Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest | 1994 | Daniel Quinn | Buy |
| 2 | A Newcomer’s Guide to the Afterlife | 1997 | Daniel Quinn | Buy |
| 3 | If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways. | 2007 | Daniel Quinn | Buy |
Providence (1994) is the most personal of Quinn’s non-fiction books. Structured as a conversation between Quinn and one of his readers, it recounts his fifty-year search for meaning. The journey took him from a Trappist monastery, where he studied under the theologian Thomas Merton, through careers in publishing, a divorce, and eventually to the set of ideas about civilization and humanity that he would put into Ishmael. Along the way, the book covers religion, education, psychology, and what Quinn called his rejection of organized faith in favor of something older.
A Newcomer’s Guide to the Afterlife (1997), co-written with Tom Whalen, is a very different kind of book. Presented as a handbook for the recently deceased, it reads as part fiction, part allegory, part deadpan comedy. If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (2007) is built around a lightly edited transcript of a three-day conversation between Quinn and a reader who visited his Houston home over Thanksgiving weekend in 2005. The book focuses less on Quinn’s specific ideas and more on how to think critically, and it includes two previously unpublished essays, “The New Renaissance” and “Our Religions.”