This is a review of Colin Wilson’s The Books in My Life, published by Hampton Roads Publishing Company in 1998 and — to my surprise and delight — dedicated to me. I had met Colin three years earlier, on the memorable 17th of March, 1995.
THE BOOKS IN MY LIFE
Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
311 pages, $15.95 USD
It is impossible to classify Colin Wilson as a writer. He has published something like one hundred books in his lifetime – on philosophy, literature, psychology, criminology, and the occult, primarily. Oh, yes, and there are a couple of dozen novels.
The one thing I can say about him with definite certainty is that, paradoxically to his output, hardly anyone reads him. I’ve met a few people who have heard of his first book, The Outsider, which catapulted him to a brief period of fame in 1956 at the age of 24. Until the critics took a dislike to this youthful upstart, that is. A few have heard of him as a writer on crime or mysticism. Fewer have actually read him.
Wilson has persevered, however, because he is one of those rare writers who writes out of a sheer enthusiasm for ideas. And despite the enormous range of topics he has written about, his entire body of work is unified by a group of themes, all pertaining to the present and future of consciousness and its role in society. This latest book is no exception. Continue reading A Review of Wilson’s “The Books in my Life”