’s still much more to learn. Men, as it turns out are a misunderstood universe. And so, alongside the books, I’ve also been acquiring some learning from the real deal: a man himself, otherwise known as my partner, Tom.
The learning has been humbling, hard, and then humbling and more hard, and occasionally, heartening and hopeful too.
As a woman who for the most part of her life, has adopted a forge ahead approach to living, the notion that I might learn to trust my partner enough to ask his thoughts on things, and then to actually trust those thoughts (thank you Laura Doyle), has been not too dissimilar a process to entering a chrysalis and emerging a whole new person.
For so long now, I’ve identified with qualities typically associated with masculine energies, or confusingly, traits I often hear my girlfriends complain about with regards to their husbands. I care less for an immaculate home, create chaos when I cook and will always seek play, and being silly with my kids, preferably under the sky, or out in the wild, even if it means late bedtimes. Also, over the years, I’ve learnt how to not only be my now hero, but so too my family’s.
Also, because I normally have about 28 visions for my family by lunchtime alone, I’ve always felt I was the one in the family who had the sense of direction. And yet, as it turns out that these kinds of multiple, cross-pollinating visions can actually work in partnership with a man's single vision!
And yet, what inspired me to learn more about men, was a sense that though I had learned in life how to be a really good man, I was missing something essential about being a woman. And so, I went back to learning…
- “Whoever has learned to listen to treas no longer wants to be a tree. He wants nothing except what he is.” Herman Hesse.
I also want to clarify that whilst the books I’ve been reading have opened my eyes to the depth of men, their history, context, potential..., it’s actually a podcast that’s saving me in real time in my own relationship, -Laura Doyle’s where she interviews women who've healed every conceivable trauma in their relationship's using Laura’s ‘6 Intimacy Skills.’
In my view, there’s currently no one braver on the world stage who’s daring to address the kind of issues and challenges many of us have experienced and felt lost against in our own homes, AND more importantly, is creating results for women worldwide.
My sense is you need to be pretty desperate to be willing to try her work in the first place– it so flies in the face of what we have come to identify as women & also, on a more tender note, because so many of our relationships can feel like a battle ground, and have left many of us feeling sore - women and men - what Laura stands for and asks, can sometimes just feel too much.
Personally, having navigated 4.5 years of being separated from my partner, I came to her work from a sort of Ground Zero of having tried everything else and knowing I want to make this relationship work. I also want to say, I don’t do this alone, and my partner does a phenomenal amount of inner work himself. But every time things are challenging, it’s Laura’s work that helps me shake off my fear and mistrust & open my heart again.
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And also, there’s the motivation that our kids are looking out at this whole mess of the sexes thing and all the passive aggressive anger, and tension and blaming in the home and it doesn’t make them feel so safe; so maybe learning about men, what’s going on for them, why this sense of being adrift... maybe, reaching back into history, (which is where I first went with my reading) maybe, just maybe, it’s worth it...
Because one can’t but read D.H. Lawrence, or explore Wade Davies’s book of those who sought to climb Everest before it was a selfie thing, or learn of Shakleton’s extraordinary odyssey and all he achieved only to return and not to be seen at all, not to intuit what that must have done to him. To his spirit. To his sense of himself.
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Personally, as a result of my reading this last year, I cannot discredit anyone who argues that there's been a systematic and intentional misdirection of the heroic spirit in the heart of man. That over the last 150 years it has been severely misused and misdirected. For as a man dear to me explained: “The patriarchy only worked for a very small section of men Laura. Most, it's used like machines.”
Yet, when you’re a woman who’s used to feeling as if she's carrying everything, and who carries that kind of soul disappointment in men, it’s scary to even explore trusting our men.
And yet Buddha said, “true love is understanding.” And so perhaps, it’s worth it.
So for me the choice is clear: carry on being mistrustful, bitter and angry, and always in charge, but only as a reaction, and subsequently secretly resentful and exhausted. Or learn how to really be a woman, in all her magnificent glory, because i’m finally leaving being man to the men.
So, with much love, I give you ❤️The Ultimate Book List for learning about Men ❤️
Share it with friends. And comment below what’s made a difference to your own life and in your relationship with men.
- Tom, and my beloved dog Bongo -
- The List -
Iron John by Robert Bly
This book taught me about the importance of brotherhood for men. Us women cannot teach men how to be men. They need mentors, elders: all men.
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Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence
This was a partial re-read. It’s the way that Lawrence writes about man’s infatuation with machines which you can’t but read, and think of how enamoured we all are with A.I. and what the impact of that will be. Something prophetic about his words.
Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and The Conquest of Everest, by Wade Davies.
This book broke my heart. It opened my eyes to the emotional legacy of WW1. And really starting seeding how powerful the heroic impulse is in a man and how easy it is to manipulate it, but how essential it is to a man. Read it. Read it. Read it.
The Ship Beneath the Ice: Sunday Times Bestseller - The Gripping Story of Finding Shackleton's Endurance By Mensen Bound. This is a kind of diary account of Bound’s expedition 100 years after Shakleton’s ship Endurance sank to find it, recover it, and learn from it. What touched me most about it was that it’s a written by a man who has managed to fashion a life, in a way an old-fashioned sea-faring adventurer’s life, in search of the ultimate quest. Incredibly moving.
I also read 2 other books about Shakleton’s quest, but embarrassingly despite looking for it online, I can’t remember their names.
