Maria Popova's Reading List
Writer and creator of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings); publishes annual "Favorite Books of the Year" round-ups.
Open in WellRead Daily app →Maria Popova — Favorite Books of 2024 (2024)
Annual year-end favorites from The Marginalian.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Marie Howe · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of poems, exploring themes of love, loss, and the sacred in the everyday, fits Maria Popova's interest in profound, life-affirming literature. It aligns with her work on finding meaning and beauty in human experience."
Jarod K. Anderson · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of nature's intricate connections and the human search for meaning fits Maria Popova's interest in philosophy, science, and the enduring wisdom found in the natural world. It aligns with her work on finding wonder and interconnectedness in everyday life."
Icinori · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This graphic novel's exploration of childhood wonder and the interconnectedness of life aligns with Maria Popova's enduring interest in the wisdom of children and the beauty of the everyday. It fits within her ongoing curation of works that illuminate the human spirit."
Oliver Sacks · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of letters by a beloved neurologist and writer fits Maria Popova's interest in the intersection of science, humanity, and the profound inner lives of thinkers and creators. It aligns with her ongoing exploration of consciousness, empathy, and the art of living deliberately."
Ruth Allen · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of nature's resilience and human connection fits Maria Popova's interest in the enduring wisdom found in the natural world and the interconnectedness of life. It aligns with her work on finding meaning and beauty in the everyday."
Rhaina Cohen · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of non-traditional relationships and chosen families fits Maria Popova's interest in the evolving nature of human connection and the wisdom found in diverse life structures. It aligns with her work on the richness of human experience beyond conventional narratives."
David Whyte · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of essays on the nature of grief and the courage to face difficult truths fits Maria Popova's interest in contemplative wisdom and the human condition. It aligns with her work on finding meaning and resilience through profound reflection."
Adam Moss · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the creative process and the artist's journey aligns with Maria Popova's enduring interest in the inner lives of creators and the nature of meaningful work. It fits within her long-standing exploration of how art shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world."
Lyndsey Stonebridge · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of radical hope and the power of ideas to reshape society fits Maria Popova's interest in intellectual history and enduring humanistic thought. It aligns with her work on how literature and philosophy can offer pathways to a more meaningful existence."
Rachel Carson and Nikki McClure · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the natural world and human connection aligns with Popova's enduring interest in science, art, and the profound beauty of the universe. It's an expected read for someone exploring the intersection of ecological consciousness and artistic expression."
Tucker Nichols · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of short, poignant essays on navigating complex emotions and unspoken feelings aligns with Maria Popova's interest in the inner life and the art of thoughtful expression. It fits within her ongoing exploration of how we make sense of ourselves and our relationships."
Adam Phillips · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the psychology of letting go and the subtle art of surrender fits Maria Popova's interest in the philosophical underpinnings of human experience and the wisdom found in unconventional perspectives. It aligns with her work on self-discovery and the often-overlooked power of intentional inaction."
Zoë Schlanger · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of bioluminescence and the interconnectedness of life fits Maria Popova's interest in the poetry of science and the wonder of the natural world. It aligns with her work on consciousness and the hidden marvels of existence."
Aracelis Girmay and Diana Ejaita · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This lyrical story of connection and belonging fits Maria Popova's interest in the wisdom of children's literature and its capacity for profound emotional and philosophical exploration. It aligns with their work on empathy and the interconnectedness of all things."
Sara Imari Walker · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality aligns with Maria Popova's interest in the intersection of science, philosophy, and the human experience. It fits within her ongoing examination of how we understand ourselves and our place in the universe."
Gavin Pretor-Pinney and William Grill · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the everyday wonder of clouds fits Maria Popova's interest in finding profound meaning in the seemingly ordinary and the interconnectedness of science and art. It aligns with her work on cultivating a richer, more observant inner life."
Sara Stridsberg and Beatrice Alemagna · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This lyrical exploration of childhood wonder and the ephemeral nature of memory fits Maria Popova's interest in literature that delves into the profound beauty of ordinary moments and the inner lives of children. It aligns with her ongoing fascination with books that illuminate the human condition through evocative storytelling and artistic expression."
Alan Lightman · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the intersection of science, wonder, and the human experience aligns with Popova's enduring interest in the profound questions that bridge the material and the miraculous. It fits within her ongoing work examining the poetry of physics and the philosophy of everyday existence."
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of Black identity and history aligns with Popova's consistent interest in profound, socially conscious narratives and their place in the broader human story. It fits within her tradition of highlighting works that grapple with complex truths and offer intellectual and emotional resonance."
Pepita Sandwich · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of emotional expression and vulnerability aligns with Maria Popova's enduring interest in the human condition and the cultivation of inner life. It fits within her ongoing examination of how we navigate complex feelings and find meaning."
Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of language's origins and the power of words aligns with Popova's enduring interest in the intersection of art, science, and philosophy, and their capacity to shape our understanding of the world. It fits The Marginalian's focus on books that illuminate the human condition through creative and intellectual inquiry."
Maria Popova · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"Her own book — included in her year-end favorites round-up."
Books from Tim Ferriss: Insights from Tara Brach, Ryan Holiday, Maria Popova, and Cal Newport (2022)
Extracted via LLM from auto-captions of Tim Ferriss (2022-10-11).
Source: www.youtube.com
Tara Brach · 2003 · Buy on Amazon
"She has changed my life perhaps more profoundly than anybody in my life so I highly recommend her."
Tara Brach · 2021 · Buy on Amazon
"She has changed my life perhaps more profoundly than anybody in my life."
Seneca · Buy on Amazon
"Is this perhaps the best manifesto for our current struggle with productivity versus presence?"
Best Art Books of 2012 (2012)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2012-11-26.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Tejubehan · Buy on Amazon
"Its gorgeous black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings, brimming with expressive lines and dots somewhere between Yayoi Kusama and Edward Gorey, tell the partly autobiographical, partly escapist tale of this self-taught artist who came of age as a woman trapped between unimaginable poverty and a wildly imaginative inner world in a patriarchal society."
Yayoi Kusama · Buy on Amazon
"Her vibrant artwork, sewn together in a magnificent fabric-bound hardcover tome, becomes an exquisite embodiment of Carroll’s story and his fascination with the extraordinary way in which children see and explore the ordinary world."
Austin Kleon · Buy on Amazon
"an intelligent and articulate manifesto for the era of combinatorial creativity and remix culture that’s part 344 Questions, part Everything is a Remix, part The Gift, at once borrowed and entirely original."
Christoph Niemann · Buy on Amazon
"gathers sixteen of his visual essays, infused with his signature blend of humor, thoughtfulness, and exquisite conceptual freshness."
Michael Bird · Buy on Amazon
"offers a succinct account of the most influential developments in the history of art, from cave paintings to the internet, compiled by art historian and broadcaster Michael Bird."
Thessaly La Force · Buy on Amazon
"a magnificent collection of Mount’s illustrated “portraits” of these modern-day icons, alongside short essays by each contributor explaining why the books included are meaningful to him or her."
Ramsingh Urveti · Buy on Amazon
"is unlike any book you’ve ever held in your hands and in your heart, and outcharms even"
Blexbolex · Buy on Amazon
"is a poignant satire of the mind’s well-documented gift for fooling itself and seducing us into our own hand-spun illusory realities."
Vahram Muratyan · Buy on Amazon
"an absolutely charming collection of these vibrant visual dichotomies and likenesses."
Best Art Books of 2015 (2015)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2015-12-08.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Maira Kalman · Buy on Amazon
"The magnetism of that mutuality is what artist , visual memoirist , and champion of attentiveness Maira Kalman explores in Beloved Dog — a tender, quirky, scrumptiously sincere love letter to our canine companions, part memoir of and part manifesto for the adoration of Dog."
JooHee Yoon · Buy on Amazon
"In Beastly Verse , her spectacular picture-book debut, Brooklyn-based illustrator and printmaker JooHee Yoon brings to vibrant life sixteen beloved poems about nonhuman creatures, real and imagined — masterworks as varied in sentiment and sensibility as Lewis Carroll’s playful “The Crocodile,” D.H. Lawrence’s revolutionarily evolutionary homage to the hummingbird, Christina Rossetti’s celebration of butterfly metamorphosis, and William Blake’s bright-burning ode to the tiger."
Lauren Redniss · Buy on Amazon
"That abiding and dimensional relationship with the weather is what artist, Guggenheim Fellow, and American Museum of Natural History artist-in-residence Lauren Redniss explores in the beguiling Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future ."
Chip Kidd · Buy on Amazon
"In Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts , beloved graphic designer Chip Kidd offers a guided behind-the-scenes tour of Schulz’s genius."
Christopher Marley · Buy on Amazon
"That passionate love of aliveness and that exulted awareness of the citizenry of all beings is what artist, designer, and photographer Christopher Marley captures in Biophilia — an exquisite collection of his artwork incorporating various life-forms, from insects to reptiles to marine creatures."
Jason Polan · Buy on Amazon
"The first seven years of this ongoing project, totaling drawings of 30,000 people, are now collected in Every Person in New York — a marvelous tome of Polan’s black-and-white line drawings, colored in with the intense aliveness of a city where, as White wrote more than half a century earlier, “wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”"
Bhajju Shyam · Buy on Amazon
"Shyam captures ten origin myths from Gond folklore in absolutely breathtaking illustrations."
Best Art & Design Books of 2011 (2011)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2011-11-28.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Lauren Redniss · Buy on Amazon
"It’s also a remarkable feat of thoughtful design and creative vision."
Pat Kirkham · Buy on Amazon
"Had Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design been released before the publication of this selection of the 100 best graphic design books of the past 100 years, it would most certainly have been included, and quite possibly would have topped the list — it is, truly, one of the most beautiful, inspirational, important design books you’ll ever lay eyes and hands on."
Sophie Blackall · Buy on Amazon
"Both playful and profound, Blackall’s delicate drawings — many of which are available on Etsy as prints — immortalize the ephemeral with a wink and a wand, breathing into these mundane encounters a kind of magic that transforms them into open-ended modern-day fairy tales."
Rana Abou Rjeily · Buy on Amazon
"Both minimalist and illuminating, the book’s stunning pages map the rules of Arabic writing, grammar and pronunciation to English, using this typographic harmony as the vehicle for better understanding this ancient culture from a Western standpoint."
Stefan G. Bucher · Buy on Amazon
"Let’s be clear: I want this book to be useful to you."
Manuel Lima · Buy on Amazon
"It’s a winsome addition to these essential books on data visualization and a powerful tool in your visual literacy arsenal for navigating the Information Age."
Paula Scher · Buy on Amazon
"A foreword by Simon Winchester contextualizes Scher’s maps as cultural objects, and an introduction by Scher herself offers a peek inside the mind and personal history that sprouted her cartographic creativity."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"this magnificent volume of contemporary and experimental visual storytelling explores what it means to convey information with equal parts clarity and creativity, speaking with remarkable aesthetic eloquence about the things that matter in the world today."
Al Jaffee · Buy on Amazon
"Essays by Pixar animator Pete Docter, New York Times cultural critic Neil Genzlinger and Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist and author Jules Feiffer contextualize Jaffee’s work and the tremendous influence it has had on generations of artists, comedians and ordinary people."
Matt Kish · Buy on Amazon
"Kish’s ingenious project joins our running list of blogs so good they became books with Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, collecting his magnificent lo-fi drawings in a 600-page visual masterpiece of bold, breathtaking full-page illustrations that captivate eye, heart, and mind, inviting you to rediscover the Melville classic in entirely new ways."
Peter F. Neumeyer · Buy on Amazon
"From the intellectual banter to the magnificent illustrations, Floating Worlds, is quite possibly the most heart-warming art-and-so-much-more book this year, and certainly among the all-time favorites of my personal library."
Best Art & Design Books of 2013 (2013)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2013-12-05.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Debbie Millman · Buy on Amazon
"Personal bias aside, these moving, lovingly crafted poems and essays — some handwritten, some drawn with colored pencils, some typeset in felt on felt — vibrate at that fertile intersection of the deeply personal and the universally profound."
Alain de Botton and John Armstrong · Buy on Amazon
"Their basic proposition is that, far more than mere aesthetic indulgence, art is a tool — a tool that serves a rather complex yet straightforwardly important purpose in our existence:"
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"More than anything, however, the anthology embodies the cat’s defining characteristic: its cluster of opposites, rolled together into a giant hairball of cultural attitudes — something, perhaps, at once uncomfortably and assuringly reflective of our own chronically conflicted selves."
Josef Albers · Buy on Amazon
"Half a century later, Interaction of Color (public library), with its illuminating visual exercises and mind-bending optical illusions, remains an indispensable blueprint to the art of seeing."
Becky Cooper · Buy on Amazon
"The finest of them are now collected Mapping Manhattan: A Love (And Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers (public library) — a tender cartographic love letter to this timeless city of multiple dimensions, parallel realities, and perpendicular views, featuring contributions from both strangers and famous New Yorkers alike, including Brain Pickings favorites like cosmic sage Neil deGrasse Tyson, artist-philosopher Yoko Ono, wire-walked Philippe Petit, The Map as Art author Katharine H…"
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Taschen has captured the life’s work of this infographic pioneer in the magnificent monograph Fritz Kahn (public library) — a 6-pound tome in English, French and German that collects and contextualizes his most influential images and essays and, above all, celebrates a boundless mind that never settled for limiting itself to a single discipline, to any one area of curiosity, to the onus and hubris of specialization that our culture so vehemently and so toxically fetishizes."
Gertrude Stein · Buy on Amazon
"Given my affinity for all things Gertrude Stein and my enduring admiration for the art of my frequent collaborator and talented friend Lisa Congdon, I was instantly enamored with Tender Buttons: Objects (public library) — Stein’s 1914 collection of avant-garde verses celebrating everyday objects in her signature style of semantic somersaults, brought to fresh life with Lisa’s vibrant illustrations of birds, boxes, cups, clocks, umbrellas, and other ordinary objects made extraordinary."
Gareth Cook · Buy on Amazon
"The Best American Infographics 2013 (public library) is now out, featuring the finest examples from the past year — spanning everything from happiness to sports to space to gender politics, and including a contribution by friend-of-Brain Pickings Wendy MacNaughton — with an introduction by none other than David Byrne."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Maurice Sendak is celebrated by many, myself included, as the greatest and most influential children’s book artist of the past century."
John Bertram and Yuri Leving · Buy on Amazon
"That Lolita renders this human condition at such an extreme, so truthfully, and yes, as von Rezorri says, convincingly, is the book’s most shocking quality."
Sarah Kay · Buy on Amazon
"What’s most striking about these vibrant, colorful, exuberant images and verses, however, is their stark contrast to the cultural context in which they were born — alongside them we find grim photographs of desolate little faces in shabby schoolrooms, the faces of a generation that would be soon engulfed by communism’s dark descend."
· · Buy on Amazon
"In A Map of the World According to Illustrators and Storytellers (public library), the fine folks of Gestalten — who have a knack for pictorial magic and visual storytelling — collect more than 500 maps by artists, illustrators, and designers representing the creative zeitgeist of modern cartography around the world, ranging from the astoundingly accurate and detailed to the marvelously abstract and utopian."
Best Art, Design & Photography Books of 2010 (2010)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2010-12-16.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Jonathan Safran Foer · Buy on Amazon
"Without a shadow of a doubt, Jonathan Safran Foer ‘s Tree of Codes is the most ambitious book project of the year."
Marian Bantjes · Buy on Amazon
"Her latest book, I Wonder , is a remarkable journey of visual joy and conceptual fascination, intersecting logic, beauty and quirk in an utterly breathtaking way."
Doogie Horner · Buy on Amazon
"Everything Explained Through Flowcharts by standup comedian and book designer Doogie Horner is the absolute pinnacle of the hipster meme."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"And nothing fuels that obsession more richly than Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters — an ambitious exploration of the pervasiveness of letters in everyday life, tracing our visual vocabulary to its roots in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Kanji characters and other ancient alphabets with rich illustrations, beautiful graphic design and typography, found objects, graffiti and more."
Bill Moggridge · Buy on Amazon
"IN Designing Media , he explores the evolution of mainstream media, both mass and personal, looking closely at the points of friction between old and new media models and the social norms they have sprouted."
Marc and Sara Schiller · Buy on Amazon
"From Guatemalan guerrilla gardeners to icons like Banksy and Barry McGee, the visually astounding anthology is as much an exhaustive compendium of compelling artwork as it is a modern manifesto for activism, democracy and freedom of speech."
Dyna Moe · Buy on Amazon
"This fall, Dyna Moe released her dynamite work in Mad Men: The Illustrated World — a truly, truly fantastic book that captures not only everything we love about Mad Men , but also the broader cultural landscape of the era, from fashion and style to office culture to lifehacks like hangover workarounds and secretary etiquette."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This year, a collective of Brooklyn-based designers replicated the exquisite corpse idea in The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game — a brilliant collaborative illustration project, two years in the making, that enlisted 100 of today’s most talented visual artist and designers to co-create a book by building on each other’s work."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"And nothing hit the sweet spot this year better than Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design — the brilliant sequel 2008’s now-iconic Data Flow , a compelling anthology of work in all of data visualization as a broad and cross-disciplinary creative medium, from static infographics to dynamic interactive visualizations to physical data sculptures and beyond."
Cedric Pollet · Buy on Amazon
"French photographer Cedric Pollet travels the world to capture this beauty and has documented it in his gorgeous new book, Bark: An Intimate Look at the World’s Trees ."
Best Art, Design & Photography Books of 2014 (2014)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2014-12-08.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Rachel Sussman · Buy on Amazon
"beautiful and powerful work at the intersection of fine art, science, and philosophy, spanning seven continents and exploring issues of deep time, permanence and impermanence, and the interconnectedness of life."
Maira Kalman · Buy on Amazon
"She looks at the same world we all look at but sees what no one else sees — that magical stuff of “the moments inside the moments inside the moments.”"
Michael Benson · Buy on Amazon
"This masterwork of scholarship also attests, ever so gently, ever so powerfully, to the value of the “ungoogleable” — a considerable portion of Benson’s bewitching images comes from the vaults of the world’s great science libraries and archives, bringing to light a wealth of previously unseen treasures."
Alessandro Sanna · Buy on Amazon
"Through his soft watercolors shines the immutable light of existence."
Wendy MacNaughton and Isaac Fitzgerald · Buy on Amazon
"In Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them ( public library | IndieBound ), based on their popular Tumblr of the same title, illustrator and visual storyteller Wendy MacNaughton — she of extraordinary sensitivity to the human experience — and editor Isaac Fitzgerald catalog the wild, wicked, wonderfully human stories behind people’s tattoos."
Dinah Fried · Buy on Amazon
"nowhere does that relationship come alive more vividly and enchantingly than in Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals ( public library | IndieBound ) — an ingenious project by designer and writer Dinah Fried , who cooks, art-directs, and photographs meals from nearly two centuries of famous fiction."
Jill Mullin · Buy on Amazon
"a beautiful and thoughtful celebration of the vibrantly creative underbelly of autism, featuring contributions from more than 50 international graphic artists and children who fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, with a foreword by none other than Temple Grandin ."
Sébastien Lifshitz · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what French screenwriter and director Sébastien Lifshitz explores in The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride ( public library | IndieBound ), a remarkable collection of archival photographs — sometimes poignant, sometimes playful, invariably tender — of gay and lesbian couples privately celebrating their love in the early twentieth century."
Austin Kleon · Buy on Amazon
"“a book for people who hate the very idea of self-promotion,” in which Kleon addresses with equal parts humility, honesty, and humor one of the quintessential questions of the creative life: How do you get “discovered”?"
Lynda Barry · Buy on Amazon
"Hardly anyone has explored this delicate relationship between drawing and looking, drawing and experiencing, drawing and thinking with more rigor, wit, and insight than Lynda Barry , one of the greatest visual artists of our time."
Gareth Cook · Buy on Amazon
"Now comes the second installment, The Best American Infographics 2014 ( public library | IndieBound ), with an introduction by master-statistician Nate Silver and fifty-eight examples of stellar information design shedding light on such diverse topics as the history of space exploration, the sleep habits of famous writers, the geography of where gay people stay in the closet, the comparative shapes and sizes of major baseball parks, and the social network of jazz musicians in the 1920s."
Robert Dawson · Buy on Amazon
"Alongside Dawson’s beautiful photographs are short reflections on the subject by such celebrated minds as Isaac Asimov , Anne Lamott , and E.B. White ."
