Notable (and forgotten notable) Books of 2017

If you're like me - or like other people, if you don't want to be like me - there is never enough time as you'd like to read. But that doesn't stop you from scouring thrift stores and garage sales, drooling in used books stores, and buying more books than one could ever read in an entire lifetime. But you're okay with that because just buying books, rearranging them on your shelf, or knowing that if you ever did want to read them, you could. Because it's there, on the shelf, surrounded by other possible early morning companions. 

Here are a few more possibles to add to your list of must reads or sometime, someday reads:

"The NY Times whittled down their long list of 100 Notable Books to just The 10 Best Books of 2017, including The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us by Richard Prum and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (which Roxane Gay declared her favorite book of 2017)" (via).

Lee’s stunning novel, her second, chronicles four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century, then in Japan itself from the years before World War II to the late 1980s. Exploring central concerns of identity, homeland and belonging, the book announces its ambitions right from the opening sentence: “History has failed us, but no matter.” Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen (via).

Amazon’s editors picked their top 100 books of the year and then narrowed that list down to 20. Some titles include You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie, which I read and found not only extremely enjoyable, but deeply moving, Beartown by Fredrik Backman whom I've read before and thoroughly enjoyed, Sourdough, and Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply, which, alongside Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari, might be my next Amazon book purchase - I've heard both of them recommended now by several people.

Lithub also included a list of some baffling omissions from the NY Times' 100 notable books list. Some notables include Richard Lloyd Parry's, Ghosts of the Tsunami, and Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War. 

And for those non-reader out there (you know who you are. And yes, I judge you), here is a list of the top 25 films of 2017.

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100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction: Tales About A World Gone Wrong

We may or may not be living in a dystopian age, but we are certainly living in an age of dystopias.

Vulture has compiled a list of 100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction. Within the list you’ll "find the classics — your Orwells, Huxleys, and Atwoods — but you’ll also find a rising crop of new entries into the dystopian canon, from younger authors with fresher concerns about what, precisely, could spell our doom. 

You’ll find literary fiction (like Lord of the Flies - one my all-time favorites), young-adult works, graphic novels, realist tomes, some books written long ago, and others published in just the last few years

Dystopian literature, as described by Jenny C. Mann, is “The creation of alternate societies through the negation of despised aspects of the real world, the use of social engineering to make people ‘good,’ the difficulty of distinguishing between the civilized and the barbarous, the use of frame stories that pretend as if the document you are reading ‘really happened,’ the confusion of reality/fiction and truth/lies, the purpose of technology in a perfect society, and the question of who counts as ‘human.’” These books are all part of the same wary family and, taken as a whole, they provide a look not just at the power of a literary mode, but what we fear we are capable of."

Apparently, we capable of some pretty terrifying shit.

For more on . . .

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Books Recommended by TED 2017 Speakers

ParrotRead has compiled a list of books recommended on Twitter by the speakers at the recently concluded TED 2017 conference in Vancouver. Some highlights:

Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple by Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons. “Simmons shares the most fundamental key to success — meditation — and guides readers to use stillness as a powerful tool to access their potential.” Recommended by Serena Williams, who also recommended Eat Yourself Sexy.

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. Recommended by Atul Gawande.

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. Classic sci-fi about humans living underground with all their needs being met by machines. Recommended by Elon Musk, who kinda wants to do that for realsies?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Lacks’ cells were taken without her knowledge and used to develop medical breakthroughs worth billions of dollars. Now an HBO movie starring Oprah Winfrey. Recommended by Lisa Genova.

SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully by Jane McGonigal. “She explains how we can cultivate new powers of recovery and resilience in everyday life simply by adopting a more ‘gameful’ mind-set.” Recommended by Tim Ferriss (via).

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PLAYLIST FOR A CLASSIC NOVEL: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

10 SONGS FOR VIRGINIA WOOLF'S CLASSIC (THE FIRST IN A SERIES)

By Emily Temple

“I think of all my books as music before I write them,” Virginia Woolf once said. It shows—her work isn’t necessarily what I’d call musical, but it is rhythmic, both formally and thematically, indicative of an internal melody. Woolf was an avid music fan, of course, and I won’t venture to guess what she was actually listening to—in her head in her room—when she was writing her masterpiece To the Lighthouse. But below, I have given my impressions of the novel in musical, or rather playlist, form—a sort of reverse-engineering of Woolf’s own process.

