Adam Steiner’s 8 Best Books 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.