Allen Crawford · Buy on Amazon
"In Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself ( public library | IndieBound ), artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman’s undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Somewhere between Salvador Dalí’s illustrations of Montaigne , the weird and wonderful Codex Seraphinianus , and the visual history of Gotham’s imaginary apocalypse , the book is a singular shrine to some of the most eternal of human hopes and fears, and, above all, our immutable longing for grace, for mercy, for the miraculous."
Hans Ulrich Obrist · Buy on Amazon
"With more than 130 maps by a wide-ranging roster of luminaries spanning art, science, technology, literature, architecture, film, and more — including John Baldessari , Tim Berners-Lee , Louise Bourgeois , Yoko Ono , Kevin Kelly , Damien Hirst , Ed Ruscha , John Maeda , Sean Carroll , Douglas Rushkoff , and Marcus du Sautoy — the book offers a living reminder that rather than objective representations of reality, maps are invariably projections in both the literal and the metaphorical sense,…"
Danielle Krysa · Buy on Amazon
"In addition to sharing their broader thoughts on the demons and rewards of creativity, each artist also offers one specific block-busting exercise — a “Creative Unblock Project” — to try the next time you feel stuck."
Paul Rand · Buy on Amazon
"At the age of only thirty-three, Rand collected these uncompromising principles and his rare brand of idealism in the influential 1947 volume Thoughts on Design ( public library | IndieBound ), which has been newly resurrected after decades in the morgue of out-of-print gems."
Lisa Congdon · Buy on Amazon
"Now comes a wonderful modern-day counterpart that falls partway between Tolstoy and Tumblr: Whatever You Are, Be a Good One ( public library | IndieBound ) — an impossibly charming compendium of 100 wise and timeless thoughts from some of history’s greatest minds, hand-lettered by illustrator and Brain Pickings collaborator Lisa Congdon ."
Genis Carreras · Buy on Amazon
"Philographics: Big Ideas in Simple Shapes ( public library | IndieBound ) is a vibrant visual dictionary of philosophy, enlisting the telegraphic powers of design in distilling the essential principles of 95 schools of thought into visual metaphors and symbolic representation."
Best Biographies, Memoirs & History Books of 2013 (2013)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2013-11-25.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton · Buy on Amazon
"Though “about” a cat, this heartwarming and heartbreaking tale is really about what it means to be human — about the osmosis of hollowing loneliness and profound attachment, the oscillation between boundless affection and paralyzing fear of abandonment, the unfair promise of loss implicit to every possibility of love."
Susan Sontag · Buy on Amazon
"In one segment of the conversation, Sontag discusses how the false divide between “high” and pop culture impoverishes our lives ."
Maurice Sendak · Buy on Amazon
"From rich essays by historians and artists who contextualize Sendak’s life and legacy to a selection of his best-loved and notable little-known illustrations, the book is a treasure trove of insight on Sendak’s spirit, sensibility, and evolution as an artist."
Darrin M. McMahon · Buy on Amazon
"McMahon argues that, in an age where we’re urged to explore the “genius” in all of us, we’ve grown increasingly obsessed with the word and the idea of genius, robbing it of substance in the process."
Andrew Wilson · Buy on Amazon
"This book will show what compelled Plath to peek over the edge and stare into the abyss of the human psyche."
Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr · Buy on Amazon
"Darwin: A Graphic Biography offers a delightful visual take on the story of the father of evolution , decoder of human emotion , hopeless romantic , and occasional grump ."
Matthew Goodman · Buy on Amazon
"No female reporter before her had ever seemed quite so audacious, so willing to risk personal safety in pursuit of a story."
Celia Blue Johnson · Buy on Amazon
"You could adopt one of these practices or, more ambitiously, combine several of them, and chances are you still wouldn’t invoke genius."
Italo Calvino · Buy on Amazon
"To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being just as Proust, Radiguet and Fitzgerald did: what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it."
Terry Teachout · Buy on Amazon
"Teachout writes:
That was Ellington’s way. He talked not to explain himself but to conceal himself."
B. Jack Copeland · Buy on Amazon
"To Turing we owe the brilliant innovation of storing applications, and all the other programs necessary for computers to do our bidding, inside the computer’s memory , ready to be opened when we wish."
Mark Twain · Buy on Amazon
"In April of 1906, Twain — who famously believed that any claim of originality was merely misguided narcissism — offers this humorous lament on religion as a manifestation of human egotism:"
Andrea Pitzer · Buy on Amazon
"What few realize — and what Pitzer reveals through newly-declassified intelligence files and rigorously researched military records — is that Nabokov wove serious and unsettling political history into the fabric of his fiction, which had gone undetected for decades: until now."
Best Biographies, Memoirs & History Books of 2014 (2014)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2014-12-15.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Robert Zaretsky · Buy on Amazon
"If the question abides, it is because it is more than a matter of historical or biographical interest."
Roz Chast · Buy on Amazon
"The humor and humility with which Chast tackles the enormously difficult subject of aging, illness and death is nothing short of a work of genius."
David Schreiber · Buy on Amazon
"To capture Sontag’s life and spirit by honoring her dimensionality, then, is a monumental task, but one which Berlin-based writer and art critic David Schreiber accomplishes with enormous elegance in the long-awaited Susan Sontag: A Biography ( public library | IndieBound )."
Wendy MacNaughton · Buy on Amazon
"Like a modern-day Margaret Mead armed with ink and watercolor, not a critic or commentator but an observer and amplifier of voice, MacNaughton plunges into the living fabric of the city with equal parts curiosity and compassion, gentleness and generosity, wit and wisdom, and emerges with a dimensional portrait painted with honesty, humor, and humility."
Vincent van Gogh · Buy on Amazon
"Nowhere does the role of these polarizing pulls in the making of his genius shine more brilliantly than in Ever Yours: The Essential Letters ( public library | IndieBound ) — a revelatory selection of 265 letters exploring Van Gogh’s creative restlessness, his struggle to find his path in life, his tentative first steps into painting, and his views on art, society, love, and life."
Meghan Daum · Buy on Amazon
"In The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion ( public library | IndieBound ), she explores “the tension between primal reactions and public decorum” and aiming at “a larger discussion about the way human experiences too often come with preassigned emotional responses,” driven by a valiant effort to unbridle those messy, complex experiences from the simplistic templates with which we address them, both privately and publicly."
Emily Spivack · Buy on Amazon
"For artist and editor Emily Spivack , clothes can be an “evolving archive of experiences, adventures, and memories” and a powerful storytelling device."
Vladimir Nabokov · Buy on Amazon
"But nowhere did his all-consuming love and ebullient passion unfold with more mesmerism than in his letters to her, which he began writing the day after they met and continued until his final hours."
William Grill · Buy on Amazon
"From Flying Eye Books — the children’s book imprint of British indie press Nobrow, which gave us Freud’s comic biography , Blexbolex’s brilliant No Man’s Land and some gorgeous illustrated histories of aviation and the Space Race — comes Shackleton’s Journey ( public library | IndieBound ), a magnificent chronicle by emerging illustrator William Grill , whose affectionate and enchanting colored-pencil drawings bring to life the legendary explorer and his historic expedition."
Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski, and Matt Lamothe · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what illustrator extraordinaire Julia Rothman and her collaborators Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe celebrate in The Who, the What, and the When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Sidekicks of History ( public library | IndieBound ) — an illuminating inventory of the little-known champions behind a wide range of cultural icons and an homage to the gift of what Robert Krulwich once so poetically termed “friends in low places.”"
Susan Cheever · Buy on Amazon
"In E. E. Cummings: A Life ( public library | IndieBound ), memoirist, biographer, and journalist Susan Cheever chronicles the celebrated poet’s “wildly ambitious attempt at creating a new way of seeing the world through language.”"
Bhajju Shyam · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what award-winning artist Bhajju Shyam , working in the Gond tradition of Indian folk art, does in The London Jungle Book ( public library | IndieBound ) — an extraordinary and invigorating book from Indian independent publisher Tara Books , who continue to give international voice to marginalized art and literature through their commune of artists, writers and designers collaborating on unusual, often handmade books."
Alex Wright · Buy on Amazon
"In Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age ( public library | IndieBound ), writer, educator, and design historian Alex Wright traces Otlet’s legacy not only in technology and information science, but also in politics, social reform, and peace activism, illustrating why not only Otlet’s ideas, but also his idealism matter as we contemplate the future of humanity."
Brian Heinz and Randall Enos · Buy on Amazon
"Now, children’s book author Brian Heinz and artist Randall Enos tell the story of the original white whale behind Melville’s masterpiece in Mocha Dick: The Legend and the Fury ( public library | IndieBound ) — a captivating picture-book “biography” of the monster-turned-literary-legend, from how human aggression turned the “peaceful giant” into a ferocious beast to his first recorded attack near the South American island of Mocha off the coast of Chile to the final, fatal harpoon blow."
Adam Begley · Buy on Amazon
"He had a mind that could ponder the origin of the universe , a heart that could eulogize a dog with such beautiful bittersweetness , and a spirit that could behold death without fear ."
Malka Marom · Buy on Amazon
"Over the decades that followed, she would interview Mitchell on three separate occasions — in 1973, in 1979, and in 2012."
Walter Benjamin · Buy on Amazon
"Those pioneering pieces, at last translated into English and released as Radio Benjamin ( public library | IndieBound ), were notable for many reasons, but perhaps most of all for upholding the idealism and optimism of any young medium."
Andy Miller · Buy on Amazon
"That question is what Andy Miller implicitly, and at times explicitly, asks in The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life ( public library | IndieBound ) — his wonderfully elevating and entertaining memoir of the twelve months he spent reading “some of the greatest and most famous books in the world, and two by Dan Brown.”"
Corinne Maier and Anne Simon · Buy on Amazon
"More than the sum total of his political legacy, Marx’s story is also one of great personal turmoil and tragedy, inner conflict, and moral tussle — subtleties that the comic genre, with its gift for stripping complexities to their simplest truths without losing dimension, reveals with great sensitivity and insight."
Peter Sís · Buy on Amazon
"That interplay between Saint-Exupéry the pilot and Saint-Exupéry the imaginative creator of a cultural classic is what celebrated Czech-born American children’s book author and illustrator Peter Sís explores in the beautiful graphic biography The Pilot and the Little Prince ( public library | IndieBound ) — a sensitive account of Saint-Exupéry’s life, underpinned by a fascinating chronicle of how aviation came to change humanity and a poignant undercurrent of political history, absolutely mag…"
Best Books of 2012: Reader Favorites (2012)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2012-12-26.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Gemma Elwin Harris · Buy on Amazon
"The result is Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds ( public library ), one of the best children’s books of 2012 — a compendium of fascinating explanations of deceptively simple everyday phenomena, featuring such modern-day icons as Mary Roach , Noam Chomsky , Philip Pullman , Richard Dawkins , and many more, with a good chunk of the proceeds being donated to Save the Children , and also one of the best science books of 2012 ."
Cheryl Strayed · Buy on Amazon
"This year, all of Sugar’s no-bullshit, wholehearted wisdom on life’s trickiest contexts — sometimes the simplest, sometimes the most complex, always the most deeply human — was released in Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar ( UK ; public library ), along with several never-before-published columns, under Sugar’s real name: Cheryl Strayed ."
Keri Smith · Buy on Amazon
"From mapping found sounds to learning the language of trees to turning time observation into art, these playful and poetic micro-projects aren’t just a simple creativity booster — they’re potent training for what Buddhism would call “living from presence” and inhabiting your life more fully."
Austin Kleon · Buy on Amazon
"So widely did the talk resonate that Kleon decided to deepen and enrich its message in Steal Like an Artist ( UK ; public library ), one of the best art books of 2012 — an intelligent and articulate manifesto for the era of combinatorial creativity and remix culture that’s part 344 Questions , part Everything is a Remix , part The Gift , at once borrowed and entirely original."
James Webb Young · Buy on Amazon
"Last week’s wonderful field guide to creativity, Dancing About Architecture , mentioned in passing an intriguing old book originally published by James Webb Young in 1939 — A Technique for Producing Ideas ( UK ; public library ), which I promptly hunted down and which will be the best $5 you spend this year, or the most justified trip to your public library."
Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne · Buy on Amazon
"From publisher Laurence King , who brought us the epic Saul Bass monograph , and the prolific design writer Steven Heller with design critic Veronique Vienne comes 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design ( UK ; public library ) — a thoughtfully curated inventory of abstract concepts that defined and shaped the art and craft of graphic design, each illustrated with exemplary images and historical context, and one of the year’s best design books ."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"The images, which come from a mix of well-known titans and promising up-and-comers, including favorites like Lisa Congdon , Gemma Correll , and Jon Klassen , borrow inspiration from antique medical illustrations , vintage science diagrams , and other historical ephemera from periods of explosive scientific curiosity."
Saul Bass and Leonore Klein · Buy on Amazon
"This year, exactly half a century later, Rizzoli reprinted Henri’s Walk to Paris , one of this year’s best children’s books — an absolute gem like only Bass can deliver, at once boldly minimalist and incredibly rich, telling the sweet, aspirational, colorful story of a boy who lives in rural France and dreams of going to Paris."
Yayoi Kusama · Buy on Amazon
"Now, from Penguin UK and Yayoi Kusama , Japan’s most celebrated contemporary artist, comes a striking contender for the most visually captivating take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland yet — and one of the year’s best art books ."
John Homans · Buy on Amazon
"That’s exactly what former New York magazine executive editor John Homans explores in What’s a Dog For?: The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man’s Best Friend ( public library ) — a remarkable chronicle of the domestic dog’s journey across thousands of years and straight into our hearts, written with equal parts tenderness and scientific rigor."
Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson · Buy on Amazon
"Indeed, more than thirty years after its original publication in 1981, Writing That Works: How to Communicate Effectively In Business ( UK ; public library ) by former Ogilvy & Mather CEO Kenneth Roman and legendary adman Joel Raphaelson offers some timelessly practical tips on the art, science, and psychology of successful communication, in business and beyond."
Best Books of 2013 (2013)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2013-12-23.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Alexandra Horowitz · Buy on Amazon
"It is undoubtedly one of the most stimulating books of the year, if not the decade, and the most enchanting thing I’ve read in ages."
Mark Twain · Buy on Amazon
"While frolicsome in tone and full of wink, the story is colored with subtle hues of grown-up philosophy on the human condition, exploring all the deft ways in which we creatively rationalize our wrongdoing and reconcile the good and evil we each embody ."
John Brockman · Buy on Amazon
"Perhaps the greatest pleasure in science comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way."
Claudia Hammond · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what acclaimed BBC broadcaster and psychology writer Claudia Hammond explores in Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception ( public library ) — a fascinating foray into the idea that our experience of time is actively created by our own minds and how these sensations of what neuroscientists and psychologists call “mind time” are created, and also among the year’s best psychology books ."
Debbie Millman · Buy on Amazon
"Personal bias aside, these moving, lovingly crafted poems and essays — some handwritten, some drawn with colored pencils, some typeset in felt on felt — vibrate at that fertile intersection of the deeply personal and the universally profound."
Susan Sontag · Buy on Amazon
"In one of her most poignant insights, Sontag admonishes against our culture’s dangerous polarities and imprisoning stereotypes :"
Shaun Usher · Buy on Amazon
"One of the most beautiful letters in the collection comes from Hunter S. Thompson — gonzo journalism godfather , pundit of media politics , dark philosopher ."
Daniel C. Dennett · Buy on Amazon
"In Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking ( public library ), also among the year’s best psychology books , the inimitable Daniel Dennett , one of our greatest living philosophers, offers a set of thinking tools — “handy prosthetic imagination-extenders and focus holders” — that allow us to “think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions” — to enhance your cognitive toolkit ."
Caroline Paul · Buy on Amazon
"Though “about” a cat, this heartwarming and heartbreaking tale is really about what it means to be human — about the osmosis of hollowing loneliness and profound attachment, the oscillation between boundless affection and paralyzing fear of abandonment, the unfair promise of loss implicit to every possibility of love."
Luigi Serafini · Buy on Amazon
"Besides a visual masterwork, it’s also a timeless meditation on what “reality” really is, one all the timelier in today’s age of such seemingly surrealist feats as bioengineering whole new lifeforms, hurling subatomic particles at each other faster than the speed of light, and encoding an entire book onto a DNA molecule."
Maurice Sendak · Buy on Amazon
"It tells the story of two brothers, Jack and Guy, torn asunder when a falling star crashes onto Earth."
Matthew Goodman · Buy on Amazon
"In Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World ( public library ), also among the year’s best history books , Matthew Goodman traces the groundbreaking adventure, beginning with a backdrop of Bly’s remarkable journalistic fortitude and contribution to defying our stubbornly enduring biases about women writers :"
Kio Stark · Buy on Amazon
"So, in 2012, when I found out that writer Kio Stark was crowdfunding a book that would serve as a manifesto for learning outside formal education, I eagerly chipped in."
Best Books of 2014 (2014)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2014-12-22.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Alan Lightman · Buy on Amazon
"Science does not reveal the meaning of our existence, but it does draw back some of the veils."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This, perhaps, is why yesteryear’s greatest letters appeal to us more irrepressibly than ever."
Werner Herzog · Buy on Amazon
"His answers are unfiltered and to-the-point, often poignant but always unsentimental, not rude but refusing to infest the garden of honest human communication with the Victorian-seeded, American-sprouted weed of pointless politeness."
Maira Kalman · Buy on Amazon
"She looks at the same world we all look at but sees what no one else sees — that magical stuff of “the moments inside the moments inside the moments.”"
Rebecca Solnit · Buy on Amazon
"In The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness ( public library | IndieBound ), she explores place as “the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location,” forces like culture, justice, ecology, democracy, art, and storytelling, which reveal things like “what environmentalists got wrong about country music and nearly everyone got wrong about Henry David Thoreau’s laundry.”"
Amanda Palmer · Buy on Amazon
"The most urgent clarion call echoing throughout the book, which builds on Amanda’s terrific TED talk , is for loosening our harsh and narrow criteria for what it means to be an artist, and, most of all, for undoing our punishing ideas about what renders one a not-artist, or — worse yet — a not-artist-enough."
Diane Ackerman · Buy on Amazon
"With bewitchingly lyrical language, Ackerman paints the backdrop of our explosive evolution and its yin-yang of achievement and annihilation:"
Steven Pinker · Buy on Amazon
"We now know that telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice."
Steven Johnson · Buy on Amazon
"Our lives are surrounded and supported by a whole class of objects that are enchanted with the ideas and creativity of thousands of people who came before us: inventors and hobbyists and reformers who steadily hacked away at the problem of making artificial light or clean drinking water so that we can enjoy those luxuries today without a second thought, without even thinking of them as luxuries in the first place…"
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"In Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them ( public library | IndieBound ), based on their popular Tumblr of the same title, illustrator and visual storyteller Wendy MacNaughton — she of extraordinary sensitivity to the human experience — and editor Isaac Fitzgerald catalog the wild, wicked, wonderfully human stories behind people’s tattoos."
Sam Harris · Buy on Amazon
"In Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion ( public library | IndieBound ), philosopher, neuroscientist, and mindful skeptic Sam Harris offers a contemporary addition to this lineage of human inquiry — an extraordinary and ambitious masterwork of such integration between science and spirituality, which Harris himself describes as “by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people cons…"
Emily Spivack · Buy on Amazon
"For artist and editor Emily Spivack , clothes can be an “evolving archive of experiences, adventures, and memories” and a powerful storytelling device."
Rachel Sussman · Buy on Amazon
"Her breathtaking photographs and illuminating essays are now collected in The Oldest Living Things in the World ( public library | IndieBound ) — beautiful and powerful work at the intersection of fine art, science, and philosophy, spanning seven continents and exploring issues of deep time, permanence and impermanence, and the interconnectedness of life."
Marianne Dubuc · Buy on Amazon
"The Lion and the Bird ( public library | IndieBound ) by French Canadian graphic designer and illustrator Marianne Dubuc is one such rare gem — an ode to life’s moments between the words via the tender and melodic story of a lion who finds a wounded bird in his garden one autumn day and nurses it back to flight."
Best Books of 2015 (2015)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2015-12-21.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Oliver Sacks · 2015 · Buy on Amazon
"This record of time pouring through the unclenched fingers of the mind’s most magnanimous patron saint has become one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life — one I came to with deep reverence for Dr. Sacks’s intellectual footprint and left with deep love for his soul."