The thing I always say about To the Lighthouse to those who haven’t read it is that it’s the closest a novel has ever come to feeling like direct experience for me. That is, it feels like a reflection of consciousness as opposed to something external to it, which also seems to me to be a quality of (good) music. E.M. Forster called To the Lighthouse “a novel in sonata form”—as it is split up into three sections—movements, as it were—so shall this playlist be.

The Window

In the first section of To the Lighthouse, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their various friends have gathered at the Ramsays’ summer home, and embark on various amorous, artistic, and philosophical pursuits. Thematically, this is the happiest part of the novel, abuzz with the busy loudness of life, the push and pull, the will we go to the lighthouse tomorrow, the dinner, the boeuf-en-daube, the society of others—all of this conflicted but essentially joyous.

1. “Summertime Clothes,” Animal Collective
In the novel, Woolf moves in and out of her characters’ minds indiscriminately, sometimes changing perspectives in the middle of a sentence. Animal Collective’s fuzzy, messy music always puts me in mind of this er, collective manner of representation—and this song in particular is evocative of the frantic energy and frazzled joy of a summer vacation.

2. “Bloom,” Chymes
Speaking of Woolf’s fluid perspectives, the lyrics to the chorus of this moodier track are pretty apt:  “I’ve wrapped you around my mind/All your words, they flow into mine.” Tonally, it’s a good reflection of some of Mrs. Ramsay’s quieter moments—or perhaps Lily’s, looking at her.

3. “The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” Joni Mitchell
I’ve always found this song to be weird, but also perfectly evocative of summer evenings. I feel like Lily would totally jam out to this while working on her painting.

4. “It’s Only Life,” The Shins
All of the messy confusion of the first section culminates in a dinner party (enter the boeuf-en-daube). Things seem to fall into place, but even this only serves to remind Mrs. Ramsay of the transience of life. The easy melody and uplifting message—but ultimate melancholy—of this song seems to me to suit, rather.

Time Passes

Ten years, in fact. The house that once held so much life stands empty, and decays. So do some of the people we’ve met, including Mrs. Ramsay, who departs this life between parentheses. The narrator is now time, perhaps, or the house, perhaps, or something else:

So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—“Will you fade? Will you perish?”—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.

By the end of this short section, however, all this lament and dissolution is interrupted: the cottage comes to life again, as Mrs. McNab begins to prepare it, as best she can, for the return of Mr. Ramsay and his guests.

5. “The Moonlight Sonata,” Beethoven
No pop music for Time Passes, sorry. Only the best for this devastating section—and I can’t really think of a better soundtrack to a house on the beach going forgotten.

6. “Path 19 (yet frailest),” Max Richter
Another sad one, and almost minimalist. I actually discovered Max Richter through his album Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works (the works in question are Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves, which really doesn’t help me for this particular project, Max), so perhaps there’s some cross-pollination going on here. But I still think this song is an empty dream, perfect for this section.

The Lighthouse

Well, in The Lighthouse they go to the lighthouse—at long last. Not, of course, without almost everything of import having changed, though several of the living characters are back, filling roles and spaces that may fit them yet, or may do so oddly. The loss of Mrs. Ramsay is deeply felt by all. There’s a sense of a journey being completed in this section, but the joy to be found is only a pale reflection of the previous joy. Much has been lost, not only Mrs. Ramsay, and not all of it comprehensible to those that once held it.

7. “Unravel,” Björk
I hear Lily’s longing for Mrs. Ramsay in this song. I also have a sneaking suspicion that Virginia Woolf would have been best friends with Björk.

8. “8 (circle),” Bon Iver
The cacophony of melancholy at the end of this watery, midnight song clinches it.

9. “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano,” Sampha
The piano in Mrs. Ramsay’s house plays a significant metaphorical role in this novel—on Mr. Ramsay: “It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q.”—and the lyrics to this melancholy-yet-hopeful song make me think of James at the end—missing his mother, on a boat with his father and sister, finally going to the lighthouse, profoundly lonely but perhaps in a position to reconnect to what family he has left.

10. “Swim Good,” Frank Ocean
Okay, so the details aren’t exactly right, but there’s something about this song—and the (problematic) idea of the ocean as a place of redemption and renewal that reminds me of James, and even Mr. Ramsay.

You can listen to them all here.

