What to Read When Smoking Weed

Spring is for recreation—of all kinds.

By Becca Trabin
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Mar. 24, 2009

It’s springtime and the world is blossoming. What better way to celebrate the renewal of life than with some fresh greens and some mind expansion? Here’s a list of books that have been known to maximize the feeling of getting jazzed. (Since it can be tricky to read while stoned, this author recommends tackling denser material prior to smoking and then revisiting the book after lighting up.)

KEY:
C- Cerebral
EM- Embracing Mankind
I- Investigative
R- Radical
HB- Heady Business

Of course, weed isn’t for everybody. If you’re not into drugs, you can get high off the following books right after a long run, a Turkish coffee, a great yoga session or whatever gets you lifted.

 

 

Handwriting Analysis as a Psychodiagnostic Tool by Ulrich Sonnemann

Although many psychologists dismiss graphology, or handwriting analysis, as a bullshit pseudoscience, in 1950 Sonnemann wrote an extensive catalogue of the subject that raises good questions. He abstracts the practice of writing words to such a high degree and with such delicacy that you’ll feel like you’re reading Freud: Dude probably got shit way wrong, but he was onto something. Who will come along and better interpret the “realm of inner experience within which the projector orients himself in unconscious symbolic analogy to his orientation in space”? Toke up and see what can be seen. C I 

 

 

The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts

As awesome as it is to thrash around at rock shows, sometimes when you’re stoned you just want to chill on your couch with classic jazz—the body-high professional stoners call couchlock. Reading Alan Watts’ discussion of the nature of religion and Eastern philosophy is like hearing Louis Armstrong riffing on whatever’s flowing through his being at the moment. It’s smooth, peaceful and a little bit genius as it sails through the vibrating nature of the universe. EM R HB

 

 

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris

Plenty of scholarship is devoted to using big words to complain about man’s alienation from himself and his world. While these books are important, The Naked Ape goes ahead and makes you feel like an authentic, newly evolved animal. Best experienced while surrounded by nature—Fairmount Park counts, Rittenhouse Square doesn’t—this explanation of human evolution is delightfully peppered with speculations for stoners to ponder, like why female homo sapiens have much larger breasts than our closest female ancestors. (Spoiler alert: Our asses starting growing in the front so that sex would be face-to-face.) EM HB

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