Helen Macdonald · Buy on Amazon
"H Is for Hawk ( public library ) by Helen Macdonald is one such book — the kind one devours voraciously, then picks up and puts down repeatedly, unsure how to channel its aboutness in a way that isn’t woefully inadequate."
David Whyte · Buy on Amazon
"Whyte — who has previously enveloped in his wisdom such intricacies of existence as what happens when love leaves and how to break the tyranny of work-life balance — constructs an alternative dictionary inviting us to befriend words in their most dimensional sense by reawakening to the deeper and often counterintuitive meanings beneath semantic superficialities and grab-bag terms like pain , beauty , and solace ."
Patti Smith · Buy on Amazon
"That transcendent transience is what beloved musician, artist, and poet Patti Smith explores in M Train ( public library ) — a most unusual and breathtaking book: part memoir, part dreamscape, part elegy for the departed and for time itself."
Elizabeth Alexander · Buy on Amazon
"This she chronicles with uncommon elegance in The Light of the World ( public library ) — her soul-stretching memoir of how Ficre, the love of her life and her husband of fifteen Christmases, an artist and a chef, a blueberries-and-oatmeal-eating yogi and proud self-proclaimed “African ox,” collapsed while running on the treadmill in their basement."
Sarah Manguso · Buy on Amazon
"Joining the canon of insightful meta-diarists is Sarah Manguso with Ongoingness: The End of a Diary ( public library ) — a collection of fragmentary, piercing meditations on time, memory, the nature of the self, and the sometimes glorious, sometimes harrowing endeavor of filling each moment with maximum aliveness while simultaneously celebrating its presence and grieving its passage."
Mary Oliver · Buy on Amazon
"But in her most recent collection, Felicity ( public library ), Oliver dedicates nearly half the poems to the scintillating seizure that is love."
Sydney Padua · Buy on Amazon
"The unusual story of this Victorian power-duo is what graphic artists and animator Sydney Padua explores in the immensely delightful and illuminating The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer ( public library ), itself a masterwork of combinatorial genius and a poetic analog to its subject matter — rigorously researched, it has approximately the same footnote-to-comic ratio as Lovelace’s trailblazing paper."
Brené Brown · Buy on Amazon
"In Rising Strong ( public library ), Brown builds upon her earlier work on vulnerability to examine the character qualities, emotional patterns, and habits of mind that enable people to transcend the catastrophes of life, from personal heartbreak to professional collapse, and emerge not only unbroken but more whole."
Matthew Burgess · Buy on Amazon
"Such a burst is what rewards the reader, whatever his or her age, in Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings ( public library ) — an uncommonly delightful picture-book celebration of Cummings’s life by Brooklyn-based poet Matthew Burgess , illustrated by Kris Di Giacomo (the artist behind the wonderful alphabet book Take Away the A )."
Elizabeth Gilbert · Buy on Amazon
"The craftsmanship of that wand, which is perhaps the most terrifying and thrilling task of the creative person in any domain of endeavor, is what Elizabeth Gilbert explores in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear ( public library ) — a lucid and luminous inquiry into the relationship between human beings and the mysteries of the creative experience, as defined by Gilbert’s beautifully broad notion of “living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.”"
Margo Jefferson · Buy on Amazon
"The many modes of telling and the many types of trouble are what trailblazing journalist, longtime New York Times theater critic, and Pulitzer winner Margo Jefferson (b. October 17, 1947) explores in Negroland: A Memoir ( public library ) — a masterwork of both form and substance."
Lisa Randall · Buy on Amazon
"That’s what Harvard particle physicist and cosmologist Lisa Randall accomplishes in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe ( public library ) — an intellectually thrilling exploration of how the universe evolved, what made our very existence possible, and how dark matter illuminates our planet’s relationship to its cosmic environment across past, present, and future."
Meghan Daum · Buy on Amazon
"A potent and sorely needed antidote to this toxic myth comes in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids ( public library ), edited by the brilliant Meghan Daum — a writer of rare aptitude for articulating the unspeakable ."
Maira Kalman and Daniel Handler · Buy on Amazon
"That’s what longtime collaborators Maira Kalman and Daniel Handler explore in the immensely wonderful children’s-book-for-grownups Hurry Up and Wait ( public library ) — the second installment in their collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, following their quirky Girls Standing on Lawns ."
Best Books of 2016 (2016)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2016-12-15.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Olivia Laing · Buy on Amazon
"How to break free of that prison and reinhabit the space of trust and love is what Olivia Laing explores in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone — an extraordinary more-than-memoir; a sort of memoir-plus-plus, partway between Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk and the diary of Virginia Woolf; a lyrical account of wading through a period of self-expatriation, both physical and psychological, in which Laing paints an intimate portrait of loneliness as “a populated place: a city in…"
Rebecca Solnit · Buy on Amazon
"We lose hope, Solnit suggests, because we lose perspective — we lose sight of the “accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes” which constitute progress and which render our era dramatically different from the past, a contrast obscured by the undramatic nature of gradual transformation punctuated by occasional tumult."
Mary Oliver · Buy on Amazon
"To read Mary Oliver is to be read by her — to be made real by her words, to have the richest subterranean truths of your own experience mirrored back to you with tenfold the luminosity."
Janna Levin · Buy on Amazon
"This book remains one of the most intensely interesting and beautifully written I’ve ever encountered — the kind that comes about once a generation if we’re lucky."
James Gleick · Buy on Amazon
"I consider it a grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst."
Neil Gaiman · Buy on Amazon
"Here stands a writer of firm conviction and porous curiosity, an idealist amid our morass of cynicism who, in revealing who he is, reveals who we are and who we can be if we only tried a little bit harder to wrest more goodness out of our imperfect humanity."
Sally Mann · Buy on Amazon
"That confounding parallax of personal history is what photographer Sally Mann explores throughout Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs — a lyrical yet unsentimental meditation on art, mortality, and the lacuna between memory and myth, undergirded by what Mann calls her “long preoccupation with the treachery of memory” and “memory’s truth, which is to scientific, objective truth as a pearl is to a piece of sand.”"
Martha Nussbaum · Buy on Amazon
"The moral choreography of that dance is what philosopher Martha Nussbaum explores in Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice."
Adam Phillips · Buy on Amazon
"In the collection’s standout essay, titled “Against Self-Criticism,” Phillips reaches across the space-time of culture to both revolt against and pay homage to Susan Sontag’s masterwork Against Interpretation, and examines “our virulent, predatory self-criticism [has] become one of our greatest pleasures.”"
Alain de Botton · Buy on Amazon
"At its heart is a lamentation of — or, perhaps, an admonition against — how the classic Romantic model has sold us on a number of self-defeating beliefs about the most essential and nuanced experiences of human life: love, infatuation, marriage, sex, children, infidelity, trust."
Caroline Paul · Buy on Amazon
"She offers an intelligent and imaginative antidote in The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure — part memoir, part manifesto, part aspirational workbook, aimed at tween girls but speaking to the ageless, ungendered spirit of adventure in all of us, exploring what it means to be brave, to persevere, to break the tyranny of perfection, and to laugh at oneself while setting out to do the seemingly impossible."
Margot Lee Shetterly · Buy on Amazon
"In Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, Margot Lee Shetterly tells the untold story of these brilliant women, once on the frontlines of our cultural leaps and since sidelined by the selective collective memory we call history."
Krista Tippett · Buy on Amazon
"In her interviews with the great spiritual geniuses of our time, Tippett has cultivated a rare space for reflection and redemption amid our reactionary culture — a space framed by her generous questions exploring the life of meaning."
Annie Dillard · Buy on Amazon
"For decades, Annie Dillard has beguiled those in search of truth and beauty in the written word with the lyrical splendor and wakeful sagacity of her prose."
Paul Kalanithi · 2016 · Buy on Amazon
"That tumultuous turning point is what neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi chronicles in When Breath Becomes Air, also among the year’s best science books — his piercing memoir of being diagnosed with terminal cancer at the peak of a career bursting with potential and a life exploding with aliveness."
Alessandro Sanna · Buy on Amazon
"In the astonishingly beautiful and tenderhearted Pinocchio: The Origin Story, also among the year’s loveliest picture-books, Sanna imagines an alternative prequel to the beloved story, a wordless genesis myth of the wood that became Pinocchio, radiating a larger cosmogony of life, death, and the transcendent continuity between the two."
Best Books of 2018 (2018)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2018-12-21.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Ursula K. Le Guin · Buy on Amazon
"Undergirding the verses is Le Guin’s largehearted generosity of spirit — toward the reader, toward nature and reality, toward the intertwined natures of life and art."
Zadie Smith · Buy on Amazon
"In one of the most arresting essays, titled “On Optimism and Despair,” Smith takes on an eternal question that has bared its sharpest edges in our cultural moment — the question John Steinbeck tussled with when he wrote to his best friend at the peak of WWII: “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”"
Alan Lightman · Buy on Amazon
"Through the lens of his personal experience as a working scientist and a human being with uncommon receptivity to the poetic dimensions of life, Lightman traces our longing for absolutes in a relative world from Galileo to Van Gogh, from Descartes to Dickinson, emerging with that rare miracle of insight at the meeting point of the lucid and the luminous."
Sy Montgomery · Buy on Amazon
"That is what naturalist and author Sy Montgomery , one of the most poetic science writers of our time, explores in How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals ( public library ), illustrated by artist Rebecca Green — an autobiographical adventure into the wilderness of our common humanity, where the world of science and the legacy of Aesop converge into an existential expedition to uncover the elemental truth that “knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your so…"
Audre Lorde · Buy on Amazon
"That is what the great poet, essayist, feminist, and civil rights champion Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) explores with exquisite self-possession and might of character in a series of diary entries included in A Burst of Light: and Other Essays ( public library )."
Rebecca Solnit · Buy on Amazon
"In the age of “alternative facts,” when language is used as a weapon of oppression and manipulation, her words reverberate with the irrepressible, unsilenceable urgency of truth: To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt — or important or possible — and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story."
John Kaag · Buy on Amazon
"The legacy of that deceptively simple yet profound proposition is what philosopher John J. Kaag explores in Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are ( public library ) — part masterwork of poetic scholarship, part contemplative memoir concerned with the most fundamental question of human life: What gives our existence meaning?"
Michael Pollan · Buy on Amazon
"With an eye to this renaissance and the scientists using brain-imaging technology to investigate how psychedelics may illuminate consciousness, Pollan writes: One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens."
Anne Lamott · Buy on Amazon
"That is what Anne Lamott , one of the rare sages of our time, reminds us with equal parts humility, humor, and largehearted wisdom in Almost Everything: Notes on Hope ( public library )."
Amanda Stern · Buy on Amazon
"That is what author, Happy Ending Music & Reading Series host, and my dear friend Amanda Stern accomplishes in Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life ( public library ) — part-memoir and part-portrait of a cruelly egalitarian affliction that cuts across all borders of age, gender, race, and class, clutching one’s entire reality and sense of self in a stranglehold that squeezes life out."
Antonio Damasio · Buy on Amazon
"That tessellated relationship is what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio examines in The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures ( public library ) — a title inspired by the disorienting fact that several billion years ago, single-cell organisms began exhibiting behaviors strikingly analogous to certain human social behaviors and 100 million years ago insects developed interactions, instruments, and cooperative strategies that we might call cultural."
Jason Fagone · Buy on Amazon
"The savaging of Nazis, the birth of a science: It begins on the day when a twenty-three-year-old American woman decides to trust her doubt and dig with her own mind."
Freeman Dyson · Buy on Amazon
"In Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters ( public library ), Dyson unleashes his warm wisdom and unboastful wit on subjects as varied as politics, the enchantment of science, the vacuity of celebrity, the value of the immigrant perspective , his vibrant friendship with Richard Feynman , and the complexities of being human."
Michael McCarthy · Buy on Amazon
"The natural world can offer us more than the means to survive, on the one hand, or mortal risks to be avoided, on the other: it can offer us joy."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of letters to young readers, exploring the transformative power of books and reading, aligns with Maria Popova's long-standing work on literature's capacity for wisdom and wonder. It fits her interest in the enduring human connection to stories and the cultivation of a rich inner life."
Best Books of 2019 (2019)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2019-12-19.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Patti Smith · Buy on Amazon
"That is what Patti Smith offers with uncommon elegance of thought and feeling in Year of the Monkey — a dream-driven, reality-reclaiming masterpiece, laced with poetry and philosophy and surrealism and the hardest realism there is: that of hope."
Ross Gay · Buy on Amazon
"Page after page, small joy after small joy, one is reminded — almost with the shock of having forgotten — that delights are strewn about this world like quiet, inappreciable dew-drops, waiting for the sunshine of our attention to turn them into gold."
Robert Macfarlane · Buy on Amazon
"Nearly a century later, Robert Macfarlane — a rare writer of Carson’s sensibility, who rises to the level of enchanter — extends a lyrical invitation to a vicarious journey into another mysterious earthly universe of all-pervading darkness with Underland: A Deep Time Journey ( public library )."
James Crews · Buy on Amazon
"These words with which he encased the most immortal truth of the human heart open poet James Crews’s wondrous anthology Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection ( public library ) — a tender, truthful mirror held up to what is best in us amid a culture that so readily caricatures us at our worst, featuring soul-salving, rupture-suturing, sanity-resuscitating poems by virtuosos of verse like Jane Hirshfield , Marie Howe , Tracy K. Smith , Lucille Clifton , W.S. Merwin , Naomi Shiha…"
Toni Morrison · Buy on Amazon
"That speech, along with other invaluable remnants of this irreplaceable mind, appears in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations ( public library ) — Morrison’s final nonfiction collection, replete with her wisdom on subjects as varied as borders and belonging , the singular humanistic power of storytelling , and our search for wisdom in the age of information ."
Pico Iyer · Buy on Amazon
"So argues Pico Iyer , one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time, in Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells ( public library )."
Alain de Botton · Buy on Amazon
"At the heart of it is De Botton’s conviction that of all the species of intelligence, emotional intelligence is the one most vital to our sense of being, to our sanity, to our selfhood, yet our entire educational model omits it completely in favor of other, more reducible intelligences."
Alexandra Horowitz · Buy on Amazon
"That question — along with myriad other auxiliary scientific and moral questions strewn across the lacuna between the canine consciousness and our projectionist, propertarian orientation toward it — is what cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz , director of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, explores in a chapter of her altogether fascinating book Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond ( public library )."
Olga Jacoby · Buy on Amazon
"First published anonymously by her husband in 1919 and hurled out of print by wartime want, the letters were discovered a century after their composition by the scholar Trevor Moore, who was so taken with them that he set about identifying their author."
Ella Frances Sanders · Buy on Amazon
"That ricochet wonder, in its myriad kaleidoscopic manifestations diffracted by various scientific phenomena, reflected by various facets of this splendidly interconnected universe, and hungrily absorbed by the human heart, is at the center of Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe ( public library ) by Ella Frances Sanders — the boundlessly curious writer and artist who gave us Lost in Translation , that lovely illustrated dictionary of untranslatable words from around the world."
Rebecca Solnit · 2019 · Buy on Amazon
"Rebecca Solnit offers a mighty antidote to those limiting precepts in Cinderella Liberator ( public library ), also among the year’s loveliest children’s books — an empowered and empowering retelling of the ancient story, which dates back at least two millennia and has recurred in various guises across nearly every culture since, reflecting and perpetuating our most abiding cultural myths about love, work, gender, success, waste and want, the measure of prosperity, and the meaning of purpose."
Ben Folds · Buy on Amazon
"All of that, and so much more, is what musician Ben Folds — an artist of convention-breaking vision and unrelenting creative courage — explores in his lovely memoir, A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons ( public library ), which radiates his goofy, brilliant, genuine, deeply empathetic spirit, marked by the kind of amiable self-consciousness with which unboastful genius often shades itself from the harsh stage-glare of attention."
Eve Ensler · Buy on Amazon
"This letter is my attempt to endow my father with the will and the words to cross the border, and speak the language, of apology so that I can finally be free."
Stephen Fry · Buy on Amazon
"So argues Stephen Fry in the opening of Mythos ( public library ) — his gloriously imaginative, erudite, warmhearted, and subversively funny retelling of the classic Greek myths, illuminating the origins of so many of our cultural givens: the names of planets and constellations and chemical elements and diseases, the words “fraud” and “doom” and “enthusiasm,” our precepts of beauty, our taxonomies of love."
Adam Gopnik · Buy on Amazon
"In A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism ( public library ) — an elegant, impassioned, and rigorously reasoned effort to re-humanize the most humanistic moral and political philosophy our civilization has produced — Adam Gopnik argues that Mill and Taylor pioneered something even greater than a true marriage of equals on the intimate plane of personal partnership: a vision for the building blocks of equality on the grandest human scale."
Favorite Books of 2024 (2024)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2024-12-17.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Marie Howe · 2024 · Buy on Amazon
"Here is my favorite poem from it (which is also one of my favorite poems of all time), and here is another."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of ecological poetry likely resonates with Popova's ongoing exploration of nature's wisdom and the interconnectedness of life, fitting her interest in profound, often overlooked, human experiences. It aligns with her work on finding meaning and beauty in the natural world."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of interconnectedness and the profound impact of seemingly small moments fits Maria Popova's interest in the subtle threads that weave through human experience and meaning. It aligns with her work on finding wonder in the everyday and the interconnectedness of all things."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of Sacks's letters, revealing his intellectual curiosity and profound humanity, fits Maria Popova's interest in the intersection of science, art, and the human condition. It aligns with her ongoing exploration of lives lived with deep inquiry and empathy."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of human connection and the natural world fits Maria Popova's interest in the intersection of science, art, and philosophy. It aligns with her ongoing exploration of how we find meaning and belonging."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the tension between individual consciousness and collective thought fits Maria Popova's interest in the inner life and the nature of being. It aligns with her work on psychology, philosophy, and the enduring questions of human experience."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of chosen families and unconventional relationships fits Maria Popova's interest in the expansive nature of love and belonging. It aligns with her work on finding meaning in the often-overlooked connections that shape our lives."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of philosophical reflections on human connection and the search for meaning fits Maria Popova's interest in enduring wisdom and the contemplative life. It aligns with her work exploring the intersection of art, science, and the human spirit."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of artistic creation and its societal impact fits Maria Popova's interest in the intersection of creativity, philosophy, and the human condition. It aligns with her ongoing work on the enduring power of art and ideas."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of essays likely resonates with Popova's interest in philosophy, social change, and the power of collective action to shape a better future. It aligns with her ongoing exploration of how individuals and communities can foster meaningful transformation."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of celestial phenomena and human connection fits Maria Popova's interest in the intersection of science, philosophy, and the enduring human quest for meaning. It aligns with her work on wonder and the vastness of the universe."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of anonymous, deeply personal reflections on inexpressible emotions aligns with Popova's long-standing interest in the nuances of human experience and the power of language to articulate the ineffable. It fits her exploration of art, science, and philosophy as tools for understanding ourselves and the world."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of surrender and letting go fits Maria Popova's interest in the wisdom of vulnerability and the philosophical underpinnings of personal growth. It aligns with her ongoing work on finding meaning in life's complexities."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of human connection and the search for meaning fits Maria Popova's interest in philosophy, psychology, and the enduring questions of existence. It aligns with her work on finding wisdom in literature and art."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This story of unlikely friendship and problem-solving fits Maria Popova's interest in empathy and the wisdom found in children's literature. It aligns with her work on the enduring power of simple narratives to illuminate complex human truths."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of uncharted existence fits Maria Popova's interest in the profound and the unknown, aligning with her work on consciousness and the human condition. It lands in the same neighborhood as her ongoing fascination with the liminal spaces of experience."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the uncanny and the unseen in nature fits Maria Popova's interest in the intersection of science, philosophy, and the poetic. It aligns with her work on the enduring mysteries of consciousness and the natural world."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the ephemeral and the everyday aligns with Popova's enduring interest in wonder, mindfulness, and finding profundity in the seemingly ordinary. It fits her ongoing work on cultivating a richer inner life."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of simple, everyday joys aligns with Popova's enduring interest in the profound beauty of the ordinary and the wisdom found in quiet observation. It fits The Marginalian's characteristic focus on literature that enriches the inner life."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the material world's inherent wonder fits Maria Popova's interest in finding profundity in the everyday and the scientific. It aligns with her work on the interconnectedness of knowledge and the beauty of overlooked phenomena."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This ancient text's exploration of communication and meaning aligns with Popova's enduring interest in the wisdom of the ages and the enduring power of human connection. It fits her work on the timeless questions that shape our lives."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of a fundamental human experience aligns with Popova's interest in the emotional and philosophical dimensions of life, fitting her work on empathy and vulnerability. It lands in the same neighborhood as her ongoing fascination with the wisdom found in often-overlooked aspects of the human condition."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of language's origins and evolution fits Maria Popova's interest in the interconnectedness of knowledge and the enduring power of words. It aligns with her work on the history of ideas and the human drive to define and understand our world."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of anonymous writings likely appeals to Popova's interest in the enduring power of the human voice and the unexpected places wisdom can be found. It aligns with her work exploring the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the search for meaning."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the future of creativity and consciousness aligns with Maria Popova's enduring interest in the intersection of art, science, and the human spirit. It fits her ongoing project of illuminating timeless wisdom for a modern age."
