What a Librarian is Reading in Times of Moral Nausea and Psychological Despair
A reading list for when more information makes things worse.
With the news and the state of the world being what it is, and horror upon horror revealing itself almost hourly, I’ve been struggling to process what I’m learning and find any solid ground beneath my feet. This isn’t crisis in the sense we’ve known it. This is something else entirely: a catastrophic undoing of what we thought we knew was true, coupled with the sickening revelation of true monstrosity.
This is the collision of three unbearable things at once. First, institutional betrayal: watching systems that should protect the vulnerable reveal themselves as mechanisms for protecting power instead. Second, collective sorrow: the crushing weight of bearing witness to immense human suffering and to the magnitude of pain inflicted and endured. The grief is for those who suffered, for the scope of what was done, for the reality that this level of cruelty existed and was allowed to continue. Third, confrontation with depravity: unfathomable horrors that many of us couldn’t even begin to imagine, and seeing evidence that what was outside the realm of possibility is, in fact, very real.
In this disorienting state of horror and moral nausea, I did what I always do when I don't know what else to do: I turned to books. Books have always been my solace and my guide. When the world makes sense, they deepen my understanding. When it doesn’t, they offer frameworks for continuing anyway. Right now, the problem isn’t lack of information. (If anything, we’re drowning in it.) The problem is absorbing it, integrating it into a worldview that can’t quite accommodate what it means. How do you process information that collapses your baseline assumptions about what’s possible? How do you continue when the revelation isn’t that the system is broken, but that it’s working exactly as designed to protect certain people at any cost?
Instead of accumulating more information, what I need are practices for holding unbearable knowledge without being destroyed by it. Not explanations for what happened but frameworks for staying present with revelations that shatter our assumptions about the world as we knew it.
Information literacy teaches us how to evaluate sources, how to distinguish good information from bad, and how to think critically about what we’re reading. But there’s a kind of information literacy rarely taught: how to process information that fundamentally breaks you. There’s no framework for this particular crisis of meaning. There’s no protocol for “everything you believed was a story they told you.”
So this is a reading list assembled for that purpose. These aren’t books that tell us everything is okay, but texts that might help us figure out how to keep moving forward while knowing it’s not. A curriculum for what comes after the ground gives way.
Note: Each book title below links directly to a free PDF where I could find one. For titles without freely available versions or still under copyright, I’ve linked to Bookshop.org which supports independent bookstores with every purchase. Your local library likely has many of these available as well, both as physical copies and ebooks. If you can afford to purchase books, Bookshop.org ensures your money supports independent booksellers rather than larger retailers. Cost shouldn’t be a barrier to accessing what might help right now, so I’ve tried to make as many paths available as possible.
The Cloud of Unknowing (Anonymous, 14th century)
What it is:
A medieval contemplative text written by an anonymous English mystic, offering guidance on approaching divine truth through a practice of learned unknowing. The work instructs readers to place all thoughts and concepts beneath them in a “cloud of forgetting” while reaching upward toward what cannot be grasped by intellect alone. Written as a manual for spiritual contemplation, it emerges from a Christian mystical tradition but speaks to anyone confronting the limits of rational understanding. The text is brief, direct, and surprisingly accessible despite its age.
What it offers:
Permission to stop trying to understand what resists understanding. When thoughts about injustice demand to be comprehended, when your mind runs the same loops asking how this could happen, this text offers an alternative to the endless search for the answer that will make it make sense. It names the experience of hitting the wall where thinking can take you no further and suggests sitting in that space rather than fighting it. The Cloud offers a way to be with what cannot be understood without turning to information addiction, the compulsive refreshing of news sites, or the hunt for one more detail that might finally bring clarity.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
What it is:
The first half is Viktor Frankl’s memoir of surviving Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, written with the keen observational eye of a psychiatrist. The second half introduces logotherapy, his therapeutic framework built on the conviction that the search for meaning is the primary human drive. Frankl observed that prisoners who survived weren’t necessarily the strongest or most optimistic but those who maintained a sense of purpose that existed independent of their circumstances. The book is short and written with remarkable clarity about the most extreme human experiences.
