The Best Books for the Psychedelic-Curious

Your literary psychedelic trip begins here.

We’ve already discussed how psychedelics have had a significant impact on culture, from Native American chants to the Beatles to Kacey Musgraves, from The Monkees to Sesame Street, from Easy Rider to Knocked Up. As they go more mainstream, and studies showing their therapeutic qualities push more states toward legalization, it’s worth understanding their inner workings as well as their impact, whether you’re interested in partaking or not. Books are the perfect way to do that.

Here are a few I recommend to get started on your own literary psychedelic trip:

The Art of Solitude

Buddhist author Stephen Batchelor shares vignettes from his own experiences of solitude, as well as thoughts on being alone from Montaigne and Buddhist philosophy. What’s interesting is that Batchelor doesn’t consider solitude literally; his solitude is often in the company of others, whether at a Buddhist meditation retreat or, quite frequently, while practicing with psychedelics. Solitude, for him, is about turning inward, not about who’s in the room. Through several accounts of using psychedelics for spiritual growth, he underlines the fact that this work is always, at its core, individual, but that we can reach out to others for comfort, support, and community. We’re always alone, but we can still often be together.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe’s rollicking, funny, reported account from within Ken Kesey’s band of “Merry Pranksters,” a group with a quasi-religious dedication to doing LSD and spreading the good word about it, helped to define what people thought about the 1960s hippie movement at the time, and how it would be remembered. As I’ve written here before, in this 1968 masterpiece of New Journalism, Wolfe rides along with Kesey (a successful novelist who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and his acolytes in a multicolored bus called Furthur, traveling the country and interacting with the likes of the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg, and the Hells Angels. Wolfe manages to take Kesey’s mission seriously while still illuminating the humor and silliness of many of the characters and situations.

How to Change Your Mind

Michael Pollan covers much of psychedelic history in this 2018 bestseller, which is widely credited for helping to bring psychedelic practice back into the mainstream, this time as a practical, scientifically backed solution to mental health problems. In it, he traces psychedelics’ roots with indigenous cultures, their pop culture heyday first as a potential panacea and then as a hippie scourge in the 1960s, to their resurgence as a great (and widely studied) hope for the future. Crucially, Pollan also methodically tries several of the substances himself and shares his own experiences with them, helping the masses to understand exactly what a trip might be like and making it feel safer to try for the average reader. Pollan told me in an interview that he’s seen even more willing acceptance of psychedelics’ potential than he anticipated, because, he postulates, “we’re desperate … we have a mental health crisis, and the tools we have to deal with it are just failing us, the pharmaceutical tools. So there's an openness on the part of psychiatry to psychedelics that I don't think you would see otherwise. I thought there'd be a lot of mainstream resistance to psychedelics, and I did not encounter that at all. I mean, people were just like ‘no, bring it on, we need some new tools.’”

A Really Good Day

Ayelet Waldman makes the modern psychedelic movement even more personal in her 2017 memoir of microdosing LSD to combat a long-standing mood disorder. Because Waldman is a well-known writer (who’s also married to a well-known writer, Michael Chabon), her willingness to share both her struggle and the technically illegal solution is significant. Her account is funny, vulnerable, and accessible.