Best Books of 2025 (2025)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2025-12-13.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Rachel Hébert · Buy on Amazon
"one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive."
Muriel Rukeyser · Buy on Amazon
"Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts — the inaugural title in Marginalian Editions — is a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world: “a phantom of science to haunt inventors who did not know his name, to overreach dimension touching history and touching art”; a mind that unraveled the mysteries of matter by following “the imperative in his loneliness, the creative loneliness of the im…"
Gianni Rodari · Buy on Amazon
"Within a year, he had distilled what he presented at the workshop into a dazzling, deeply original book he titled The Grammar of Fantasy ( public library ), only now available in English with enchanting illustrations by Matthew Forsythe ."
Robert Macfarlane · Buy on Amazon
"This view, readily reflected in many native traditions, is entirely absent from the Western canon, absent from our legislature and our imagination. It is what Robert Macfarlane champions with passion and rigor in Is a River Alive? ( public library ) — a portal of a book, lucid and luminous, hinged on something particular and urgent (the rights of nature movement) but (because this is Robert Macfarlane) opening into the deepest recesses of the existential and the timeless: the measure and mean…"
Chloe Dalton · Buy on Amazon
"In her moving memoir Raising Hare ( public library ), she recounts that catalytic encounter:"
Martine Murray · Buy on Amazon
"Having always felt that great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites."
Jane Ellen Harrison · Buy on Amazon
"“To be a heretic today is almost a human obligation,” Jane Ellen Harrison declared from the peak of her thoroughly heretical life in one of the superb essays collected in Alpha & Omega ( public library )."
Oliver Sacks · Buy on Amazon
"His singular spirit, the quiet passion of his devotion to the human project, and his uncommon insight into the life of the mind come alive in his posthumously published Letters ( public library ), revealing in a new way — in that singular way that only the contact point between one consciousness and another can reveal — his views on the self, the creative process, music, the relationship between art and science, the nature of love, and much more."
Debbie Millman · Buy on Amazon
"This is why Debbie Millman ( yes ) begins her tenderly illustrated Love Letter to a Garden ( public library ) at the very beginning, at that first atom of time chipped from the rib of eternity — the singularity that seeded everything."
Patti Smith · Buy on Amazon
"In her moving memoir Bread of Angels ( public library ), she traces the trajectory of a life stubbornly defiant of the odds — the odds of bodily survival, with a “Proustian childhood” punctuated by tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and the A/H2N2 virus; the odds of success: born into a poor family, her father, unable to afford a car, walking two miles to take the bus for his night shift; the odds of spiritual survival, with losses so harrowing to read about it is hard…"
Arundhati Roy · Buy on Amazon
"Arundhati Roy is one such modern patron saint, and she takes up the complicated question of success in her exquisite memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me ( public library ) — what success means and looks like in the deepest sense, how its shallow metrics can turn a person into “a cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart,” why “making friends with defeat” is “the very opposite of accepting it” and so-called failure might actually be worth striving for."
Kelli Anderson · Buy on Amazon
"Kelli Anderson , maker of material magic , brings that layered history to life in Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape — a large-format two-volume marvel, many years and myriad prototypes in the making, full of paper pulleys and accordion delights that illustrate the biography of each letter."
Pico Iyer · Buy on Amazon
"Pico Iyer , that untiring steward of the human soul, liberates the possibility imprisoned in the paradox with his slender and splendid book Aflame: Learning from Silence ( public library ) — a reckoning with the meaning of life drawn from his time spent in a Benedictine monastery on a journey toward inner stillness and silence, along which his path crosses those of those of fellow travelers in search of unselfing: a 100-year-old Japanese monk and a young Peruvian woman with a love of Wittgens…"
Suleika Jaouad · Buy on Amazon
"I know of no better medicine for the spirit than a daily creative practice , and I know of no better field guide to embarking on one and sticking with it, no better floatation device for the ocean of self-doubt that regularly engulfs all creative work, than The Book of Alchemy ( public library ) by Suleika Jaouad, whose very life is a testament to art as the alchemy of suffering into strength, into connection, into meaning."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Somehow it all felt like a children’s book that didn’t yet exist. So I wrote The Coziest Place on the Moon ( public library ) — a modern fable about how to live with loneliness and what it means to love, illustrated by the wildly talented Sarah Jacoby ."
Best Books on Writing & Creativity of 2013 (2013)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2013-12-18.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"In Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do (public library), editor Meredith Maran seeks out answers on the why and advice on the how of writing from twenty of today’s most acclaimed authors."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (public library), edited by Behance’s 99U editor-in-chief Jocelyn Glei and featuring contributions from a twenty of today’s most celebrated thinkers and doers, delves into the secrets of this holy grail of creativity."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (public library) — her magnificent memoir of the writing life, at once disarmingly personal and brimming with widely resonant wisdom on the most universal challenges and joys of writing."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"In Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors (public library), Brooklyn-based writer Celia Blue Johnson takes us on a guided tour of great writers’ unusual techniques, prompts, and customs of committing thought to paper, from their ambitious daily word quotas to their superstitions to their inventive procrastination and multitasking methods."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"In Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (public library), which comes on the heels of their indispensable guide to mastering the pace of productivity and honing your creative routine, editor Jocelyn Glei and her team at Behance’s 99U pull together another package of practical wisdom from 21 celebrated creative entrepreneurs."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"But in Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career, writer Elizabeth Hyde Stevens sets out to debunk this toxic myth through the life and legacy of the beloved Muppeteer."
Italo Calvino · Buy on Amazon
"Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 (public library) offers more than four decades of wisdom in 600+ pages of personal correspondence by one of the 20th century’s most enchanting writers and most beautiful minds."
Neil Gaiman · Buy on Amazon
"When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art."
Best Business Books of 2010 (2010)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2010-12-15.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Steven Johnson · Buy on Amazon
"Where Good Ideas Come From was one of our 7 must-read books by TED speakers and you can sample it visually here ."
Clay Shirky · Buy on Amazon
"Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age , one of our 5 curated summer readings , takes a fascinating look at how new media and technology are transforming us from consumers to collaborators, harnessing the vast amounts of free-floating human potential."
Kevin Kelly · Buy on Amazon
"What Technology Wants begins with a brilliantly broad definition of “technology” — encompassing everything from language itself to augmented reality — and unfolds into ten insightful universal tendencies that give technology direction."
Rachel Botsman · Buy on Amazon
"What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption — a compelling investigation of the emergent cultural shift from consumerism to community."
Nick Bilton · Buy on Amazon
"I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted dissects our analog past to find the roots of our digital future and our ambivalent present, illustrating with meticulously curated historical anecdotes that new technology has always been met with resistance but has inevitably effected progress that betters human life."
Dan Ariely · Buy on Amazon
"After the Predictably Irrational slam-dunk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely outdid himself in The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home — not only a powerful research-driven look at the practical applications of irrationality, but also a personal story of the youthful accident that left Ariely scarred and sent him into years of painful physical therapy."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This Is NPR: The First Forty Years , a beautifully designed anthology of behind-the-scenes photos, essays and original reporting, and NPR: The First Forty Years , a companion 4-CD compilation featuring some of the most memorable moments from 40 years of news, culture, conversation and commentary."
Neena Schwartz · Buy on Amazon
"A Lab of My Own , is cultural landmark not only as a fascinating look at the feminist plight in science, but also as Schwartz’s deeply personal, powerful and graceful coming out story, with six decades of secrecy revealed for the first time on the pages of the book."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination is an absorbing anthology featuring essays by a wide range of scholars and writers spanning from the entire spectrum between theoretical and empirical."
Carl Schoonover · Buy on Amazon
"Author Carl Schoonover delivers a book that sources its material in solid science, roots its aesthetic in art, and reads like an ambitious literary anthology."
Best Children's Books of 2012 (2012)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2012-12-07.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Saul Bass · Buy on Amazon
"This year, exactly half a century later, Rizzoli reprinted Henri’s Walk to Paris — an absolute gem like only Bass can deliver, at once boldly minimalist and incredibly rich, telling the sweet, aspirational, colorful story of a boy who lives in rural France and dreams of going to Paris."
Gemma Elwin Harris · Buy on Amazon
"The result is Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds ( public library ) — a compendium of fascinating explanations of deceptively simple everyday phenomena, featuring such modern-day icons as Mary Roach , Noam Chomsky , Philip Pullman , Richard Dawkins , and many more, with a good chunk of the proceeds being donated to Save the Children , and also one of the best science books of 2012 ."
Rambharos Jha · Buy on Amazon
"But now comes what’s positively the most exquisite book I’ve ever held in my hands: Waterlife by artist Rambharos Jha , who explores the marine wonderland through vibrant Mithila art, a form of folk painting from Bihar in eastern India."
Gaëtan Dorémus · Buy on Amazon
"From my friends at Enchanted Lion Books , who previously brought us such gems as Blexbolex’s People and Albertine’s Little Bird , comes Bear Despair ( public library ) by French illustrator Gaëtan Dorémus — an utterly lovely wordless story about what happens when you take a bear’s teddy bear."
Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault · Buy on Amazon
"The tenderly illustrated and hand-lettered little gem tells the story of Virginia, who finds herself in a “wolfish” mood, restlessly growling and howling around the house."
Olivier Tallec · Buy on Amazon
"Waterloo & Trafalgar ( public library ) by French illustrator extraordinaire Olivier Tallec , also from my ceaselessly wonderful neighbor Enchanted Lion Books , is a thoughtful, minimalist Cold War allegory that tells the story of two characters who watch each other observantly through the seasons across the narrow walls that separate them."
Edward Gorey · Buy on Amazon
"In this beautiful resurrection, Gorey’s signature blend of wit and dark whimsy shines in each of the micro-vignettes — a fine complement to his beloved alphabet classic, The Gashlycrumb Tinies ."
Janik Coat · Buy on Amazon
"In Hippopposites ( public library ), her children’s book debut, French graphic designer Janik Coat teaches the progeny of the design-inclined about opposites and basic spatial, dimensional, and aesthetic vocabulary through a minimalist red hippo-hero, who remains charmingly catatonic throughout the book."
Germano Zullo and Albertine · Buy on Amazon
"The finest picturebooks have this magical quality of speaking to young hearts with expressive simplicity, but also engaging grown-up minds with subtle reflections on what it means to be human."
James Joyce · Buy on Amazon
"The short story, illustrated by Casey Sorrow in a style reminiscent of Edward Gorey and beautifully typeset by book artist Michael Caine , was only recently rediscovered and makes an offbeat but characteristically masterful addition to Joyce’s well-known body of work."
Lewis Carroll · Buy on Amazon
"Now, from Penguin UK and Yayoi Kusama , Japan’s most celebrated contemporary artist, comes a striking contender for the most visually captivating take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland yet — and one of the year’s best art books ."
Best Children's Books of 2013 (2013)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2013-12-09.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Mark Twain · Buy on Amazon
"While frolicsome in tone and full of wink, the story is colored with subtle hues of grown-up philosophy on the human condition, exploring all the deft ways in which we creatively rationalize our wrongdoing and reconcile the good and evil we each embody."
Elin Kelsey · Buy on Amazon
"But rather than dry science trivia, the message is carried on the wings of poetic admiration for these intricate relationships:"
Øyvind Torseter · Buy on Amazon
"With Torseter’s minimalist yet visually eloquent pen-and-digital line drawings, vaguely reminiscent of Sir Quentin Blake and Tomi Ungerer yet decidedly distinctive, the story is at once simple and profound, amusing and philosophical, the sort of quiet meditation that gently, playfully tickles us into existential inquiry."
Maurice Sendak · Buy on Amazon
"Now, half a century after his iconic Where The Wild Things Are , comes My Brother’s Book ( public library ; UK ) — a bittersweet posthumous farewell to the world, illustrated in vibrant, dreamsome watercolors and written in verse inspired by some of Sendak’s lifelong influences: Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, and the music of Mozart."
Gemma Elwin Harris · Buy on Amazon
"Naturally, I was thrilled to do it, and honored to be a part of something as heartening as Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? ( public library ) — a compendium of primary school children’s funny, poignant, innocent yet insightful questions about science and how life works, answered by such celebrated minds as rockstar physicist Brian Cox , beloved broadcaster and voice-of-nature Sir David Attenborough , legendary linguist Noam Chomsky , science writer extraordinaire Mary Roach , stat-showman Han…"
Isobel Harris · Buy on Amazon
"This is the story of a four-year-old boy living with his well-to-do mother and father in a Manhattan hotel, in which the elevator connects straight to the subway tunnel below the building and plugs right into the heart of the city."
Matthew Olshan · Buy on Amazon
"One should never underestimate a man who loves his finch."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"And what a story it is: A cunning jackal who decides to spare himself the effort of hunting for food by tricking his fellow forest creatures into being gobbled up whole, beginning with his friend the crane; he slyly swallows them one by one, until the whole menagerie fills his belly — a play on the classic Meena motif of the pregnant animal depicted with a baby inside its belly, reflecting the mother-daughter genesis of the ancient art tradition itself."
Daniel Handler · Buy on Amazon
"I think books that are meant to be read in the nighttime ought to confront the very fears that we’re trying to think about."
Fanny Britt · Buy on Amazon
"It’s precisely this experience that comes vibrantly alive in Jane, the Fox, and Me ( public library ) — a stunningly illustrated graphic novel about a young girl named Hélène, who, cruelly teased by the “mean girls” clique at school, finds refuge in Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre."
Matthue Roth · Buy on Amazon
"With stunning black-and-white illustrations by London-based fine artist Rohan Daniel Eason , this gem falls — rises, rather — somewhere between Edward Gorey , Maurice Sendak , and the Graphic Canon series."
Stein Erik Lunde · Buy on Amazon
"Above all, My Father’s Arms Are a Boat is about the quiet way in which boundless love and unconditional assurance can lift even the most pensive of spirits from the sinkhole of existential anxiety."
Best Children's Books of 2014 (2014)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2014-11-18.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Marianne Dubuc · Buy on Amazon
"Once in a long while, a children’s book comes by that is so gorgeous in sight and spirit, so timelessly and agelessly enchanting, that it takes my breath away."
Simona Ciraolo · Buy on Amazon
"At first glance, this seems to be the premise behind Hug Me ( public library | IndieBound ) by animator-turned-children’s-book-author Simona Ciraolo — a sweet story about a young cactus named Felipe, who longs for such softness of contact in a family that sees emotional expression as a sign of weakness."
Maira Kalman · Buy on Amazon
"As a lover of imaginative and intelligent alphabet books and of absolutely everything Maira Kalman does, I find the letters of the alphabet and the words they make insufficient to express the boundless wonderfulness of Kalman’s Ah-Ha to Zig-Zag ( public library | IndieBound ) — the children’s-book counterpart of her magnificent My Favorite Things , which began as a companion to an exhibition Kalman curated to celebrate the anticipated reopening of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum ."
Anne Bertier · Buy on Amazon
"Partway between Norton Juster’s 1963 gem The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics and the endearing Sendak-illustrated Let’s Be Enemies , this unusual, minimalist, maximally imaginative book tells the story of two friends, Little Round and Big Square, who get together to play their favorite game every Wednesday — a game of association and transformation, where “as soon as one of them says a word, they transform themselves into it.”"
Emily Hughes · Buy on Amazon
"More than 150 years later, Hawaiian-born, British-based illustrator Emily Hughes makes an imaginative 21st-century case for this in Wild ( public library | IndieBound ) — an irreverent, charming, and oh-so-delightfully illustrated story, partway between Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are , and one of the most endearing things to come by in decades."
Neil Gaiman · Buy on Amazon
"J.R.R. Tolkien memorably asserted that there is no such thing as writing “for children” and Maurice Sendak similarly scoffed that we shouldn’t shield young minds from the dark . It’s a sentiment that Neil Gaiman — one of the most enchanting and prolific writers of our time, a champion of the creative life , underappreciated artist , disciplined writer , and sage of literature — not only shares, in contemplating but also enacts beautifully in his work."
Oliver Jeffers · Buy on Amazon
"Now comes a worthy modern counterpart by one of the most original and imaginative children’s book storytellers and artists of our time: Once Upon an Alphabet: Short Stories for All the Letters ( public library | IndieBound ) by Oliver Jeffers — an unusual and utterly wonderful tour of the familiar letters that takes a whimsical detour via quirky, lyrical, delightfully alliterative tales for each, and makes a fine addition to the canon of offbeat alphabet books ."
Bárður Oskarsson · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what Faroese children’s book author and artist Bárður Oskarsson does in The Flat Rabbit ( public library | IndieBound ) — a masterwork of minimalist storytelling that speaks volumes about our eternal tussle with our own impermanence ."
Sophie Blackall · Buy on Amazon
"Thankfully, Australian-born, Brooklyn-based illustrator extraordinaire Sophie Blackall , who has given us such treasures as her visual love stories based on Craigslist missed connections and her illustrations for Aldous Huxley’s only children’s book , addresses that dreaded question with equal parts warmth, wisdom, and wit in The Baby Tree ( public library | IndieBound ) — an elegantly age-appropriate explanation of how reproduction works that neither talks down to children’s inherent intelli…"
William Grill · Buy on Amazon
"From Flying Eye Books — the children’s book imprint of British indie press Nobrow, which gave us Freud’s comic biography , Blexbolex’s brilliant No Man’s Land and some gorgeous illustrated histories of aviation and the Space Race — comes Shackleton’s Journey ( public library | IndieBound ), a magnificent chronicle by emerging illustrator William Grill , whose affectionate and enchanting colored-pencil drawings bring to life the legendary explorer and his historic expedition."
Sophie Strady · Buy on Amazon
"The Memory of an Elephant: An Unforgettable Journey ( public library | IndieBound ) is a most unusual picture-book by writer Sophie Strady and illustrator Jean-François Martin ."
Lemony Snicket · Buy on Amazon
"Now comes 29 Myths on the Swinster Pharmacy ( public library | IndieBound ), illustrated by the inimitable Lisa Brown — a project all the more charming for the heartening fact that Handler and Brown are married and a living echelon of a romantic relationship that’s also a creative collaboration ."
Peter Brown · Buy on Amazon
"From children’s book author and illustrator Peter Brown comes My Teacher Is a Monster! (No, I Am Not.) ( public library | IndieBound ) — a sweet contemporary fable about one such moment of seeing through the mask of terrifying otherness the soft heart of our shared humanity."
Peter Sís · Buy on Amazon
"That interplay between Saint-Exupéry the pilot and Saint-Exupéry the imaginative creator of a cultural classic is what celebrated Czech-born American children’s book author and illustrator Peter Sís explores in the beautiful graphic biography The Pilot and the Little Prince ( public library | IndieBound ) — a sensitive account of Saint-Exupéry’s life, underpinned by a fascinating chronicle of how aviation came to change humanity and a poignant undercurrent of political history, absolutely mag…"
Carla Torres · Buy on Amazon
"This concern, coupled with my enormous soft spot for children’s books, is why I was instantly smitten with Larry and Friends ( publisher ) — a heartening story about immigration, diversity, friendship, and acceptance, envisioned by Ecuadorian-born, New-York-based illustrator Carla Torres , who partnered with Belgian-born, Venezuelan-raised, New-York-based writer Nat Jaspar to bring the project, funded on Kickstarter, to life."
Best Children's Books of 2015 (2015)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2015-12-15.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Matthew Burgess · Buy on Amazon
"Such a burst is what rewards the reader, whatever his or her age, in Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings — an uncommonly delightful picture-book celebration of Cummings’s life by Brooklyn-based poet Matthew Burgess, illustrated by Kris Di Giacomo."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"That’s what French illustrator Olivier Tallec accomplishes with extraordinary humor, sensitivity, and warmth in Louis I, King of the Sheep — one of the loveliest children’s books I’ve ever encountered."
