Six books that expand our mental horizons

A native of Seattle and Soldotna, Alaska, Steve Toutonghi studied fiction and poetry while completing a BA in Anthropology at Stanford. After pursuing a variety of interests, he began a career in technology that led him from Silicon Valley back to Seattle. Join is his first novel.

At Tor.com, Toutonghi tagged six top books that expand our mental horizons, including:

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886)

In 1886, chemistry looked like a science at the threshold of fundamental truths. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll uses “scientific discoveries” to concoct a chemical potion that allows his sinful and virtuous impulses to take turns running their shared body. Neither side of his dual identity really learns more than that the whole experiment wasn’t a good idea, but Stevenson’s story is enthralling.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also appears on Irvine Welsh's list of six favorite books that explore human duality, the Huffington Post's list of classic works that are all under 200 pages, Koren Zailckas's top 11 list of favorite evil characters, Stuart Evers's list of the top ten homes in literature, H.M. Castor's top ten list of dark and haunted heroes and heroines and John Mullan's list of ten of the best butlers in literature, and among Yann Martel's six favorite books. It is one of Ali Shaw's top ten transformation stories and Nicholas Frankel's five best pieces of decadent writing from the nineteenth century.

--Marshal Zeringue