What it offers:
A framework for creating meaning from bearing witness when everything else has been stripped away. Logotherapy asks a different question than we usually ask ourselves: instead of “what do I want from life,” it asks “what does life want from me right now?” The answer might be: to not become numb, to remember, to refuse to normalize what’s happening. That becomes enough. The act of witnessing itself, of maintaining moral clarity in the face of systematic betrayal, becomes meaningful even when it changes nothing about outcomes or justice or consequences for perpetrators.
Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
What it is:
A philosophical meditation disguised as a game theory text, written in brief numbered sections that build a radical framework for understanding human activity. Carse distinguishes between finite games, played to win with fixed rules and clear endpoints, and infinite games, played to continue play with evolving rules and no winners. The book runs just over 100 pages but reframes everything: relationships, politics, culture, conflict, meaning itself. Written in 1986, it reads like it was written for this moment.
What it offers:
A complete reframing of what winning and losing even mean. Power structures need you to believe you’re in a finite game that’s already over: they won, we lost, the bad guys got away with it, game over. Recognizing this as an infinite game changes everything. The goal stops being “win against networks of institutional corruption” and becomes “keep the game going.” Keep demanding transparency, keep naming names, keep refusing amnesia, keep the story alive. Institutions design their responses as finite games with clear endpoints, but survivors, journalists, and citizens keep saying “we’re still playing.” Every revelation, every investigation launched by someone who refuses the official narrative, every person who won’t move on represents an infinite game move.
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
What it is:
Poet Ross Gay committed to writing one short essay every day for a year about something that delighted him. He wrote them during 2016 and 2017, through election trauma and personal loss and his mother’s illness and the ongoing violence of racism in America. Each essay runs one to three pages, readable in five minutes. The delight exists alongside the horror and never denies it: he writes about police brutality and also about the way strangers help each other in grocery stores, about death and also about the taste of a perfect peach, about systemic oppression and also about the gardens people tend in abandoned lots.
What it offers:
A model for dual consciousness, for holding children are being harmed AND there are tomatoes growing in the neighbor’s yard as equally true and simultaneously present. Our nervous systems cannot sustain constant moral outrage without shutting down, going numb, dissociating. Gay shows what it looks like to let delight be small and fleeting and true because we are human animals who need beauty to survive horror. Each essay is a practice in noticing what’s worth noticing even when, especially when, the world is on fire. Permission to be a whole person in terrible times.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
What it is:
A botanist who is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation weaves together Indigenous wisdom, plant science, and personal narrative into a meditation on reciprocity between humans and the living world. Kimmerer describes her dual education: PhD training that taught her to study plants as objects, and traditional knowledge passed down through generations that taught her plants as teachers. The book moves between memoir, natural history, and philosophy, exploring what it means to be in relationship with the earth rather than standing apart from it. Each essay circles questions of giving and receiving, of what we owe to the world that sustains us, of how to live as if the earth were not a resource but a relative.
What it offers:
A complete reframing of witness and response through the concept of the “honorable harvest”: taking only what you need, taking only what is given, using everything you take, giving thanks, giving something in return. When institutions have harvested without honor, when taking has been extractive and exploitative, this offers an alternative grammar. The book provides Indigenous frameworks for understanding reciprocity, gratitude, and repair that don’t depend on Western legal or religious structures. Kimmerer writes about restoration ecology, about how damaged systems can heal when treated with respect rather than domination. She offers practices: learning the names of plants where you live, practicing gratitude as daily discipline, and understanding yourself as part of an ecosystem rather than outside it. When moral nausea comes from witnessing desecration, Braiding Sweetgrass offers a way to practice sacred attention to what remains.
Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore
What it is:
A sustained argument against the modern obsession with fixing, optimizing, and solving everything, written by a former monk turned psychotherapist. Moore draws on Renaissance philosophy, depth psychology, and contemplative traditions to argue that the soul has needs contemporary life systematically ignores. The book distinguishes between cure, which aims to eliminate symptoms and return you to normal, and care, which honors what the soul is trying to tell you through difficulty. Written in accessible prose that weaves together mythology, art, and clinical experience.
What it offers:
Recognition that moral nausea isn’t a symptom to manage but the soul correctly identifying poison. Moore reframes the work: instead of trying to feel better, try to feel more accurately. Tend to the nausea like it’s sacred information. Sit with images that match your inner state. Create private rituals that honor grief. Stop trying to be productive with pain. Let melancholy be melancholy rather than depression to fix. When everyone tells you to process this so you can move on, Moore says some things change us permanently and the work is making a soul-home that can hold the changed version of who we’re becoming.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
What it is:
A psychotherapist’s synthesis of decades studying how different cultures approach grief and mourning. Weller identifies five gates of grief, each representing a different source of sorrow, and argues that modern Western culture has systematically dismantled the communal containers that make grief bearable. The book weaves together psychology, anthropology, poetry, and ritual practice. Weller draws on Indigenous wisdom traditions, African mourning practices, and his own experience leading grief circles to build a case that we’ve forgotten how to grieve together and are suffering for it.
What it offers:
The framework that what we’re feeling is grief, not just anger, and permission to treat it as such. People have been betrayed, children were harmed, systems protected harmers: that’s loss. Weller describes creating grief altars, physical spaces to feel what needs feeling and then leave it contained rather than carrying it everywhere. He describes grief tending circles where people witness each other’s sorrow. The book names the sorrows of the world as one of five gates and says this kind of grief needs communal ritual because you cannot metabolize systemic evil alone in your living room. We’re allowed to grieve institutional betrayal like a death.
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön
What it is:
An American Buddhist nun draws on Tibetan teachings to write a manual for staying present when everything is going wrong. Chödrön doesn’t offer techniques for making things better or strategies for fixing what’s broken. She offers something harder: instructions for not running away. Each chapter examines a different aspect of groundlessness (the experience of having nothing solid to stand on) and treats it not as a problem to solve, but as the actual path. The book is short and structured as brief teachings that circle back to the same insight from different angles: your resistance to what’s happening causes more suffering than what’s happening.
What it offers:
Permission to stop trying to make it make sense. The teachings name what happens when you keep hitting refresh on news sites, searching for the detail that will finally let you understand: you’re trying to get ground under your feet, trying to find a stable place to stand. Chödrön says there isn’t one. The ground was never solid; you just didn’t notice until now. She offers practices for staying with the raw feeling without needing it to resolve into meaning. This isn’t about achieving peace or acceptance. It’s about developing the capacity to be where you are without needing the story to have an ending you can live with. When institutions have betrayed trust and justice feels impossible, the work becomes being able to stay present for what’s true without requiring it to be bearable.
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
What it is:
An exploration of human behavior in disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake through Hurricane Katrina, built on meticulous research into how people actually respond when normal social structures collapse. Solnit documents pattern after pattern: in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, people don’t panic or loot but become spontaneously generous, cooperative, and purposeful. Strangers organize rescue efforts, share food and shelter, create new communities based on mutual aid. Then she documents what happens next: elites panic at this organic cooperation and send in troops to restore control. The book asks why authorities fear disaster communities more than the disasters themselves.
What it offers:
Evidence of what’s already happening in the margins right now. Survivors supporting each other, people from opposing political perspectives working together on accountability, ordinary people doing analysis official channels won’t touch. The book documents that people are already organizing, already demanding truth, already supporting survivors without waiting for institutional permission. This shifts attention from “the system failed,” which creates paralysis, to “people are responding anyway,” which opens possibility. The insight centers not on whether institutions will save us but on recognizing we don’t need them to because mutual aid emerges organically when structures collapse.