JonArno Lawson · Buy on Amazon
"Sidewalk Flowers tells the wordless story of a little girl on her way home with her device-distracted father, a contemporary Little Red Riding Hood walking through the urban forest."
Emily Hughes · Buy on Amazon
"The charming, immeasurably sweet tale calls to mind what Van Gogh wrote to his brother: “Whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done!”"
James Thurber · Buy on Amazon
"Nearly a century later, illustrator and printmaker JooHee Yoon — the talent behind Beastly Verse, one of the best art books of the year — brings the Thurber classic to breathtaking new life in the stunning picture-book The Tiger Who Would Be King."
Jihyeon Lee · Buy on Amazon
"A century and a half after Lewis Carroll plunged his Alice into a fantastical world through the looking-glass, South Korean fine artist and illustrator JiHyeon Lee offers a magnificent modern counterpart in her picture-book debut, Pool — a wordless masterpiece of space, scale, and silence converging to create an underwater world of wonder just beneath the reflective surface of ordinary life."
Mac Barnett · Buy on Amazon
"In Leo: A Ghost Story, beloved children’s book author Mac Barnett and illustrator Christian Robinson subvert the many dimensions of this human tendency in a heartening parable of seeing through difference, meeting the unfamiliar with unflinching friendliness, and dignifying the reality of the other."
Isol · Buy on Amazon
"As the recent honorary aunt of an exceptional small human, I was thrilled to come upon The Menino: A Story Based on Real Events by Argentine singer, author, and illustrator Marisol Misenta, better known as Isol — a delightful developmental odyssey seen from the parallel perspectives of the strange new creature and his joyfully disoriented parents."
Carson Ellis · Buy on Amazon
"In the impossibly wonderful Home, illustrator and children’s book author Carson Ellis presents an imaginative taxonomy of houses and a celebration of the wildly different kinds of people who call them home."
Dr. Seuss · Buy on Amazon
"But the book into which Dr. Seuss poured his most exuberant love of animals, created sometime between 1958 and 1962, was never made public in his lifetime."
Cecilia Ruiz · Buy on Amazon
"How to embrace, or at least making sense of, memory’s necessary fallibilities is what Brooklyn-based Mexican illustrator Cecilia Ruiz explores with equal parts playfulness and poignancy in The Book of Memory Gaps — a collection of fourteen short, lyrical illustrated vignettes, each centered around one protagonist experiencing a particular misfiring of memory."
Best Children's Books of 2016 (2016)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2016-12-12.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Glenn Ringtved · Buy on Amazon
"Now comes a fine addition to the most intelligent and imaginative children’s books about making sense of death — the crowning jewel of them all, even, and not only because it bears what might be the most beautiful children’s book title ever conceived: Cry, Heart, But Never Break"
Jo Ellen Bogart · Buy on Amazon
"but nowhere more delightfully than in The White Cat and the Monk by writer Jo Ellen Bogart and illustrator Sydney Smith — one of four wonderful children’s books about the creative life, which I recently reviewed for The New York Times ."
Amy Novesky · Buy on Amazon
"In Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois — one of four marvelous children’s books about the life of ideas I recently reviewed for The New York Times and a crowning curio among the loveliest picture-books celebrating cultural icons — writer Amy Novesky and illustrator Isabelle Arsenault trace the thread of Bourgeois’s creative development from the formative years of her unusual childhood to the pinnacle of her success as an artist."
Carson Ellis · Buy on Amazon
"That’s what illustrator and author Carson Ellis explores with great subtlety and warmth in Du Iz Tak? — a lyrical and imaginative tale about the cycle of life and the inexorable interdependence of joy and sorrow, trial and triumph, growth and decay."
Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston · Buy on Amazon
"That transcendent stream is what London-based typographic fine artist Sam Winston and Belfast-born, Brooklyn-based artist and children’s book maestro Oliver Jeffers plunge us into with A Child of Books — a serenading invitation into the joyful wonderland of reading, extended by a courageous little girl besotted with books to a little boy timorous to take the dive."
Ingrid Chabbert · Buy on Amazon
"The deconditioning of that dangerous delusion is what French children’s book author Ingrid Chabbert and Spanish artist Guridi explore with imaginative subtlety in The Day I Became a Bird ( public library )."
Alessandro Sanna · Buy on Amazon
"In the astonishingly beautiful and tenderhearted Pinocchio: The Origin Story , Sanna imagines an alternative prequel to the beloved story, a wordless genesis myth of the wood that became Pinocchio, radiating a larger cosmogony of life, death, and the transcendent continuity between the two."
Katrina Goldsaito · Buy on Amazon
"That ennobling, endangered kind of silence is what writer Katrina Goldsaito and illustrator Julia Kuo celebrate in The Sound of Silence — the story of a little boy named Yoshio, who awakens to the elusive beauty of silence amid Tokyo’s bustle and teaches himself its secret language."
Jon Klassen · Buy on Amazon
"Beloved children’s book author and illustrator Jon Klassen explores this disorienting paradox with great subtlety, simplicity, and sensitivity in We Found a Hat — the conclusion of his celebrated hat trilogy, following I Want My Hat Back (2011) and This Is Not My Hat ."
Isol · Buy on Amazon
"That’s what lends imaginative alphabet books their magic and their singular place in the developmental journey, and among the most imaginative is Daytime Visions: An Alphabet by beloved Argentinian musician, artist, and children’s book author Isol."
Jabari Asim · Buy on Amazon
"Writer Jabari Asim and illustrator E.B. Lewis tell the improbable and inspiring origin story of this largehearted legend in Preaching to the Chickens: The Story of Young John Lewis — a superb addition to the greatest picture-book biographies of cultural icons ."
Jenni Desmond · Buy on Amazon
"That’s what London-based illustrator and Sendak Fellow Jenni Desmond explores in The Polar Bear , also among the year’s best science books — the follow-up to The Blue Whale , Desmond’s serenade to the science and life of Earth’s largest-hearted creature, which was among the best science books of 2015."
Anne Herbauts · Buy on Amazon
"Touched by the sincerity of the boy’s curiosity, Herbauts set out to offer her answer in What Color Is the Wind? , translated by Claudia Zoe Bedrick — a largehearted, unusual book that takes the reader on a sensorial adventure, with the tactile magic of The Black Book of Colors and the die-cut delight of Bruno Munari’s visionary vintage gems ."
Phyllis La Farge · Buy on Amazon
"So imagine my enormous gladness at the news that Princeton Architectural Press is bringing The Pancake King back to life as part of the same vintage children’s book revival series that also resurrected the marvelous The Brownstone by graphic design legend (and, incidentally, Chwast’s spouse of four decades) Paula Scher."
Corinne Maier · Buy on Amazon
"This seething cauldron of brilliant complexity is what Swiss writer, economist, historian, and psychoanalyst Corinne Maier and French illustrator Anne Simon explore in Einstein — the third installment in their series of illustrated biographies of thinkers who have shaped modern life, following Freud and Marx ."
Ann Rand · Buy on Amazon
"Four decades later, this forgotten masterpiece is brought to life as What Can I Be? with stunning illustrations by painter and architecture professor Ingrid Fiksdahl King ."
Best Children's Books of 2017 (2017)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2017-12-17.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Nadine Brun-Cosme · Buy on Amazon
"Such a reminder radiates with uncommon tenderness from Big Wolf & Little Wolf (public library) by French author Nadine Brun-Cosme and illustrator Olivier Tallec, originally published in 2009 and reissued in 2017."
Jacqueline Ayer · Buy on Amazon
"More than a century and a half later, illustrator and designer Jacqueline Ayer (May 2, 1930–May 20, 2012) offered a beautiful allegorical counterpart to Blake’s timeless message in her 1962 masterpiece The Paper-Flower Tree (public library) — a warm and whimsically illustrated parable about the moral courage of withstanding cynicism and the generative power of the affectionate imagination."
Beatrice Alemagna · Buy on Amazon
"Now comes a warm and wondrous invitation to remastering the art of fertile solitude in On a Magical Do-Nothing Day (public library) by Italian artist and author Béatrice Alemagna, translated by Jill Davis."
Jacques Goldstyn · Buy on Amazon
"Crowning the canon of arboreal allegories is Bertolt (public library) by French-Canadian geologist-turned-artist Jacques Goldstyn — the uncommonly tender story of an ancient tree named Bertolt and the boy who named and loved it."
Oliver Jeffers · Buy on Amazon
"A mighty antidote to this civilizational impoverishment of imagination comes from Oliver Jeffers, one of the great visual storytellers of our time, in Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth (public library) — Jeffers’s most personal picture-book yet, dedicated to his firstborn child."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"In Sun and Moon (public library), ten Indian folk and tribal artists bring to life the solar and lunar myths of their indigenous traditions in stunningly illustrated stories reflecting on the universal themes of life, love, time, harmony, and our eternal search for a completeness of being."
Vern Kousky · Buy on Amazon
"How we arrive at that secret and sacred knowledge is what Brooklyn-based artist Vern Kousky explores in The Blue Songbird (public library) — a lyrical and tenderhearted parable about finding one’s voice and coming home to oneself."
Best Children's Books of 2018 (2018)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2018-12-18.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Daniel Salmieri · Buy on Amazon
"That is what Brooklyn-based author and illustrator Daniel Salmieri explores with great thoughtfulness and tenderness in Bear and Wolf."
Thomas Scotto · Buy on Amazon
"The uncontainable, unclassifiable beauty of such love is what French writer Thomas Scotto explores with great tenderness in Jerome by Heart."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Having devoted eight years of my life to it, and having a heart swelling with gratitude to the legion of writers and artists who contributed original letters and illustrations for this monumental labor of love, I must proudly include A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader."
Riccardo Bozzi · Buy on Amazon
"That relational, existential mesmerism is what Italian author Riccardo Bozzi explores in The Forest."
Matt de la Peña · 2018 · Buy on Amazon
"That splendid multiplicity of manifestations is what author Matt de la Peña and illustrator Loren Long explore with uncommon loveliness in a book simply titled Love."
James Baldwin · Buy on Amazon
"Baldwin, who considered the book a “celebration of the self-esteem of black children,” began working on it shortly after his historic conversation about race with anthropologist Margaret Mead and set out to find the right illustrator for it."
Ohara Hale · Buy on Amazon
"An uncommonly tenderhearted, wide-eyed invitation to fill our days with lively presence comes in Be Still, Life."
Maurice Sendak · Buy on Amazon
"Presto & Zesto in Limboland, Sendak’s posthumously published collaboration with the writer and director Arthur Yorinks, is not one of those books."
Kirsten Gillibrand · Buy on Amazon
"New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand celebrates ten of these leaders (though, curiously, not Fuller herself) in Bold & Brave: Ten Heroes Who Won Women the Right to Vote."
Kate Messner · Buy on Amazon
"Nedimyer’s story and immensely inspiring work come alive in The Brilliant Deep: Rebuilding the World's Coral Reefs by Kate Messner, illustrated by Matthew Forsythe — a lovely addition to the growing body of picture-book biographies of cultural heroes ."
Jessica Love · Buy on Amazon
"A lovely celebration of the courage to tell the world who you are comes in Julián Is a Mermaid."
Best Children's Books of 2021 (2021)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2021-12-19.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Isabelle Marinov · Buy on Amazon
"Author Isabelle Marinov and artist Deborah Marcero pay tender homage to Hubble’s life and legacy in The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: A Life of Edwin Hubble — a splendid addition to the finest picture-book biographies of revolutionary minds, and one particularly dear to my own heart in light of my ongoing devotion to building New York City’s first public observatory to cast the cosmic enchantment on future Hubbles and Leavitts, to make life more livable for the rest of us by inviting…"
Giuliano Cucco · Buy on Amazon
"Before I Grew Up was born — part elegy and part exultation, reverencing the vibrancy of life: the life of feeling and of the imagination, the life of landscape and of light, the life of nature and of the impulse for beauty that irradiates what is truest and most beautiful about human nature."
Corinna Luyken · Buy on Amazon
"Artist and author Corinna Luyken draws on this intimate connection between the sylvan and the human in The Tree in Me — a lyrical meditation on the root of creativity, strength, and connection, with a spirit and sensibility kindred to her earlier emotional intelligence primer in the form of a painted poem."
Monika Vaicenavičienė · Buy on Amazon
"That is what Lithuanian illustrator and storyteller Monika Vaicenavičienė contemplates in What Is a River? — part prose poem and part encyclopedia, exploring the many things a river is and can be, ecologically and existentially."
Elizabeth Pulford · Buy on Amazon
"From the land of Aurora australis comes Seeking an Aurora — a work of transcendence and tenderness by New Zealand author-artist duo Elizabeth Pulford and Anne Bannock, whose spare poetic prose and soulful paintings interleave to enlush an inner landscape of wonder, suspended between the creaturely and the cosmic."
Maira Kalman · Buy on Amazon
"In Darling Baby, artist Maira Kalman, a poet of chromatic tenderness, composes an uncommon ode to aliveness, to the vibrant beauty of life, life that is very new and life that is very old."
Matthew Burgess · Buy on Amazon
"This sentiment — the most precise and poetic summation of Sister Corita’s credo — is the epigraph that opens Burgess’s loving picture-book biography Make Meatballs Sing: The Life and Art of Corita Kent, created in collaboration with the Corita Art Center and illustrated by artist Kara Kramer with patterned, textured, sensitive vibrancy consonant with Corita’s art spirit and sensibility."
Travis Jonker · Buy on Amazon
"This paradox of transformation comes alive with uncommon tenderness, through a singular lens — the science and poetics of Earth’s water cycle — in Blue Floats Away by Travis Jonker, an elementary school librarian by day and an author by night, and Grant Snider, an orthodontist by day and an artist (yes, that artist) by night."
Maria Popova · Buy on Amazon
"While the story is inspired by a beloved young human in my own life, who is living with the same rare and wondrous variation of body as the real-life mollusk protagonist, it is a larger story about science and the poetry of existence, about time and chance, genetics and gender, love and death, evolution and infinity — concepts often too abstract for the human mind to fathom, often more accessible to the young imagination; concepts made fathomable in the concrete, finite life of one tiny, unus…"
Best Design Books of 2012 (2012)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2012-11-27.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This season, it’s The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design — an impressive, exhaustive, rigorously researched, and beautifully produced compendium of 500 seminal designs spanning newspapers, magazines, posters, advertisements, typefaces, logos, corporate design, record covers, and moving graphics, examined through 3000 color and 300 black-and-white illustrations in their proper historical and sociocultural context."
Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn · Buy on Amazon
"Significant Objects reminds us of the storiness of our lived materiality — of the artifacts we imbue with meaning, with loves and losses, with hopes and desperations."
Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne · Buy on Amazon
"From publisher Laurence King , who brought us the epic Saul Bass monograph , and the prolific design writer Steven Heller with design critic Veronique Vienne comes 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design ( UK ; public library ) — a thoughtfully curated inventory of abstract concepts that defined and shaped the art and craft of graphic design, each illustrated with exemplary images and historical context."
Paola Antonelli · Buy on Amazon
"Talk to Me ( public library ) is itself a meta-object in the exhibition — exquisitely produced and thoughtfully constructed to contextualize and illuminate the nearly 200 projects in the show, this analog artifact flows beautifully and seamlessly into the digital and mechanical world it encapsulates."
Louise Fili · Buy on Amazon
"But Fili’s greatest gift is perhaps the extraordinary ability to seek out vintage gems — and to do so with great taste — which she then reimagines and combines into entirely new designs that aren’t mere homage to the past but, rather, an entirely original visual language with an entirely original point of view."
Sandra Rendgen · Buy on Amazon
"Information Graphics by art historian Sandra Rendgen explores the four key aspects of visualizing data — Location, Time, Category, and Hierarchy — through exemplary work from more than 200 projects, alongside essays by information architect and TED founder Richard Saul Wurman , Guardian Datablog editor Simon Rogers , Density Design’s Paolo Ciuccarelli , and Rendgen herself."
Penny Fowler · Buy on Amazon
"Frank Lloyd Wright: Graphic Artist ( public library ) is an essential bible of design and cultural history."
Ron van der Vlugt · Buy on Amazon
"Logo Life: Life Histories of 100 Famous Logos ( public library ) from Dutch publisher BIS and creative director Ron van der Vlugt offers exactly what it says on the tin, covering brands as diverse yet uniformly enduring as Apple, LEGO, adidas, Google, Xerox, and VISA."
Eric McLuhan and William Kuhns · Buy on Amazon
"In The Book of Probes , Eric McLuhan , Marshall's son, partners with media theorist William Kuhns and legendary graphic designer David Carson to bring to life McLuhan’s sharpest probes culled from his books, speeches, classes, and various writings published between 1945 and 1980."
Frank Chimero · Buy on Amazon
"From my studiomate Frank Chimero — one of the most talented designers, most eloquent writers, and most dimensional thinkers I know — comes The Shape of Design , an exquisite meditation on what makes great design."
Best History Books of 2012 (2012)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2012-12-10.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Teresa Carpenter · Buy on Amazon
"New York, as it emerges from these pages, is by turns a wicked city, a compassionate city, a muscular city, a vulnerable city, an artistic wonder, an aesthetic disaster, but forever a resilient city — and one loved fiercely by its inhabitants."
Faramerz Dabhoiwala · Buy on Amazon
"The Origins of Sex goes on to reverse-engineer how modern ideas about sexual freedom and gender equality coalesced out of the stormy sexual attitudes and behaviors of 17th, 18th, and 19th-century England, exposing a rich new layer of understanding humanity’s most intimate mechanism for relating to self and other."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the historical regulation of desire fits Maria Popova's interest in the intersection of culture, psychology, and societal norms. It aligns with her work on understanding enduring human questions across disciplines."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"The collection is thus at once a visual record of the evolution of science and of its opposite — the earliest examples, dating as far back as the sixteenth century, portray the mythic order in which God created Earth, and the diagrams’ development over the centuries is as much a progression of science as it is of culture, society, and paradigm."
Susan Sontag · Buy on Amazon
"Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"These images — artful, subversive, unapologetic in their unreality — serve sometimes to amuse and entertain, sometimes to deliberately deceive, sometimes to comment on social and political issues, and always to give pause with how they tease and taunt our assumptions of optical reality and visual representation."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This book's exploration of photography's foundational concepts aligns with Maria Popova's enduring interest in the history of ideas and their impact on human perception. It offers a concise yet comprehensive overview of the medium's evolution, fitting her penchant for insightful cultural retrospectives."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of foundational design concepts aligns with Maria Popova's interest in the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of creative fields. It offers a concise exploration of influential ideas that have shaped visual communication."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of influential film concepts aligns with Maria Popova's interest in the intersection of creativity, history, and intellectual currents. It offers a concise exploration of pivotal ideas that shaped cinematic language."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This book's exploration of foundational art concepts aligns with Maria Popova's interest in intellectual history and the evolution of human thought. It offers a concise overview of influential ideas, fitting her annual round-ups of significant works."
Kurt Vonnegut · Buy on Amazon
"What makes the anthology particularly sublime is that strange, endearing way in which so much of what Vonnegut wrote about to his friends, family, editors, and critics appears at first glance mundane but somehow peels away at the very fabric of his character and reveals the most tender boundaries of his soul."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"When colleagues ask me what I feel are the greatest milestones in medicine, I usually offer three events. the first involves the use of ligatures to stem the flow of blood during surgeries, for example, as performed by the French surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510-1590). he promoted ligature (e.g., tying off with twine) of blood vessels to stem hemorrhage during amputations, instead of the traditional method of burning the stump with a hot iron to stop bleeding. The second key milestone includes met…"
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of forgotten narratives aligns with Maria Popova's interest in uncovering overlooked intellectual and cultural histories. It fits her ongoing project of illuminating the often-unseen threads that connect human thought and creativity."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This ancient text on healing practices fits Maria Popova's interest in the enduring wisdom of the past and the intersection of science and philosophy. It aligns with her work exploring the evolution of human knowledge and our relationship with the natural world."
Peter Toohey · Buy on Amazon
"Boredom is, in the Darwinian sense, an adaptive emotion. Its purpose, that is, may be designed to help one flourish."
Martin Clayton · Buy on Amazon
"As a great artist, Leonardo had two advantages over his contemporary anatomists. First of all, as a sculptor, engineer, architect, he had an intuitive understanding of form — when he dissected a body, he could understand in a very fluid way how the different parts of the body fit together, worked together."
