Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books on Spirituality and Connecting with Humanity
I have complicated feelings about the word spiritual. It has been claimed by too many candles, too many retreats, too many books that promise to awaken you in thirty days. But when I look at the books that have changed me most — the ones that made me feel genuinely less strange for being human — they are all, in some sense, spiritual. Not because they talk about God or consciousness or the cosmos. Because they talk about what it costs to be alive, and how that cost is not yours alone. That, I think, is what connecting with humanity actually means. Not a feeling of universal love. A recognition: other people carry this too. These five books gave me that.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
Memoir · Psychology
Man’s Search for Meaning On my shelf
Frankl survived Auschwitz. This is what he noticed while doing it: that the prisoners who held on longest were not the strongest. They were the ones who still had a why. A person to return to. A work to finish. The book is short. It takes an afternoon. It stays considerably longer.
This is the book I come back to most. Not because it comforts — it doesn’t. But because it shows, from inside the worst conditions humans have created, that the search for meaning is not a luxury. It is how we survive. And it is not yours alone. Every person in that camp was conducting the same search. So, probably, are you.
Oral History · Nonfiction
Working On my shelf
Studs Terkel spent years recording ordinary Americans talking about their jobs. Gravediggers. Waitresses. Copy editors. What came back was not a book about work. It was a book about what people need in order to feel like their days mean something.
This is the most quietly spiritual book I know — because it does what spirituality is actually supposed to do: it erases the distance between you and other people. Not by telling you to feel connected. By showing you what is happening inside them. After this book, the person at the checkout counter looks different. That shift doesn’t wear off.
Psychology · Science
The Body Keeps the Score On my shelf
Van der Kolk spent decades working with people whose minds had survived things their bodies could not forget. This book explains how trauma lives in the nervous system — in posture, in the reflex that fires before you know why. It is clinical. It reads like a reckoning.
The reason this belongs on this list is not what you’d expect. It reframes everyone around you. That colleague who overreacts. That friend who disappears. That parent who could never quite be present. Van der Kolk changes the question you ask about people: not what is wrong with you — but what happened to you. That is a different question. It leads somewhere different.
Read my full recommendation →
Memoir
The Choice On my shelf
Edith Eger was sixteen when she arrived at Auschwitz. She survived. Decades later, she became a psychologist and wrote this — part memoir, part case studies, part meditation on what it means to choose who you are when everything outside you has been taken away.
Eger and Frankl survived the same camps and arrived, decades later, at almost the same conclusion from completely different directions. That convergence is not a coincidence. The line of hers I return to most: the biggest prison is in your own mind. Not because suffering is a choice — it isn’t. But because the story you tell about it is.
Read my full recommendation →
Medicine · Psychology
When the Body Says No On my shelf
Maté spent years watching patients develop serious illness and noticing something medicine preferred not to discuss: that the emotional life leaves marks on the body. This is not alternative medicine. It is a documented account of what happens when people spend decades not saying what they need.
This book changed the way I look at illness — my own and other people’s. Maté argues that we are not minds with bodies attached. We are bodies that think. Everything we suppress is stored somewhere. Your symptoms are trying to tell you something. So, probably, are everyone else’s.
Not sure where to start?
If you want a book that changes how you see suffering — yours and everyone else’s
→ Start with Man’s Search for Meaning. It is the shortest book on this list and the one I return to most.
If you want to understand why the people around you behave the way they do
→ Read The Body Keeps the Score. Van der Kolk will change the question you ask. You will stop asking what is wrong with people and start asking what happened to them. That shift is not small.
If you want to hear the full texture of what it’s like to be someone else
→ Read Working. No other book on this list will make strangers look less strange.
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From the bookshelf
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” — Viktor Frankl
If this list resonated with you, you'll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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