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
What it is:
A meticulously documented history of how economic and political elites exploit disasters to push through unpopular policies while populations are traumatized and disoriented. Klein traces the pattern from CIA-funded experiments in psychological torture through Chile’s coup, from the fall of the Soviet Union through Hurricane Katrina, showing how crisis becomes opportunity for those positioned to take advantage. The book names the pattern: disaster strikes, people are in shock, elites act fast while resistance is fragmented, radical changes get presented as emergency measures, and by the time people recover enough to organize opposition, the changes are already locked in place.
What it offers:
The tools to recognize manipulation while it’s happening rather than years later. Klein argues that awareness functions as the first line of defense because once you can see the pattern, you can name it, and naming it weakens its power. Heavy redactions, claims about missing documentation, victims exposed while perpetrators stay hidden: these stop looking like accidents or incompetence and reveal themselves as the pattern playing out. The book converts helpless rage into pattern recognition: we are being manipulated. Recognizing that truth becomes more bearable than believing we’re watching chaos, and understanding the pattern creates the possibility of resistance.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
What it is:
Twenty brief lessons distilled from the history of authoritarianism in Europe between the World Wars and after, each running two to three pages with historical examples and applications to contemporary moments. Snyder is a historian of the Holocaust and Soviet terror who wrote this after the 2016 election as a practical guide rather than a theoretical analysis. Each lesson offers concrete actions: defend institutions, beware paramilitaries, believe in truth, investigate, make eye contact and small talk, stand out, contribute to good causes, learn from peers in other countries, listen for dangerous words, be calm when the unthinkable arrives, be as courageous as you can.
What it offers:
Something concrete to do when abstract horror threatens to create paralysis. The lessons aren’t grand gestures but daily practices: don’t normalize the abnormal, don’t let them gaslight you about what you’re seeing, do your own research and trust your own eyes, remember that small acts of resistance compound. Tyranny succeeds through citizens’ small acts of compliance, which means resistance is also made of small acts. Refusing to look away becomes a lesson. Checking primary sources instead of trusting official narratives becomes a lesson. These practices maintain integrity when systems fail, offering a playbook for how to be during institutional collapse.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius & Enchiridion by Epictetus
What it is:
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor writing private notes to himself between military campaigns, during plague outbreaks, while managing political corruption and the slow decline of empire. The Meditations weren’t meant for publication but survived as a record of how one person tried to maintain his soul while everything around him fell apart. Epictetus was born a slave, gained his freedom, and became a Stoic teacher whose lectures were recorded by his students. The Enchiridion (meaning “handbook”) distills his teachings into a manual for living. Both texts circle the same questions: what can you control, what must you accept, how do you maintain integrity when systems fail.
What it offers:
A distinction between what lies within your control and what doesn’t, which sounds simple until you start applying it. Crimes committed? Outside your control. Institutional responses? Outside your control. Your refusal to normalize what’s happening? Yours. Your choice to remember names of those harmed? Yours. Whether you become cynical? Yours. Marcus Aurelius writes that if you’re distressed by anything external, the pain comes from your judgment about it rather than the thing itself, and you can revoke that judgment. The Stoics show us how to keep breathing when nothing is fine by focusing energy on the small sphere of what we can actually influence: our own responses, our own truthfulness, our own choices about who to be.
The Plague by Albert Camus
What it is:
A novel set during a plague outbreak in the Algerian city of Oran, following Dr. Rieux as he treats patients knowing most will die. Camus wrote it as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France, but it reads as a meditation on how to live during any overwhelming evil. The plague cannot be cured or stopped, only endured and resisted. Rieux becomes a doctor in the plague not because he believes in God or justice or ultimate meaning, but because not fighting it would make him complicit. When someone asks why he keeps going, he says he doesn’t know, but it’s the natural thing to do. The novel tracks what happens to different people when catastrophe reveals who they are.