Eric Kandel · Buy on Amazon
"A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of depression, but a Beethoven symphony reveals what that depression feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of mind, yet they are rarely brought together."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Magnificent in both its scope and its ambitious physicality, A Glorious Enterprise is a fascinating miniature museum in and of itself, exploring the cultural history of natural history with equal parts rigor and romanticism — the hallmark of great science."
Best Music Books of 2012 (2012)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2012-12-21.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
David Byrne · Buy on Amazon
"Or, as Byrne puts it, “how music might be molded before it gets to us, what determines if it gets to us at all, and what factors external to the music itself can make it resonate for us."
Gary Marcus · Buy on Amazon
"But what makes Guitar Zero exceptional isn’t simply that it simultaneously calls into question the myth of the music instinct and confronts the idea that talent is merely a myth — at its heart is a much bigger question about the boundaries of our capacity for transformation and, ultimately, the mechanics of fulfillment and purpose."
Kay Larson · Buy on Amazon
"Fifteen years in the making, it is without a doubt the richest, most stimulating, most absorbing book I’ve read in ages — superbly researched, exquisitely written, weaving together a great many threads of cultural history into a holistic understanding of both Cage as an artist and Zen as a lens on existence."
Frank Young · Buy on Amazon
"More than a mere chronicle of the family’s rise to success, this beautifully illustrated graphic and tenderly told story explores everything from the nature of creativity to civil rights to the frictions between poverty and wealth — and, above all, the boundless power of love, music, and the love of music."
Enzo Gentile · Buy on Amazon
"a grown-up Beatle geek’s counterpart to the lovely vintage children’s book We Love You Beatles , collecting more than 200 rare cartoon strips dedicated to John, Paul, George, and Ringo to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their first single, “Love Me Do.”"
Beck · Buy on Amazon
"The songs come with original full-color illustrations by celebrated contemporary artists, illustrators and designers like Jessica Hische and The Rumpus’ s Ian Huebert, inspired by the aesthetic of the golden age of home-play."
Elliott Schwartz · Buy on Amazon
"Music: Ways of Listening is to listening what Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book is to reading — a timeless, yet remarkably timely meditation of a skill-intensive art we all too frequently mistake for a talent or, worse yet, a static pre-wired capacity."
Best Photography Books of 2013 (2013)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2013-12-17.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Xavier Barral · Buy on Amazon
"At the intersection of art and science, these mesmerizing images belong somewhere between Berenice Abbot’s vintage science photography, the most enchanting aerial photography of Earth, and the NASA Art Project."
Brandon Stanton · Buy on Amazon
"These portraits — poignant, poetic, playful, heartbreaking, heartening — dance across the entire spectrum of the human condition not with the mockingly complacent lens of a freak-show gawker but with the affectionate admiration and profound respect that one human holds for another."
David Maisel · Buy on Amazon
"From cyanide-leaching ponds to open-pit mines to the sprawl of urbanization, Maisel’s mesmerizing photographs — which, without context, could be mistaken as much for abstract impressionism as they could for cellular microscopy — capture fragments of the landscape that “correspond to the structure of human thought and feeling.”"
Elizabeth Partridge · Buy on Amazon
"In Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning ( public library ), Lange’s goddaughter Elizabeth Partridge , an accomplished and prolific author in her own right, presents a first-of-its-kind career-spanning monograph of the legendary photographer’s work, placing her most famous and enduring photographs in a biographical context that adds new dimension to these iconic images."
Jimmy Nelson · Buy on Amazon
"The magnificent results are now gathered in Before They Pass Away ( public library ) — a lavish large-format tome featuring 500 of Nelson’s striking photographs, standing somewhere between Jeroen Toirkens’s visual catalog of Earth’s last nomads and Rachel Sussman’s photographic record of the oldest living things in the world ."
Mariana Cook · Buy on Amazon
"On the heels of Aung San Suu Kyi’s timeless wisdom on freedom from fear comes Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution ( public library ) by New-York-based photographer Mariana Cook — who gave us this heart-warming portrait of Maurice Sendak and his dog Herman , a fine addition to history’s beloved literary pets ."
Vivian Maier · Buy on Amazon
"But it wasn’t until 2013 that the most intimate and revealing of her photographs were at last released in Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits ( public library ) — a collection befitting the year of the “selfie” and helping to officially declare this the season of the creative self-portrait ."
Best Psychology & Philosophy Books of 2011 (2011)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2011-12-22.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
David McRaney · Buy on Amazon
"From confirmation bias — our tendency to seek out information, whether or not it’s true, that confirms our existing beliefs, something all the more perilous in the age of the filter bubble — to Dunbar’s Number , our evolution-imposed upper limit of 150 friends, which pulls into question those common multi-hundred Facebook “friendships,” McRaney blends the rigor of his career as a journalist with his remarkable penchant for synthesis, humanizing some of the most important psychology research o…"
F. S. Michaels · Buy on Amazon
"The governing pattern a culture obeys is a master story– one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture."
Daniel Kahneman · 2011 · Buy on Amazon
"Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health… [My aim is to] improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them.”"
James W. Pennebaker · Buy on Amazon
"From gender differences that turn everything you know on its head to an analysis of the language of suicidal vs. non-suicidal poets to unexpected insights into famous historical documents, The Secret Life of Pronouns gleans insights with infinite applications, from government-level lie-detection to your everyday email inbox, and makes a fine addition to these 5 essential books on language ."
David Eagleman · Buy on Amazon
"Bringing a storyteller’s articulate and fluid narrative to a scientist’s quest, Eagleman dances across an incredible spectrum of issues — brain damage, dating, drugs, beauty, synesthesia, criminal justice, artificial intelligence, optical illusions and much more — to reveal that things we take as passive givens, from our capacity for seeing a rainbow to our ability to overhear our name in a conversation we weren’t paying attention to, are the function of remarkable neural circuitry, biologica…"
Joanna Bourke · Buy on Amazon
"Ultimately, What It Means to Be Human is less an answer than it is an invitation to a series of questions, questions about who and what we are as a species, as souls, and as nodes in a larger complex ecosystem of sentient beings."
Julian Baggini · Buy on Amazon
"The topic of personal identity is strictly speaking nonexistent. It’s important to recognize that we are not the kind of things that simply popped into existence at birth, continue to exist, the same thing, then die off the cliff edge or go into another realm. We are these very remarkably ordered collections of things."
Martin Seligman · Buy on Amazon
"Relieving the states that make life miserable… has made building the states that make life worth living less of a priority. The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the ‘good life.'”"
V. S. Ramachandran · Buy on Amazon
"As heady as our progress [in the sciences of the mind] has been, we need to stay completely honest with ourselves and acknowledge that we have only discovered a tiny fraction of what there is to know about the human brain."
Jesse Bering · Buy on Amazon
"If humans are really natural rather than supernatural beings, what accounts for our beliefs about souls, immortality, a moral ‘eye in the sky’ that judges us, and so forth?”"
David DeSteno · Buy on Amazon
"The derivation of the word ‘character’ comes from an ancient Greek term referring to the indelible marks stamped on coins. Once character was pressed into your mind or soul, people assumed it was fixed. But what modern science repeatedly shows is that this just isn’t the case."
Best Psychology & Philosophy Books of 2012 (2012)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2012-12-04.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
John Brockman · Buy on Amazon
"Together, they construct a powerful toolkit of meta-cognition — a new way to think about thinking itself."
Cheryl Strayed · Buy on Amazon
"The book is titled after Dear Sugar #64 , which remains my own favorite by a long stretch."
Kay Larson · Buy on Amazon
"Fifteen years in the making, it is without a doubt the richest, most stimulating, most absorbing book I’ve read in ages — superbly researched, exquisitely written, weaving together a great many threads of cultural history into a holistic understanding of both Cage as an artist and Zen as a lens on existence."
Susan Sontag · Buy on Amazon
"As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 ( public library ), the second published volume of her diaries, offers an intimate glimpse of the inner life of a woman celebrated as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable intellectuals, yet one who felt as deeply and intensely as she thought."
Alex Cornell · Buy on Amazon
"The result is Breakthrough!: 90 Proven Strategies to Overcome Creative Block and Spark Your Imagination ( public library ) — a small but potent compendium of field-tested, life-approved insight on optimizing the creative process from some of today’s most exciting artists, designers, illustrators, writers, and thinkers."
Jim Holt · Buy on Amazon
"Seeking to tease apart the most central existential question of all — why there is a world, rather than nothingness, a question he says is “so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple it would occur only to a child” — Holt pores through millennia of science and theology, theory by theory, to question our most basic assumptions about the world, reality, and the nature of fact itself, with equal parts intelligence, irreverence, and insight."
Charles Duhigg · 2012 · Buy on Amazon
"So argues New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business ( public library ), proposing that the root of adhering to our highest ideals — exercising regularly, becoming more productive, sleeping better, reading more, cultivating the discipline necessary for building successful ventures — is in understanding the science and psychology of how habits work."
Dan Ariely · Buy on Amazon
"Adding to his track record> of doing precisely that is The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves ( public library ), in which Ariely asks a seemingly simple question — “is dishonesty largely restricted to a few bad apples, or is it a more widespread problem?” — and reveals the surprising, illuminating, often unsettling truths that underpin the uncomfortable answer."
Jonathan Gottschall · Buy on Amazon
"In The Storytelling Animal ( public library ), educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively."
Susan Cain · Buy on Amazon
"In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking , Susan Cain dissects the anatomy of this socially-induced guilt and delves deep into one of psychology’s most enduring tenets — that the single most important defining aspect of personality is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum — to break through the “long and storied tradition” of neatly mapping this binary division onto others, like submission and leadership, loneliness and happiness, settling and success."
Frank Partnoy · Buy on Amazon
"This exploration of the psychology and utility of waiting aligns with Maria Popova's enduring interest in the wisdom of slowness and deliberate contemplation. It fits her work on how embracing pauses can foster creativity and deeper understanding."
Christopher Hitchens · Buy on Amazon
"But what makes the book truly extraordinary is his profound oscillation between his characteristic, proud, almost stubborn self-awareness — that ability to look on with the eye of the critic rather than the experiencing self — and a vulnerability that is so clearly foreign to him, yet so breathlessly inevitable in dying."
Best Psychology & Philosophy Books of 2013 (2013)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2013-12-02.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Alexandra Horowitz · Buy on Amazon
"It is undoubtedly one of the most stimulating books of the year, if not the decade, and the most enchanting thing I’ve read in ages."
Claudia Hammond · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what acclaimed BBC broadcaster and psychology writer Claudia Hammond explores in Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception ( public library ) — a fascinating foray into the idea that our experience of time is actively created by our own minds and how these sensations of what neuroscientists and psychologists call “mind time” are created."
Roman Krznaric · Buy on Amazon
"This is a book for those who are looking for a job that is big enough for their spirit, something more than a ‘day job’ whose main function is to pay the bills."
Daniel C. Dennett · Buy on Amazon
"In Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking ( public library ), the inimitable Daniel Dennett , one of our greatest living philosophers, offers a set of thinking tools — “handy prosthetic imagination-extenders and focus holders” — that allow us to “think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions” — to enhance your cognitive toolkit ."
Maria Konnikova · Buy on Amazon
"Bridging ample anecdotes from the adventures of Conan Doyle’s beloved detective with psychology studies both classic and cutting-edge, Konnikova builds a compelling case at the intersection of science and secular spiritualism, stressing the power of rigorous observation alongside a Buddhist-like, Cageian emphasis on mindfulness."
Neil Gaiman · Buy on Amazon
"When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art ."
Paul Tough · Buy on Amazon
"In How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character ( public library ) — a necessary addition to these fantastic reads on education — Paul Tough , whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker , Slate , Esquire , The New York Times , sets out to investigate the essential building blocks of character through the findings and practical insight of exceptional educators and bleeding-edge researchers."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"One of the most provocative contributions comes from Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman — author of the indispensable Thinking, Fast and Slow , one of the best psychology books of 2012 — who examines “the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking.”"
Jocelyn Glei · Buy on Amazon
"Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind ( public library ), edited by Behance’s 99U editor-in-chief Jocelyn Glei , delves into the secrets of this holy grail of creativity."
Adam Grant · Buy on Amazon
"So argues organizational psychology wunderkind Adam Grant ( remember him?), the youngest-tenured and highest-rated Wharton professor at my alma mater, in Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success ( public library )."
Stephen Grosz · Buy on Amazon
"In The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves ( public library ), psychoanalyst and University College London professor Stephen Grosz builds on more than 50,000 hours of conversation from his quarter-century experience as a practicing psychoanalyst to explore the machinery of our inner life, with insights that are invariably profound and often provocative — for instance, a section titled “How praise can cause a loss of confidence,” in which Grosz writes:"
Dan Pink · Buy on Amazon
"So argues Dan Pink in To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others ( public library ; UK ) — a provocative anatomy of the art-science of “selling” in the broadest possible sense of the word, substantiated by ample research spanning psychology, behavioral economics, and the social sciences."
Philippa Perry · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what writer and psychotherapist Philippa Perry offers in How To Stay Sane ( public library ; UK ), part of The School of Life’ s wonderful series reclaiming the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet immensely helpful guides to modern living."
Best Psychology & Philosophy Books of 2014 (2014)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2014-12-01.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Werner Herzog · Buy on Amazon
"His answers are unfiltered and to-the-point, often poignant but always unsentimental, not rude but refusing to infest the garden of honest human communication with the Victorian-seeded, American-sprouted weed of pointless politeness."
Sara Maitland · Buy on Amazon
"That paradox is what British author Sara Maitland explores in How to Be Alone ( public library | IndieBound ) — the latest installment in The School of Life’ s thoughtful crusade to reclaim the traditional self-help genre in a series of intelligent, non-self-helpy yet immeasurably helpful guides to such aspects of modern living as finding fulfilling work , cultivating a healthier relationship with sex , worrying less about money , and staying sane ."
Sam Harris · Buy on Amazon
"In Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion ( public library | IndieBound ), philosopher, neuroscientist, and mindful skeptic Sam Harris offers a contemporary addition to this lineage of human inquiry — an extraordinary and ambitious masterwork of such integration between science and spirituality, which Harris himself describes as “by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people cons…"
Shaun Usher · Buy on Amazon
"This year, the best of them were released in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience ( public library | IndieBound ) — the aptly titled, superb collection featuring contributions from such cultural icons as Virginia Woolf, Roald Dahl, Louis Armstrong, Kurt Vonnegut, Nick Cave, Richard Feynman, Jack Kerouac, and more."
Sarah Lewis · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what curator and art historian Sarah Lewis , who has under her belt degrees from Harvard and Oxford, curatorial positions at the Tate Modern and the MoMA, and an appointment on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, examines in The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery ( public library | IndieBound ) — an exploration of how “discoveries, innovations, and creative endeavors often, perhaps even only, come from uncommon ground” and why this “improba…"
Alan Lightman · Buy on Amazon
"But that is precisely what The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew ( public library | IndieBound ) is — a spectacular journey to the frontiers of theoretical physics, exploring how the possibility of multiple universes illuminates the heart of the human experience and our quest for Beauty, Truth, and Meaning."
Anne Lamott · Buy on Amazon
"Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace ( public library | IndieBound ) shines a sidewise gleam at Lamott’s much-loved meditations on why perfectionism kills creativity and how we keep ourselves small by people-pleasing to explore the boundless blessings of our ample imperfections, from which our most expansive and transcendent humanity springs."
David DeSteno · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what psychologist David DeSteno , director of Northeastern University’s Social Emotions Lab, explores in The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More ( public library | IndieBound )."
Amanda Palmer · Buy on Amazon
"The most urgent clarion call echoing throughout the book, which builds on Amanda’s terrific TED talk , is for loosening our harsh and narrow criteria for what it means to be an artist, and, most of all, for undoing our punishing ideas about what renders one a not-artist, or — worse yet — a not-artist-enough."
Leonard Shlain · Buy on Amazon
"The result is Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding Da Vinci’s Creative Genius ( public library | IndieBound ) — an astonishing intellectual, and at times spiritual, journey into the center of human creativity via the particular brain of one undereducated, left-handed, nearly ambidextrous, vegetarian, pacifist, gay, singularly creative Renaissance male, who Shlain proposes was able to attain a different state of consciousness than “practically all other humans.”"
Pico Iyer · Buy on Amazon
"The delicate bridling of that paradox is what novelist and essayist Pico Iyer explores in The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere ( public library | IndieBound ) — a beautifully argued case for the unexpected pleasures of “sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it,” revealed through one man’s sincere record of learning to “take care of his loved ones, do his job, and hold on to some direction in a madly accelerating world.”"
Laurel Braitman · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what Senior TED Fellow Laurel Braitman explores in Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves ( public library | IndieBound )."
Edward Slingerland · Buy on Amazon
"Our lives, Slingerland argues, are often like “a massive game of Mindball,” when we find ourselves continually caught in this loop of trying so hard that we stymie our own efforts."
Scott Stossel · Buy on Amazon
"In his superb mental health memoir, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind ( public library | IndieBound ), Stossel follows in the tradition of Montaigne to use the lens of his own experience as a prism for illuminating insight on the quintessence of our shared struggles with anxiety."
Best Science Books of 2011 (2011)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2011-12-12.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Rebecca Skloot · Buy on Amazon
"Skloot weaves a fascinating and tender detective story about HeLa’s legacy through the discovery of Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, who didn’t know her mother but who always knew she wanted to be a scientist."
David Deutsch · 2011 · Buy on Amazon
"Fluidly switching between evolutionary biology, quantum physics, mathematics, philosophy, ancient history and more, Deutsch offers surprisingly — or, perhaps knowing his work, unsurprisingly — plausible answers to everything from why beauty exists to what is infinity."
Lauren Redniss · Buy on Amazon
"In Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout , artist Lauren Redniss tells the story of Marie Curie — one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of science, a pioneer in researching radioactivity, a field the very name for which she coined, and not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize but also the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and in two different sciences — through the two invisible but immensely powerful forces that guided her life: radioactivity a…"
Clifford Pickover · Buy on Amazon
"In The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics , acclaimed science author Clifford Pickover offers a sweeping, lavishly illustrated chronology of comprehension by way of physics, from the Big Bang (13.7 billion BC) to Quantum Resurrection (> 100 trillion), through such watershed moments as Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion and gravity (1687), the invention of fiber optics (1841), Einstein’s general theory of relativity (1915),…"
Stephen Jay Gould · Buy on Amazon
"The essays blend a head-spinning spectrum of serious scientific inquiry with the storytelling of fine fiction."
Richard Dawkins · Buy on Amazon
"This year, Dawkins released his first sort-of-children’s book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True , also among the year’s best children’s books — a scientific primer for the world, its magic, and its origin, an antidote to the creationism mythology teaching young readers how to replace myth with science, and a fine addition to our favorite soft-of-children’s nonfiction ."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Field Notes on Science and Nature , one of five fascinating peeks inside the notebooks of great creators , offers an unprecedented look at the inner workings of scientific inquiry and observation."
Jim Ottoviani and Leland Myrick · Buy on Amazon
"Feynman is a charming, affectionate, and inspiring graphic novel biography from librarian by day, comic nonfictionist by night Jim Ottoviani and illustrator Leland Myrick , and a fine addition to our 10 favorite masterpieces of graphic nonfiction ."
John Brockman · Buy on Amazon
"First came The Mind , followed by Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Societies, Art, Power, and Technology — a treasure chest of insight true to the promise of its title, featuring essays and interviews by and with (alas, all-male) icons such as Brian Eno , George Dyson and Douglas Rushkoff , as well as Brain Pickings favorites like Denis Dutton , Stewart Brand , Clay Shirky and Dan Dennett ."
Keith Devlin · Buy on Amazon
"Keith Devlin tells his incredible and important story in The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution , tracing how Fibonacci revolutionized everything from education to economics by making arithmetic available to the masses."
Max Brockman · Buy on Amazon
"The provocative yet digestible essays are intended for the curious layperson, which Brockman reminds us in the introduction doesn’t come without risk: “If you’re an academic who writes about your work for a general audience, you’re thought by some of your colleagues to be wasting your time and perhaps endangering your academic career."
Best Science Books of 2012 (2012)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2012-11-19.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Till Roenneberg · Buy on Amazon
"German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg demonstrates through a wealth of research that our sleep patterns have little to do with laziness and other such scorned character flaws, and everything to do with biology."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"The project is a testament to the idea that ignorance is what drives discovery and wonder is what propels science — a reminder to, as Rilke put it, live the questions and delight in reflecting on the mysteries themselves."