Of all men I’ve come across in the books, Shackleton is the one I think of and reflect on the most. That he returned from his quest from the Antartic, and no one, in the middle of WW1, cared a damn about what he and his men had endured, or more importantly what he’d achieved as a leader – not one man died during the quest, (and yet when they returned and joined the “war effort,” I think 3 or 4 of the men were then killed almost instantly on ‘the front.’ If that doesn’t strike you as absurd…
And then back home, Shackleton was left speaking to empty halls and the rest of his life, was marred by this kind of horrendous sense of not having importance. Of his life’s purpose having no value. And you think too of Van Gough, this man painting every day, and everyone but his brother and a few other artists seeing its worth, its value. What would it do to a man to be so unvalued?
If Wade Davies book broke my heart, Shakleton’s story remains with me hauntingly so. Sometimes, the biggest quests of our lives mean so little to others. What Shackleton has taught me is it's up to us to make our own meaning of those quests, and to find a way to weave its lessons and gifts throughout our lives, so that we keep hold of the meaning. I guess, I am saying: Oh Shackleton, I wish you’d believe in yourself more.
(For all those who this subject resonates, today I came across this book, which I'm about to begin, and is about a Norwegian who in 1893 set sail from Norway to reach the North Pole. He was said to be an inspiration for explorers like Shakleton – and even Freud!)
The book is called: Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen
War Is A Racket by General Smedley D. Butler
I skimmed read this. Couldn’t quite get into it. I don’t discount anything he says. Perhaps it’s that I’m already jaded enough that nothing I read here felt like new information!
by Gerry Docherty (Author), James MacGregor (Author)
Don’t worry about being called a conspiracy theorist if you read this - I just see it as plain research for “making my own mind up.”
Whilst, I don’t know yet how accurate the information is, and need to read more of other books to figure that out, (yup, figuring things out can take time), what does resonate as true, is that here you have a depiction of a man: Alfred Milner who’s a version of man at his most cold, calculated and horrendous. Men who have no problem sending other men to their death for their own personal gain. Men who are behind exceptional cruelty.
I haven’t finished this book, but will do when it comes out of storage!
Behind the Mask: Tyson Fury. By Tyson Fury
I fell in love with the Fury’s after watching their Netflix show. I’m writing a novel at the moment which includes a family of Travellersand their values go right to my heart. Personally, the more I learn about the bare knuckle tradition – it seems to hold far more honour then any government induced/back war could ever boast of having.
I’m also curious how men have been shamed over their masculinity. What it is to say no to a mad world. Fury isn’t a perfect man, but I no longer find myself looking for him(!) he is a human one tho. And that, in today’s world, counts for something.
When Fury Takes Over: Life, the Furys and Me by John Fury.
Something very touching about the pain of a father trying his best... but giving everything and honouring the hero in his own son.
Fury: Gloves Off, by Tyson Fury.
This was a flick through for me. Can’t remember too much about it, other then Fury’s wish to encourage others.
Om’s entreaty to men to reclaim their inner wolf, and for women to embrace their “wife archetype” and release the “girlfriend archetype” speaks to me.
I also joined Om’s online group & the course: What Men Want: A Course For Women and had a 1:2:1 coaching session with the great man.
The Way Of The Hermit: My 40 years In The Scottish Wilderness by Ken Smith and Will Millard.
A beautiful book about how willing one man has been to turn away from the madness of the modern world and seek another way. And though it challenges him to his core, there’s a kind of beautiful wisdom that emerges from his soul from this way of living. The acknowledgements that the co-author of the book Will Millard writes, and the words he says about Smith, are also another example of a man’s love for another man, that goes straight to your heart. And is essential for the sense of kin that men need to feel with others.
And for me this is and has been a core lesson about men: how much they need other men, and this idea of the lone warrior being a kind of myth. or maybe it’s true for some, but I don’t know, I’m not a man, but it’s definitely essential and a loss for many who don’t have it.
For just as when women are in their hearts, their bodies, my sense is we’re naturally and instinctively inclusive, there’s a brotherhood that exists for men that’s just as sacred. In fact one of the most beautiful hugs I’ve ever witnessed was between two men. It wasn’t erotic, a hug between friends. On the streets of Glastonbury. I was getting out of my car, and it just went on and on and on, and I took my time, taking it in, because it was so beautiful. So genuine.
Then the other day I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast, and it made me smile the way he described to Tucker Carlson who he was interviewing, this other man who both knew and he was saying how he (Rogan) liked this other guy. “You know, he gives good hugs.” And for a very masculine man like Joe, to affirm another man’s masculinity on account of how genuine his hugs are, that’s exactly it. (for me). The great beauty inherent in a man’s heart.
So, there’s a wisdom in this book that speaks to a place deep within you. It reminds of me of the Eddie Vedder song Society, for the film, Into The Wild based on the book by Jon Krakauer about the young Chris McCandless who left his modern life behind and wandered off to explore living in the wilds of Alaska, where his body was eventually found. Of this calling, this longing to return to what is wild and primal and essential, for me here’s a potential place where we can discover both men and women.
For in all of us, all are eyes that long to drift upwards, to gaze at starlit skies, and bodies that essentially want to sink into each other - with the other we love. But thats, another story 😘
Thank you for reading, and as a special thank you, we have 2 recommendations from my partner Tom, who when I shared the above list, mentioned that he particularly loves the following two books:
He: Understanding Masculine Psycology, by Robert A Johnson.
Transformation: Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness by robert A. Johnson.
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Have you any books you can recommend to me in the comments below?
Do share the list with friends, and invite them to subscribe as well, so we can grow this party of women in homes across the world, enjoying the transformation that happens when we trust the wisdom in our hearts - and then learn to partner it with our man’s.
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