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Author Adam Steiner’s Essential Reading List for Those Ready to Reinvent Themselves

These books offer not only an escape from the day-to-day grind but also proof that circumstances can change if you’re willing to put in the work.

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........

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