Book recommendation - The Denial of Death from Ernest Becker

I´ve been reading "The Denial of Death" from Ernest Becker these last couple of days. It´s actually a very good book. Although it´s not overtly pessimistic, like, say TCAHR from Ligotti, it´s still very close to the genre, being an example of a defeatist, honest literature one hardly gets to find. It´s really worth-checking. I will quote some of it:

"In these ways, then, we understand that if the child were to give in to overpowering character of reality and experience he would not be able to act with the kind of equanimity we need in our non-instinctive world. So one of the first things a child has to do is to learn to "abandon ecstasy", to do without awe, to leave fear trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confindence, when he has naturalized his world. We say "naturalized" but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscure, the despair of the human condition hidden, a despair that the child glimpses in his night terrors and daytime phobias and neuroses. This despair he avoids by building defenses; and these defenses allow him to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaningfulness, of power. They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody - not just a trembling accident germinated on a hothouse planet that Carlyle for all time called a "hall of doom". We called one´s life style a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one´s whole situation. [...] We don´t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives.[...]"

Now, I could quote from any page of it and I´d find as deepest and interesting paragraphs as this one here. Definately recommended if you are looking for some good stuff to read (outside the web, of course). So, there you go. Cheers to one and all.