What it offers:
A model for showing up anyway when the world has no inherent meaning and justice isn’t guaranteed. Rieux cannot stop the plague but refuses to be on its side. He fights because not fighting would mean becoming something he can’t live with. We cannot prosecute networks of institutional corruption, cannot force accountability, cannot undo what’s been done. We can refuse to look away, keep saying names, support survivors. The alternative is becoming part of the plague. Camus offers an answer to absurdity: you treat the sick anyway, you fight anyway, you show up anyway. Not because you’ll win but because it’s the natural thing to do, and because fighting is how you remain human.
How to Approach This Reading List
These books represent a curriculum being assembled for a particular kind of crisis: the one where more information makes things worse, where understanding deepens despair rather than relieving it, and where what’s needed isn’t knowledge but a way to continue.
If you’re stuck in the information loop: start with Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart. She names what happens when you keep refreshing news sites looking for the detail that will make it make sense, and offers instructions for stopping.
If you need immediate first aid: Weller’s Wild Edge of Sorrow. Permission to grieve, and acknowledgment that you can’t do it alone.
If you need concrete actions: Snyder’s On Tyranny. Twenty lessons, each 2-3 pages. Things to do that don’t require fixing entire systems.
If you need a different framework entirely: Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. One hundred pages that completely reframe what “winning” or “losing” even means.
If you need a different cosmology: Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous frameworks for reciprocity, witness, and repair that don’t depend on Western structures.
If you need daily practice: Gay’s The Book of Delights. One essay a day. Permission to notice beauty without denying horror.
If you’re ready for long-term work: the Stoics (Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus). These aren’t first aid but a practice you return to over years.
These books offer different frameworks for continuing when you want to give up, and for staying present when numbness feels safer. Each one approaches this work differently, drawing on different traditions and offering different practices. The list functions as a set of resources: what you reach for will depend on where you are and what you need.
When Information Itself Becomes the Crisis
What do you do when the problem isn’t misinformation, but accurate information that shatters everything you thought possible? When you have to expand your conception of what humans are capable of doing to each other, what systems are capable of enabling, what societies are capable of tolerating? When the facts themselves demand that you build a larger, darker, more complex model of how power operates and who it serves?
These books don’t answer that question; they can’t. But they do offer ways to live inside the question without being consumed by it. They model how others have metabolized unbearable knowledge and continued. They provide practices for days when continuing feels impossible. They remind us that we’re not the first people to discover the world is not what we thought, and we won’t be the last. They model what becomes possible when you stop asking “how do I unknow this” and start asking “who do I want to be now that I know.”
Some things change us permanently. These books are companions for that transformation. They’re maps drawn by those who traveled this territory before us and discovered that continuing mattered more than understanding, that staying present had value even without resolution. They’re proof that others have stood where you’re standing and found ways forward, too.
On a personal note, I’ve started rewatching the Lord of the Rings extended editions (which is apparently how my body wants to process spiritual distress), and there’s a moment where Gandalf said something that really clicked a missing piece in place for me:
Because yes, the depravity is real and documented and the systems are working exactly as designed. And also, critically also, there are other forces at work. I'm choosing to work for and towards those other forces, to align myself with whatever in this world resists darkness. That's what this reading list is for: learning how to do that work even when, especially when, it feels like darkness is winning.
What are you reading to get through this? I'm building this list as I go, and I'd love to know what's offering the kind of counsel that helps you continue when continuing feels impossible. Drop titles in the comments if you’d like to share. Let's build a reading list together for those of us trying to hold more than we thought we could hold.
You had me at moral nausea. Awesome list with two or three titles that have been previously suggested. So, I'm taking it as inspiration and enticement to pick up a copy of Carse, Solnit, and Gay.
Thank you for this list. I read Viktor Frankl in medical school and 30 years of psychiatric practice affirmed for me his ideas, and I often used his work explicitly with my patients.
One other aspect that I feel needs to be explicit: the role of community in maintaining sanity and providing healing. We saw this I think in Minnesota. Communities like families, are found rather than dictated. Isolation leads to madness.