Ian Stewart · Buy on Amazon
"Far from being a mere math primer or trivia aid, In Pursuit of the Unknown is an essential piece of modern literacy, wrapped in an articulate argument for why this kind of knowledge should be precisely that."
Stuart Firestein · Buy on Amazon
"Science produces ignorance, and ignorance fuels science."
David K. Randall · Buy on Amazon
"As I spent more time investigating the science of sleep, I began to understand that these strange hours of the night underpin nearly every moment of our lives."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution catalogs 230 tree-like branching diagrams, culled from 450 years of mankind’s visual curiosity about the living world and our quest to understand the complex ecosystem we share with other organisms, from bacteria to birds, microbes to mammals."
Neil deGrasse Tyson · Buy on Amazon
"When I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than most of those facts is that the Universe is in us."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Thoughtfully curated, beautifully produced, and utterly transfixing, Hidden Treasure unravels our civilization’s relationship with that most human of humannesses."
Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw · Buy on Amazon
"The picture of the universe we inhabit, as revealed by modern physics, [is] one of underlying simplicity; elegant phenomena dance away out of sight and the diversity of the macroscopic world emerges."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Big Questions from Little People is a wonderful complement to The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science and is certain to give you pause about much of what you thought you knew, or at the very least rekindle that childlike curiosity about and awe at the basic fabric of the world we live in."
Best Science Books of 2014 (2014)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2014-11-24.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Alan Lightman · Buy on Amazon
"Science does not reveal the meaning of our existence, but it does draw back some of the veils."
Diane Ackerman · Buy on Amazon
"With bewitchingly lyrical language, Ackerman paints the backdrop of our explosive evolution and its yin-yang of achievement and annihilation:"
Manuel Lima · Buy on Amazon
"In a time when more than half of the world’s population live in cities, surrounded on a daily basis by asphalt, cement, iron, and glass, it’s hard to conceive of a time when trees were of immense and tangible significance to our existence."
E.O. Wilson · Buy on Amazon
"We’ve learned enough about the Universe and ourselves to ask these questions in an answerable, testable form."
Roberto Trotta · Buy on Amazon
"What emerges is a narrative that explains some of the most complex science in modern astrophysics, told in language that sounds like a translation of ancient storytelling, like the folkloric fables of African mythology, the kinds of tales written before we had the words for phenomena, before we had the understanding that demanded those words."
Dan Falk · Buy on Amazon
"If anything in Shakespeare’s late plays points to Galileo, this is it: Jupiter, so often invoked by characters in so many of the plays, never actually makes a personal appearance — until this point in Cymbeline."
Dave Goulson · Buy on Amazon
"If we could travel to this ancient land, we might be too concerned with the dangers posed by the larger wildlife to notice that there were no flowers; no orchids, buttercups or daisies, no cherry blossoms, no foxgloves in the wooded glades."
John Brockman · Buy on Amazon
"The beginning of the 21st century is a watershed in modern science, a time that will forever change our understanding of the universe."
Dr. Hana Roš and Dr. Matteo Farinella · Buy on Amazon
"This remarkable collaboration between neuroscientist Dr. Hana Roš and neuroscience-PhD-turned-illustrator Dr. Matteo Farinella, with support from the Wellcome Trust, explains the inner workings of the brain in delightful and illuminating black-and-white illustrations, covering everything from perception and hallucinations to memory and emotional recall to consciousness and the difference between the mind and the brain."
Sam Kean · Buy on Amazon
"Four years after The Disappearing Spoon, his wonderful chronicle of crazy tales from the periodic table, science writer Sam Kean returns with The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery — a mind-bending tour of the mind, which Kean opens with a fascinating example, at once very personal and powerfully illustrative of the brain’s humbling complexity:"
Randall Munroe · Buy on Amazon
"I’ve been using math to try to answer weird questions for as long as I can remember."
Jeremy Webb · Buy on Amazon
"You might think a book about nothing sounds suspiciously like an oxymoron."
xYz (Joanna Tilsley) · Buy on Amazon
"Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F, a “super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun,” to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to see Earth from space."
Christian Rudder · Buy on Amazon
"Rudder is the co-founder of the dating site OKCupid and the data scientist behind its now-legendary trend analyses, but he is also — as it becomes immediately clear from his elegant writing and wildly cross-disciplinary references — a lover of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and all the other humanities that make us human and that, importantly in this case, enhance and ennoble the hard data with dimensional insight into the richness of the human experience."
Annu Kilpeläinen · Buy on Amazon
"This simple yet imaginative primer on science via art explores natural selection, continental drift, what killed the dinosaurs, how birds descended from them, and all the other processes and phenomena that took us to where we are today."
Best Science Books of 2015 (2015)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2015-12-11.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Oliver Sacks · 2015 · Buy on Amazon
"This record of time pouring through the unclenched fingers of the mind’s most magnanimous patron saint has become one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life — one I came to with deep reverence for Dr. Sacks’s intellectual footprint and left with deep love for his soul."
Andrea Wulf · Buy on Amazon
"In The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World ( public library ), London-based design historian and writer Andrea Wulf sets out to liberate this extraordinary man’s legacy from the grip of obscurity and short-termism, illuminating the myriad threads of influence through which he continues to shape our present thinking about science, society, and life itself."
Lisa Randall · Buy on Amazon
"That’s what Harvard particle physicist and cosmologist Lisa Randall accomplishes in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe ( public library ) — an intellectually thrilling exploration of how the universe evolved, what made our very existence possible, and how dark matter illuminates our planet’s relationship to its cosmic environment across past, present, and future."
Sydney Padua · Buy on Amazon
"The unusual story of this Victorian power-duo is what graphic artists and animator Sydney Padua explores in the immensely delightful and illuminating The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer ( public library ), itself a masterwork of combinatorial genius and a poetic analog to its subject matter — rigorously researched, it has approximately the same footnote-to-comic ratio as Lovelace’s trailblazing paper."
Jenni Desmond · Buy on Amazon
"That awe-striking being is what London-based illustrator Jenni Desmond celebrates in the marvelous nonfiction children’s book The Blue Whale ( public library ) — a loving science lullaby about our planet’s biggest creature, and a beautiful addition to the finest children’s books celebrating science ."
Jimena Canales · Buy on Amazon
"So argues science historian Jimena Canales in The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time ( public library ) — a masterwork of cultural forensics, dissecting the many dimensions of the landmark conversation between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson."
John Brockman · Buy on Amazon
"That’s what Edge founder John Brockman explores in the 2015 edition of his annual question , inviting 192 of today’s most prominent thinkers to tussle with these core questions of artificial intelligence and its undergirding human dilemmas."
Lauren Redniss · Buy on Amazon
"Our most steadfast companion since the dawn of our species, the weather seeded our earliest myths , inspired some of our greatest art , affects the way we think , and continues to lend itself to such apt metaphors for the human experience."
Best Science Books of 2016 (2016)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2016-12-07.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Janna Levin · Buy on Amazon
"This book remains one of the most intensely interesting and beautifully written I’ve ever encountered — the kind that comes about once a generation if we’re lucky."
James Gleick · Buy on Amazon
"I consider it a grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst."
Marc Wittmann · Buy on Amazon
"What emerges is the disorienting sense that time isn’t something which happens to us — rather, we are time."
Paul Kalanithi · 2016 · Buy on Amazon
"Partway between Montaigne and Oliver Sacks , Kalanithi weaves together philosophical reflections on his personal journey with stories of his patients to illuminate the only thing we have in common — our mortality — and how it spurs all of us, in ways both minute and monumental, to pursue a life of meaning."
Maria Konnikova · Buy on Amazon
"How con artists take advantage of this human hubris is what New Yorker columnist and psychology writer Maria Konnikova explores in The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time ( public library ) — a thrilling psychological detective story investigating how con artists, the supreme masterminds of malevolent reality-manipulation, prey on our hopes, our fears, and our propensity for believing what we wish were true."
Siddhartha Mukherjee · Buy on Amazon
"In The Gene: An Intimate History ( public library ), physician and Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee offers a rigorously researched, beautifully written detective story about the genetic components of what we experience as the self, rooted in Mukherjee’s own painful family history of mental illness and radiating a larger inquiry into how genetics illuminates the future of our species."
Jenni Desmond · Buy on Amazon
"Desmond’s wonderful project alleviates that task by offering a warm, empathic invitation to care about, which is the gateway to caring for, one of the creatures most vulnerable to our changing climate and most needful of our protection."
Sean Carroll · Buy on Amazon
"Physicist Sean Carroll terms this view poetic naturalism and examines its rewards in The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself ( public library ) — a nuanced inquiry into “how our desire to matter fits in with the nature of reality at its deepest levels,” in which Carroll offers an assuring dose of what he calls “existential therapy” reconciling the various and often seemingly contradictory dimensions of our experience."
Peter Wohlleben · Buy on Amazon
"This fascinating secret world of signals is what German forester Peter Wohlleben explores in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate ( public library )."
Alexandra Horowitz · Buy on Amazon
"So argues cognitive scientist and writer Alexandra Horowitz , director of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, in Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell ( public library ) — a fascinating tour of what Horowitz calls the “surprising and sometimes alarming feats of olfactory perception” that dogs perform daily, and what they can teach us about swinging open the doors of our own perception by relearning some of our long-lost olfactory skills that grant us access to hidden laye…"
Ed Yong · Buy on Amazon
"That multilayered significance is what English science writer and microbiology elucidator Ed Yong explores in I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life ( public library ) — a book so fascinating and elegantly written as to be worthy of its Whitman reference , in which Yong peels the veneer of the visible to reveal the astonishing complexity of life thriving beneath and within the crude confines of our perception."
Margot Lee Shetterly · Buy on Amazon
"In Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race ( public library ), Margot Lee Shetterly tells the untold story of these brilliant women, once on the frontlines of our cultural leaps and since sidelined by the selective collective memory we call history."
Dava Sobel · Buy on Amazon
"Science historian Dava Sobel , author of Galileo’s Daughter , chronicles their unsung story and lasting legacy in The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars ( public library )."
Rachel Ignotofsky · Buy on Amazon
"For a lighter companion to the two books above, one aimed at younger readers, artist and author Rachel Ignotofsky offers Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World ( public library ) — an illustrated encyclopedia of fifty influential and inspiring women in STEM since long before we acronymized the conquest of curiosity through discovery and invention, ranging from the ancient astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher Hypatia in the fourth century to Iranian mathematician Ma…"
Best Science Books of 2017 (2017)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2017-12-13.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Oliver Sacks · Buy on Amazon
"In his signature Sacksian way, he explores the universal through the deeply personal — not only with case studies of his patients, as he has done so beautifully for nearly half a century across his classic books, but this time with the case study of his own self as his body and mind go through the process of aging and eventually dying."
David George Haskell · Buy on Amazon
"In The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors ( public library ), Haskell visits a dozen of the world’s most beautiful trees to explore, in immensely lyrical prose and with an almost spiritual reverence, the masterful, magical way in which nature weaves the warp thread of individual organisms and the weft thread of relationships into the fabric of life."
Liza Mundy · Buy on Amazon
"Their story, as heroic as that of the women who dressed and fought as men in the Civil War , as fascinating and untold as those of the “Harvard Computers” who revolutionized astronomy in the nineteenth century and the black women mathematicians who powered space exploration in the twentieth, is what Liza Mundy tells in Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II ( public library ) — a masterly portrait of the brilliant, unheralded women — women with names…"
Alan Burdick · Buy on Amazon
"In Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation ( public library ), New Yorker staff writer Alan Burdick presents a layered, rigorously researched, lyrically narrated inquiry into the most befuddling dimension of existence."
Marcus du Sautoy · Buy on Amazon
"In this age of aggressive certitudes, how refreshing and needed to be reminded of the beauty and value of the unknown as our foremost frontier of civilizational growth."
Clifford Johnson · Buy on Amazon
"Strikingly, Johnson took a semester off from teaching to learn to draw and illustrated the book himself, then populated his panels with refreshingly diverse characters of varied races, genders, and nationalities."
Janna Levin · Buy on Amazon
"Although it was originally published in the autumn of 2016, there are two reasons — quite apart from its being one of the finest books I’ve ever read — that merit its inclusion this year."
Best Science & Technology Books of 2013 (2013)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2013-12-10.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
John Brockman · Buy on Amazon
"Perhaps the greatest pleasure in science comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way."
Elin Kelsey and Soyeon Kim · Buy on Amazon
"Underpinning the narrative is a bold sense of optimism — a refreshing antidote to the fear-appeal strategy plaguing most environmental messages today."
Alexandra Horowitz · Buy on Amazon
"It is undoubtedly one of the most stimulating books of the year, if not the decade, and the most enchanting thing I’ve read in ages."
Jon Mooallem · Buy on Amazon
"Rather than ready-bake answers, he offers instead directions of thought and signposts for curiosity and, in the process, somehow gently moves us a little bit closer to our better selves, to a deep sense of, as poet Diane Ackerman beautifully put it in 1974, “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.”"
Daniel Tammet · Buy on Amazon
"In the process, he also invites us to appreciate the poetics of numbers, particularly of ordered sets — in other words, the very lists that dominate everything from our productivity tools to our creative inventories to the cheapened headlines flooding the internet."
Clive Thompson · Buy on Amazon
"But in Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better ( public library ), Clive Thompson — one of the finest technology writers I know, with regular bylines for Wired and The New York Times — makes a powerful and rigorously thought out counterpoint."
Dorion Sagan · Buy on Amazon
"Ideally, in the search for truth, science and philosophy, the impersonal and autobiographical, can “keep each other honest,” in a kind of open circuit."
Matthew D. Lieberman · Buy on Amazon
"At the heart of his inquiry is a simple question: Why do we feel such intense agony when we lose a loved one?"
Mary Roach · Buy on Amazon
"But Mary Roach is one of those rare writers, and that’s precisely what she proves once more in Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal ( public library ) — a fascinating tour of the body’s most private hydraulics."
Brian Cox · Buy on Amazon
"That’s precisely what modern-day science-enchanter Brian Cox explores in Wonders of the Solar System ( public library ) — the fantastic and illuminating book based on his BBC series of the same title celebrating the spirit of exploration, and a follow-up to his Wonders of Life and every bit as brimming with his signature blend of enthralling storytelling , scientific brilliance , and contagious conviction ."
Ainissa Ramirez · Buy on Amazon
"She writes in the introduction:
The 21st century requires a new kind of learner — not someone who can simply churn out answers by rote, as has been done in the past, but a student who can think expansively and solve problems resourcefully."
Oliver Byrne · Buy on Amazon
"He explained that in his edition of Euclid, “coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners.”"
Gemma Elwin Harris · Buy on Amazon
"As was the case with last year’s edition, more than half of the proceeds from the book — which features illustrations by the wonderful Andy Smith — are being donated to a children’s charity."
Favorite Books of 2020 (2020)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2020-12-19.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Zadie Smith · Buy on Amazon
"These intimations she lets us overhear are blazing evidence that every artist’s art is their coping mechanism, their floatation device for the slipstream of uncertainty we call life — evidence that a great artist makes of it a raft large enough to fit more of us, robust enough to carry us across the cascades of time and understanding."
Lulu Miller · Buy on Amazon
"It appears to be, and to an impressive scholarly extent is, about David Starr Jordan — the founder of Stanford University, a brilliant ichthyologist and a deluded eugenicist."
Audre Lorde · Buy on Amazon
"Nowhere does that potency of understanding live with more focused force than in her 1977 manifesto of an essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” which opens The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (public library) — the excellent collection of poetry and prose, edited and with a foreword by the unstoppable Roxane Gay."
Viktor Frankl · Buy on Amazon
"In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he writes: Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being."
Gertrude Stein · 1933 · Buy on Amazon
"It wasn’t, of course, Alice’s autobiography, or even her biography — rather, it was the biography of their love, of early-twentieth-century Paris, of the community of visionary artists and writers who orbited the couple and who came to be known as the Lost Generation — a term Gertrude Stein coined — as they found themselves, in every sense of the term, at Alice and Gertrude’s salons."
Janna Levin · Buy on Amazon
"What emerges is a lyrical and authoritative story of strangeness as a portal to truth, tracing how black holes went from “the unwanted product of the plasticity of space and time, grotesque and extreme deformations, grim instabilities” to “a laboratory for the exploration of the farthest reaches of the mind,” things that are no-things and in their non-thingness “undermine notions of reality, but ameliorate the pain with a mind-searing vision of nature.”"
Sophie Blackall · Buy on Amazon
"Told in the form of a letter from a child to an alien visitor — a particular child named Quinn, whom Sophie met while traveling around the world with UNICEF and Save the Children, and whose uncommon imagination fomented hers — the story is populated by drawings of other real-life children she met on her travels in India, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, a particular class of twenty-three kids she befriended in a Brooklyn public school, and her own real-life friends and neighbors."
Jane Hirshfield · Buy on Amazon
"Her collection Ledger (public library) has been nothing less than a lifeline this year."
Helen Macdonald · Buy on Amazon
"Five years after H Is for Hawk, which was among my favorite books of its year and remains among my favorite books of all years, Helen Macdonald returns with Vesper Flights (public library) — a cabinet of curiosities containing forty-one essays of kaleidoscopic subject range, from mushrooms to bird migration to Mars, focused by Macdonald’s singular sensibility of reverencing the natural world on its own terms and at the same time drawing from it illuminations of human nature and the human worl…"
Tove Jansson · Buy on Amazon
"The tender delirium of their early love and the magmatic core of their lifelong devotion emanate from the pages of Letters from Tove (public library) — the altogether wonderful collection of Jansson’s correspondence with friends, family, and other artists, spanning her meditations on the creative process, her exuberant cherishment of the natural world and of what is best in human beings, her unfaltering love for Tooti."
Maria Konnikova · Buy on Amazon
"The record of that experience became The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win (public library) — an inspired investigation of “the struggle for balance on the spectrum of luck and control in the lives we lead, and the decisions we make,” partway between memoir, primer on the psychology of decision-making, and playbook for life."
Shannon Lee · Buy on Amazon
"The animating ethos of that uncommon life comes newly alive in Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee (public library) by his daughter, Shannon Lee, titled after his famous metaphor for resilience — a slender, potent book twining her father’s timeless philosophies of living with her own reflections, drawn from her own courageous life of turning unfathomable loss into a path of light and quiet strength."
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris · Buy on Amazon
"A century and a half after Whitman, writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris — two poets of nature in the vastest Baldwinian sense — compose one such living benediction in The Lost Spells (public library)."
Lucille Clifton · Buy on Amazon
"How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (public library), curated by poet Aracelis Girmay and funded by readers via Kickstarter, collects two hundred of Clifton’s most powerful poems, from hymnal classics like “won’t you celebrate with me” to several newly discovered poems never previously published."
Matthew Burgess · Buy on Amazon
"Having previously composed Enormous Smallness, one of my favorite books of 2015 — the wondrous picture-book biography of E.E. Cummings, another artist who so passionately believed that “it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are” — Burgess was impelled to invite young people into Keith Haring’s singular art and the large heart from which it sprang."
Jon Mooallem · Buy on Amazon
"Genie Chance (January 24, 1927–May 17, 1998) is the protagonist of Jon Mooallem’s uncommonly wonderful book This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together (public library)."
Brian Greene · Buy on Amazon
"That is what physicist and mathematician Brian Greene explores with great elegance of thought and poetic sensibility in Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (public library)."
Hiroshi Osada · Buy on Amazon
"The life-affirming splendor of the spectrum within and without is what Japanese poet and picture-book author Hiroshi Osada and artist Ryoji Arai celebrate in Every Color of Light: A Book about the Sky (public library), translated by David Boyd — a tender serenade to the elements that unspools into a lullaby, inviting ecstatic wakefulness to the fulness of life, inviting a serene surrender to slumber."
Jackie Morris · Buy on Amazon
"As I leaf enchanted through The Unwinding (public library) by the English artist and writer Jackie Morris, this quiet masterpiece dawns on me as the pictorial counterpart to Smith’s — a small, miraculous book that belongs, and beckons you to find your own belonging, in the “Library of Lost Dreams and Half-Imagined Things.”"
Rebecca Solnit · Buy on Amazon
"That is what Rebecca Solnit explores in a passage from Recollections of My Nonexistence (public library) — her splendid memoir of longings and determinations, of resistances and revolutions, personal and political, illuminating the kiln in which one of the boldest, most original minds of our time was annealed."
