Books That Explore What It Means to Be Human

(Or Not)

“Being human always points—and is directed—
to something or someone other than oneself.”
~Viktor Frankl

Years ago, a friend and I were led to ponder just what exactly it takes to be considered human: is it what we remember—the very fact that we can create and retrieve memories? Is it intelligence? emotion? cognition? speech? empathy? desire? vulnerability? mortality?

Is our essential humanity therefore necessarily diminished or destroyed if we lose the ability to speak or remember or understand?

In different ways, all the books on this list ponder those questions, and suggest provocative possible answers. We put the first iteration of this list together nearly thirty years ago, to help us negotiate a difficult time; we still add to it occasionally. (Thank you, Cindy, for being the better half of our book club of two.)

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a stunning novel, morally incisive, slowly revealing the horror that underlies a tranquil and apparently wholesome boarding school in the English countryside, where “special” children are carefully raised and fed and educated, isolated from the outside world and constantly told just how “special” they are. Without spoilers it’s hard to describe the plot: but even without the final reveal, it’s a devastating critique of how we deliberately deceive, exploit, demean, and ultimately destroy the vulnerable and innocent among us. Read the book before you see the movie (and then decide which of the characters are truly human and humane and which are not).

In The Condition by Jennifer Haigh, we meet the gifted and troubled McKotch family, who “always summer on the Cape.” Daughter Gwen (“small for her age”) suffers from Turner’s Syndrome, a rare and random genetic disorder that affects certain women, trapping them forever in the body of a child. The family is enmeshed in a tightening web of denial and anger, secrets and lies, the idolatry of the “normal,” the perilous traps of privilege and wealth. Slowly we realize that the heart of the problem is not Gwen’s medical condition at all, but the flawed human condition they (and we) all share.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick’s remarkable dystopian science fiction novella (on which Ridley Scott’s film Bladerunner was based) is chillingly prescient: published in 1968, set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco in 2021; androids are invading the planet with deadly intent. They are so cleverly made, and so brilliantly programmed with artificial intelligence and memory that they are almost indistinguishable from humans. Bounty hunters are sent to destroy the androids, but are their orders to “turn off” and “retire” the androids the moral equivalent of murder? What does it mean to be alive? What does it, at the end of the brutal day, mean to be human if we have no compassion?

The Wolf Hunt by Gillian Bradshaw is based on a 12th century poem written by Marie de France, a Breton folktale about a noble knight who has a dark secret: he is a werewolf, who longs for his wild life when he is in his human form, and takes every opportunity to change into a wolf. A rival betrays him, taking away the charm that allows the shapeshifter to reassume his human form. Trapped in his wolf nature, struggling to understand human speech and intention, he becomes the object of a cruel hunt and has to use his animal cunning as well as remnants of his dimly-remembered human past to escape. Part medieval romance set in the time of the Crusades, with knights and ladies and nuns and court intrigue, part historical fiction (by one of its finest practitioners), part fairy tale, part morality play, this remarkable work respects the wild side of all our natures, honors the good, punishes the wicked, and is a wholly satisfying read.

What Alice Forgot by the talented Australian novelist Liane Moriarty could also be categorized with books on dementia and Alzheimer’s on my list of books that enlarge the world, since Alice wakes up one day to realize she has lost ten years of her life, and her old self; she has actually forgotten a whole crucial decade with all its bitter losses and gains. Nonetheless it’s a solid entry in this category as it deals so winsomely with themes of identity and memory and forgiveness, what we choose to remember and struggle to forget. Funny and sweet and sharply observed and sad all at the same time. 

The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller are both ambitious reimaginings of ancient myth. Song of Achilles tells of Patroclus, an awkward young prince exiled to the kingdom of King Peleus where he meets the perfect prince Achilles—beautiful, brave, and strong, everything Patroclus is not. Achilles’ mother is the heartless sea goddess Thetis, who loathes all humans; her son takes after her a bit. The boys grow up together, forging an improbably strong bond; both end up with parts to play in the Trojan War. We come to see that Achilles’ half-human/half-god nature makes him less, not more, than human: his incapacity to feel mercy or sorrow has tragic consequences for them all. Patroclus, weak and mortal, is the real hero here. In Circe, Miller’s more recent and (to my mind) even better novel, Circe is pureblood goddess, but she’s also exiled and alone. We know her story from Ulysses’ point of view in Homer’s epic poem, but this retelling gives us her own much larger story. In her exile on her desert island she learns to honor human life and love, and chooses eventually to relinquish her immortality among the heartless gods for the chance to live and die as one of us. A lovely ode to the precious gift of being fully alive and fully human.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz is both witty and erudite, using science, history and philosophy to build on Augustine’s premise that fallor ergo sum: I err, therefore I am. Cheerfully the author asserts that to err is not only human, but essentially human: to be wrong is “our native condition.” This is not a tragedy but an adventure, one that can teach us a great deal; being wrong is in fact how we learn. “Being wrong is hard and humbling,” she writes, “and is sometimes even dangerous, but in the end it’s a journey and a story.” A story worth telling, she is happily confident, and one that makes us better human beings.

Dementia: Living in the Memories of God by John Swinton is perhaps an odd addition to this list, but the author’s exploration of dementia from a theological perspective deals profoundly with the question of what it means to be human: it is not, he insists, fundamentally a matter of cognition and memory—so that, as secular/medical models imply, those who lose memory or cognitive function cease to be fully human. To be human, Swinton insists, does not mean to know or to remember but to be dependent, embodied, wounded, related to others, and beloved. Even if we forget who we are, and forget God, God does not forget us: each of us is held tightly in the memories of God (Isaiah 49 15,16). As the Orthodox priest Kallistos Ware has suggested, the real heart of our humanity is not that we think, or feel, or remember, or even that we love, but that we are loved.

Literary Recommendations for All Sorts of Times and States of Mind