Favorite Books of 2021 (2022)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2022-01-28.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Alan Lightman · Buy on Amazon
"In Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings ( public library ), the poetic physicist Alan Lightman sieves four centuries of scientific breakthroughs, from Kepler’s revolutionary laws of planetary motion to the thousands of habitable exoplanets discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission, to estimate that even with habitable planets orbiting one tenth of all stars, the faction of living matter in the universe is about one-billionth of one-billionth: If all the matter in the universe…"
Rebecca Solnit · Buy on Amazon
"This poetic gesture with political roots inspirits the uncommonly wonderful Orwell’s Roses ( public library )."
George Dyson · Buy on Amazon
"For me, Analogia ( public library ) by George Dyson is one such book — a book that traverses vast territories of fact and feeling to arrive at a promontory of meaning from which one can view with sudden and staggering clarity the past, the present, and the future all at once — not with fear, not with hope, but with something beyond binaries: with a quickening of wonderment and understanding."
Olivia Laing · Buy on Amazon
"In Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency ( public library ), Olivia Laing — one of the handful of living writers whose mind and prose I enjoy commensurately with the Whitmans and the Woolfs of yore — occasions a rare gift of unselfing through the lives and worlds of painters, poets, filmmakers, novelists, and musicians who have imprinted culture in a profound way while living largely outside the standards and stabilities of society, embodying of James Baldwin’s piercing insight that “a society m…"
George Saunders · Buy on Amazon
"That is what George Saunders explores throughout A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life ( public library ) — his wondrous investigation of what makes a good story (which is, by virtue of Saunders being helplessly himself , a wondrous investigation of what makes a good life) through a close and contemplative reading of seven classic Russian short stories, examined as “seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made…"
Maria Popova · Buy on Amazon
"The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story ( public library ) is a labor of love three years in the making, illustrated by the uncommonly talented and sensitive Ping Zhu ."
Marcus Aurelius · Buy on Amazon
"Two millennia before the outrage culture of the Internet, the lovesick queer teenager turned Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher addressed this curious self-mauling tendency of the human mind with his characteristic precision of insight and unsentimental problem-solving in the notebooks that became his Meditations ( public library ) — a timeless book, newly translated and annotated by the British classics scholar Robin Waterfield, which Marcus Aurelius wrote largely for and to himself, like T…"
Alison Bechdel · Buy on Amazon
"That touchingly human impulse is what the unclassifiable virtuoso of meaning Alison Bechdel explores in The Secret to Superhuman Strength ( public library ) — an uncommon beam of illumination, aimed at the depths of existence through the lens of the personal, that one and only lens we ever have on the universe."
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson · Buy on Amazon
"This poetic sentiment with powerful resolve became the animating spirit of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis ( public library ) — Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson’s altogether inspiriting anthology, composed as “a balm and a guide for the immense emotional complexity of knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on one another or our collective future.”"
John Miller · Buy on Amazon
"Before I Grew Up ( public library ) was born — part elegy and part exultation, reverencing the vibrancy of life: the life of feeling and of the imagination, the life of landscape and of light, the life of nature and of the impulse for beauty that irradiates what is truest and most beautiful about human nature."
Michelle Nijhuis · Buy on Amazon
"In Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction ( public library ), Michelle Nijhuis undusts the uncommon lives of several of these visionaries — “scientists, birdwatchers, hunters, self-taught philosophers, and others who have countered the power to destroy species with the whys and hows of providing sanctuary” — interleaving their stories into the broader story of conservation."
Sy Montgomery · Buy on Amazon
"That supranatural marvel of nature is what Sy Montgomery — the naturalist who so memorably celebrated the otherworldly marvel of the octopus — celebrates in The Hummingbirds’ Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings ( public library )."
Antonio Damasio · Buy on Amazon
"In his revelatory book Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious ( public library ), he makes the bold case that consciousness — that ultimate lens of being, which shapes our entire experience of life and makes blue appear blue and gives poems their air of wonder — is not a mental activity confined to the brain but a complex embodied phenomenon governed by the nervous-system activity we call feeling."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Our ancient bond with trees as companions and mirrors of our human experience comes alive afresh in Old Growth — a wondrous anthology of essays and poems about trees, culled from the decades-deep archive of Orion Magazine ."
Favorite Books of 2022 (2022)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2022-12-09.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
John Higgs · Buy on Amazon
"How he did that is what John Higgs explores in the superb biography William Blake vs. the World."
Ed Yong · Buy on Amazon
"With an eye to the Umwelt — that lovely German word for the sensory bubble each creature inhabits, both limiting and defining its perceptual reality — he adds:"
Sophie Blackall · Buy on Amazon
"A slipstream of tomorrows hence, her list became Things to Look Forward to: 52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day ( public library ) — a felicitous catalogue partway between Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom and poet Ross Gay’s Book of Delights , every page of it radiant with the warmth and wonder that make life worth living and mark everything Sophie makes."
Susan Cain · Buy on Amazon
"In Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole ( public library ), she writes:"
Hermann Hesse · Buy on Amazon
"After the heroism of editing the first-ever complete edition of Hesse’s writings writings, scholar Volker Michels has culled the finest sylvan musings from this immense body of work and curated thirty of Hesse’s own drawings to illustrate them in the slender gem of a book Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings ( public library )."
Rumi · Buy on Amazon
"A dazzling selection of his poetry, including some never previously alive in English, appears in Gold ( public library ), newly translated and inspirited by poet and musician Haleh Liza Gafori ."
Rachel Carson · Buy on Amazon
"Her three masterpieces about the water world — Under the Sea-Wind (which began as her groundbreaking essay Undersea ), The Sea Around Us (which occasioned her superb National Book Award acceptance speech ), and The Edge of the Sea (which gave us her exquisite meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life ) — are now collected in a single Library of America volume: Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy ( public library ), introduced by Carson’s modern-day counterpart and kindred spirit Sandra Stein…"
Kathryn Schulz · Buy on Amazon
"All of this, with all of its subtleties, comes alive on the pages of Lost & Found ( public library ) by Kathryn Schulz — part personal memoir, part existential inquiry into the two great universals of human life."
David Byrne · Buy on Amazon
"Two hundred springtimes after Keats, David Byrne explores this facet of the human condition in his felicitously uncategorizable book A History of the World (in Dingbats) ( public library ) — a playful yet poignant meditation, in words and drawings, on the human truths unveiled as the world came unworlded by the global pandemic that became the great shared experience of our lifetimes."
Annie Murphy Paul · Buy on Amazon
"In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain ( public library ), Annie Murphy Paul explores the most thrilling frontiers of this growing understanding, fusing a century of scientific studies with millennia of first-hand experience from the lives and letters of great artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs."
Debbie Millman · Buy on Amazon
"The best parts of the best interviews from this immense body of work are now gathered in Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People ( public library )."
Nick Cave · Buy on Amazon
"This awareness pulsates throughout Faith, Hope and Carnage ( public library ) — Nick Cave’s yearlong conversation with journalist turned friend Seán O’Hagan."
Pablo Neruda · Buy on Amazon
"Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) channeled 320 such questions — questions earthly and cosmic about art and life, dreams and death, nature and human nature; magical-realist questions that could have been asked by a child or a sage — into his final work of poetry, originally published months before his sudden death."
Bill Hayes · Buy on Amazon
"And so it is that the notion of exercise fell out of the popular imagination for a millennium."
Natalie Hodges · Buy on Amazon
"That — the physics and neuroscience of it, the poetry and unremitting wonder of it — is what the science-enchanted classical violinist Natalie Hodges explores in Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time ( public library )."
Pádraig Ó Tuama · Buy on Amazon
"Emerging from these pages above all is poetry as prayerful attention to life, captured in the perfectly chosen epigraph from poet Christian Wiman:"
Favorite Books of 2023 (2023)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2023-12-19.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Pico Iyer · Buy on Amazon
"With soulful curiosity channeled in his ever-lyrical prose, Pico Iyer chronicles a lifetime of pilgrimages to some of Earth’s greatest shrines to that longing in The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise."
Alan Lightman · Buy on Amazon
"In The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science ( public library ), the poetic physicist Alan Lightman sets out to illuminate how these atomic constellations can be capable of such exultant spiritual experiences, aglow with such shimmering feelings."
Jean-François Beauchemin · Buy on Amazon
"The secret pulse-beat of joy is what Jean-François Beauchemin explores in Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being ( public library ) — an invitation to “a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world” and an exultation at “earthly life, with its duration so short it obliges us to surpass ourselves.”"
William Egginton · Buy on Amazon
"These are the immense and intimate questions William Egginton takes up in The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality ( public library ) — an ambitious effort to trace “the capillaries of coherence flowing from the particular to the universal,” part ode to those who have caught glimpses of that elemental coherence we call truth and part elegy for our destiny as creatures doomed to glimpses only, for we are particles of the totality we yearn to see whole a…"
Kevin Kelly · Buy on Amazon
"That is precisely what Kevin Kelly gathers in Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier ( public library ) — an herbarium of learnings that began as a list he composed on his 68th birthday for his own young-adult children, a list to which he kept adding with each lived year."
Wendy MacNaughton · Buy on Amazon
"How to move through it is what my talented friend and sometime-collaborator Wendy MacNaughton explores in How to Say Goodbye ( public library ) — a tender illustrated field guide to being present with and for what Alice James called “the most supremely interesting moment in life,” drawing on Wendy’s time as artist-in-residence at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco and her own profound experience at her beloved aunt’s deathbed."
Tess Taylor · Buy on Amazon
"The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them ( public library )."
Neil Theise · Buy on Amazon
"In Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being ( public library ), the Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality — empirical science (with a focus on complexity theory), philosophy (with a focus on Western idealism), and metaphysics (with a focus on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) — to paint a picture of the universe and…"
Jane Hirshfield · Buy on Amazon
"The Asking ( public library ) collects some of her best work, including such treasures as “Optimism,” “Today, Another Universe,” “The Weighing,” and “To Be a Person” — poems that achieve the most difficult and paradoxical of triumphs for a work of art: to remind us who and what we are, while at the same time furnishing what Iris Murdoch called “an occasion for unselfing.”"
Andy Clark · Buy on Amazon
"That is what cognitive philosopher Andy Clark explores in The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality ( public library ) — an illuminating investigation of the human brain as a prediction machine that evolved to render reality as a composite of sensory input and prior expectation, replete with implications for neuroscience, psychology, medicine, mental health, neurodiversity, the relationship between the body and the self, and the way we live our lives."
Laurel Braitman · Buy on Amazon
"She tells the story of those difficult, transformative learnings in What Looks Like Bravery ( public library ) — a book about hope (“a trickster that transforms itself all the time, expanding to fill the space it’s given”), about loss, how it stays with us and how we go on (“just like when you close the door to a room and walk into another, the one you leave doesn’t stop existing. It’s just that now you’re somewhere else”), about the meaning of courage and how to live with uncertainty, about…"
Favorite Children's Books of 2019 (2019)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2019-12-16.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Hayley Barrett · Buy on Amazon
"The epoch-making discovery that became the platform for Mitchell’s modeling of possibility and far-reaching influence is the kernel of the lovely picture-book What Miss Mitchell Saw"
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie · Buy on Amazon
"All of that — the personal nature of happiness, the daily practice of it, its centrality to participating meaningfully in the world — is what poet Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie explores in her vibrant and vitalizing picture-book debut, Layla’s Happiness"
Rebecca Solnit · 2019 · Buy on Amazon
"Rebecca Solnit offers a mighty antidote to those limiting precepts in Cinderella Liberator — an empowered and empowering retelling of the ancient story, which dates back at least two millennia and has recurred in various guises across nearly every culture since, reflecting and perpetuating our most abiding cultural myths about love, work, gender, success, waste and want, the measure of prosperity, and the meaning of purpose."
Oliver Jeffers · Buy on Amazon
"A generation later, artist and author Oliver Jeffers — one of the most beloved and thoughtful storytellers of our time — picks up the message with uncommon simplicity of expression and profundity of sentiment in The Fate of Fausto"
JonArno Lawson · Buy on Amazon
"Poet JonArno Lawson , author of the wondrous Sidewalk Flowers , and artist Nahid Kazemi take up these complex questions with great simplicity and thoughtful sensitivity in Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon"
Corinna Luyken · Buy on Amazon
"That is what artist and illustrator Corinna Luyken explores in the lyrical and lovely My Heart — an emotional intelligence primer in the form of an uncommonly tender illustrated poem about the tessellated capacities of the heart, about love as a practice rather than a state, about how it can frustrate us, brighten us, frighten us, and ultimately expand us."
Paola Quintavalle · Buy on Amazon
"That glorious strangeness is what Paola Quintavalle celebrates in Crescendo — an uncommon picture-poem about the science of pregnancy, evocative of Ursula K. Le Guin’s lovely insistence that “science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside [and] both celebrate what they describe.”"
Susan Cooper · Buy on Amazon
"That is what writer Susan Cooper and artist Carson Ellis celebrate in The Shortest Day — an illustrated resurrection of Cooper’s 1974 poem by the same title, originally composed for John Langstaff’s beloved Christmas Revel shows, which fuse medieval and modern music in grassroots theatrical productions across local communities."
Thierry Lenain · Buy on Amazon
"That chance to imagine a better world is what French author Thierry Lenain and artist Olivier Tallec invite in What If… — a lovely celebration of our civilizational responsibility, in the beautiful words of the cellist Pablo Casals, “to make this world worthy of its children” and a testament to James Baldwin’s sobering insistence that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.”"
Holly M. McGhee · Buy on Amazon
"This inspiriting, sanctifying power of listening is what writer Holly M. McGhee and illustrator Pascal Lemaître explore in the simply titled, sweetly unfolding Listen — a serenade to the heart-expanding, life-enriching, world-ennobling art of attentiveness as a wellspring of self-understanding, of empathy for others, of reverence for the loveliness of life, evocative of philosopher Simone Weil’s memorable assertion that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”"
Ruth Krauss · Buy on Amazon
"A quarter century after the end of Krauss’s long life, lost fragments of her daring poetic imagination coalesced into a manuscript that alighted to the desk of one of the great picture-book artists of our own time: Sergio Ruzzier . The resulting collaboration, across lines of space and time and life and death, is the wondrously imaginative Roar Like a Dandelion"
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"This collection of original letters to the children of today and tomorrow about why we read and what books do for the human spirit, all proceeds from which benefit the New York public library system, features contributions by 121 of the most interesting and inspiring humans in our world, including Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Jacqueline Woodson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Oliver, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Gilbert, Shonda Rhimes, Alain de Botton, James Gleick, Anne Lamott,…"
Favorite Children's Books of 2023 (2023)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2023-12-20.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Balint Zsako · Buy on Amazon
"That is what Hungarian artist Balint Zsako explores with great subtlety and sweetness in Bunny & Tree — a strange and wondrous wordless picture-book about a bunny saved from the archetypal hungry wolf by an unlikely savior — a sentient tree — and the unlikely friendship that blooms between them."
Kate Hoefler and Corinna Luyken · Buy on Amazon
"In the Dark ( public library ) by poet Kate Hoefler and artist Corinna Luyken brings that touching fundament of human nature to life with great levity and sweetness, radiating a reminder that if we are willing to walk through the darkness not with fear but with curiosity, we are saved by wonder."
Élise Fontenaille and Violeta Lópiz · Buy on Amazon
"A bright and immeasurably tender celebration of that need comes from French author Élise Fontenaille and Spanish artist Violeta Lópiz in their lovely collaboration At the Drop of a Cat ( public library )."
Oleksandr Shatokhin · Buy on Amazon
"How children survive the unsurvivable, how they keep the light inside aflame, is what Ukrainian artist Oleksandr Shatokhin explores in his stirring wordless story Yellow Butterfly ( public library )."
Leah Hayes · Buy on Amazon
"That search comes ablaze with uncommon tenderness in I Touched the Sun ( public library ) by musician and graphic novelist Leah Hayes — the story of a young boy’s quest to find and bear his own light."
Donna Jo Napoli and Robert Furrow · Buy on Amazon
"The majesty and mystery of murmurations come alive with uncommon beauty in We Are Starlings: Inside the Mesmerizing Magic of a Murmuration ( public library ) by writers Donna Jo Napoli and Robert Furrow, illustrated by artist Marc Martin, who also brought us the wondrous A Stone Is a Story ."
Marc Veerkamp and Jeska Verstegen · Buy on Amazon
"How to master that delicate balance is what Dutch author-illustrator duo Marc Veerkamp and Jeska Verstegen explore in Bear Is Never Alone ( public library ), translated by Laura Watkinson."
Jennifer Berne and Amanda Hall · Buy on Amazon
"Author Jennifer Berne and artist Amanda Hall celebrate our footholds of knowledge amid the mystery in How the Sea Came to Be (And All the Creatures In It) ( public library ) — a singsong chronicle of how Earth went from roiling rock to living wonderland, pulsating with the elemental poetry of nature."
Grégoire Laforce and Benjamin Flouw · Buy on Amazon
"That wondrous interleaving of space, time, and being comes alive with uncommon sweetness in The Lost Drop ( public library ) by Grégoire Laforce, illustrated by Benjamin Flouw — a vibrant love letter to the water cycle as a portal to deep time and deep presence, and a subtle celebration of the ongoingness of life as a way to bear our mortal smallness in the great scheme of being."
Molly Webster and Alex Willmore · Buy on Amazon
"One of them comes alive in Little Black Hole ( public library ), by Radiolab producer Molly Webster and artist Alex Willmore — an uncommon meditation on how to live with the austere existential loneliness of knowing that everything and everyone we cherish can be taken away from us and is ultimately destined for oblivion, how to live with the looming loss that is the price of being fully alive."
Favorite Food Books of 2012 (2012)
From The Marginalian (themarginalian.org) — Maria Popova's annual best-of round-up, published 2012-12-18.
Source: www.themarginalian.org
Thomas J. Craughwell · Buy on Amazon
"But perhaps most fascinating in Craughwell’s account is the role Jefferson played in championing vegetables and minimal animal products more than 200 years before Michael Pollan , popularizing indispensable plant species previously thought inedible, and even pioneering modern-day buzzword concepts like urban farming."
Sarah C. Rich · Buy on Amazon
"Urban farming is a uniquely powerful tool of change, in that it can simultaneously reshape the places where we live and the way we eat."
Nate Padavick and Salli Swindell · Buy on Amazon
"From brother-sister creative duo Nate Padavick and Salli Swindell , the fine folks who brought us They Draw & Cook , comes The Best Illustrated Cocktail Recipes: Created by Artists from Around the World ( UK ) — a compendium of 24 wonderfully illustrated libations, from timeless classics to kooky holiday concoctions, a kind of modern-day visual equivalent to the 1930 gem The Savoy Cocktail Book ."
Emily Ansara Baines · Buy on Amazon
"Whether you’re in the mood for Mr. Bates’ chicken and mushroom pie or Sybil’s ginger nut biscuits, each delicious bite of these surprisingly approachable dishes is a tiny time machine that transports you right back to the post-Edwardian era."
Ricardo Cortés · Buy on Amazon
"From Ricardo Cortés , the illustrator behind the irreverent modern classic Go The Fuck To Sleep , comes A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola ( UK ; public library ) — a fascinating and beautifully illustrated piece of visual journalism, six years in the making, tracing the little-known interwoven histories of coffee, the coca leaf and kola nut, Coca-Cola, caffeine, and cocaine, within a larger subtext of the role of prohibition in modern culture."
Noël Riley Fitch · Buy on Amazon
"Looking back on Julia’s remarkable life as we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her birth, it is clear that she belongs in the pantheon of great American teachers."
By the Book: Maria Popova (2019)
NYT By the Book column (2019-02-07).
Source: www.nytimes.com
Antoine de Saint-Exupery · Buy on Amazon
"The Little Prince (which I reread at least once a year every year, and somehow find new wisdom and pertinence to whatever I am going through at the moment)"
Nan Shepherd · Buy on Amazon
"I only recently discovered, and absolutely loved, The Living Mountain by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd -- part memoir, part field notebook, part lyrical meditation on nature."
Toni Morrison · 1987 · Buy on Amazon
"A book that gives the English language back to itself and your conscience back to itself."
Alison Bechdel · Buy on Amazon
"Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Are You My Mother? is replete with more insight into the human psyche than most books in the psychology section of the bookstore."
Hannah Arendt · Buy on Amazon
Lewis Carroll · Buy on Amazon
"I especially loved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, long before I could fully appreciate the allegorical genius of a brilliant logician."