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Fifty years ago, a teenager wrote the best selling young adult novel of all time

S.E. Hinton in 1967. (S.E. Hinton)

Repost from Timeline

Fifty years ago this spring, the best selling young adult novel of all time was published to adulation and outrage. This was 1967, so youth culture was not exactly new, but something about the plain, emotional voice of The Outsiders did away with the grownups’ interference and spoke directly to teen readers in a new way. The aura surrounding the classic tale of warring adolescent cliques from opposite sides of the tracks is enhanced by the fact that the author was herself a teenager.

We are not, by the way, talking about some urbane 19-year-old groomed for the elite cultural circles of Manhattan. S. E. Hinton was an Oklahoma high school student when she completed the manuscript she was then calling A Different Sunset. Her contract from Viking Press actually arrived the day she graduated from Tulsa’s Will Rogers High School. Because she wasn’t yet 21, her mother had to sign too.

The Outsiders—which still sells half a million copies every year—forever changed the way books are written for young readers.

The stories available to teenagers at that time, “bore no resemblance to what I saw going on,” Hinton told Interview magazine in 1999. She originally began working on her debut, “because I wanted to read a book that dealt realistically with teen life as I saw it.” This impulse has had a lasting influence on literature. Novels of the type Hinton derided, in a 1967 piece for The New York Times Book Review, as, “Mary Jane’s big date with the football hero,” are still churned out, but more often Y.A. deals with adolescents leaving behind their parents’ realm (for better or worse; by choice or otherwise) and facing the challenges of being an individual in society for the first time. Today Hinton’s debut still reads like a master class.

The Outsiders depicts a group of lost boys — the orphaned Curtis brothers and their gang of “greasers” — visited by the wise-beyond-her years ingenue Cherry Valance (played by a young Diane Lane in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film adaptation). Curiously, for such a female-centric segment of publishing, The Outsiders, like Harry Potter, that other game-changer of children’s literature, focuses on a male protagonist, while its female author initially obscured her gender. In the case of Hinton, this decision was encouraged by Velma Varner, her editor at Viking, who believed that using her given name (S.E. stands for Susan Eloise), would “throw some of the boy readers off.”

So was Hinton a 1960s Wendy, looking after some Peter Pan in a leather jacket? She has acknowledged that she borrowed from life: her first person narrator, Ponyboy, and his friends “were inspired by a true-life gang, the members of which were very dear to me.” Yet their world of drive-ins and drug stores, freight trains and churches, is strangely scrubbed of geographical specificity. This must be Hinton’s Tulsa, though she never says so explicitly. The climactic rumble with the Socs could take place on any vacant lot in any city. Yet the relationships between the members of their gang — the misinterpreted protectiveness of Darry to Pony, the fatal devotion of Dallas to Johnny, the simpatico of Soda and Steve — are intricate enough to justify a map.

Asked if she identified as a greaser in high school, Hinton responded, “I was born without the need-to-belong gene, the gene that says you have to be in a little group to feel secure.” Which is maybe just another way of saying that she was a natural born writer — human enough to feel for others, yet sufficiently comfortable with solitude to get the pages down. Her characters, by contrast, embody and implicitly understand the contradictory wages of group identity, its sorrowful stain and addictive comforts. Ponyboy bemoans the indignities of being a greaser — “I don’t want to be a hood, but even if I don’t steal things and mug people and get boozed up, I’m marked lousy” — but he also takes enormous pride in the style and ethos of greaserdom. On the run, and forced to cut and dye his hair, he is pained by the loss: “Our hair labeled us greasers… it was our trademark. The one thing we were proud of.” Though he is slight and out of shape, and seems destined for a beating, he engages in that climactic rumble without self-pity, without questioning whether or not he should take part. He is not a fighter; yet rumbling is who his brothers are, and, thus, who he is.

The struggle between individuality and the need to be accepted by the pack has since become a standard theme of the genre, as has the depiction of taboo subjects through the unfazed yet still unjaded eyes of youth. Hinton takes for granted that teens engage in vices — brawling, smoking, drinking, sex and teen pregnancy — which, from an adult point of view, would be treated either as scandal or fetish. The level of violence is pretty low by current standards, however, and we don’t get a graphic description of even a single, solitary kiss. (The pregnancy is never acknowledged as such, only alluded to as a reason Sodapop, the middle Curtis brother, may have to marry his girlfriend. Like many an unwed teenage mother of that era, Sandy, the character to whom those decisions most pertain, is kept off screen.)

The Outsiders is still challenged by conservative groups frequently enough to earn it a place on the American Library Association’s banned books list. The depictions of sexuality and violence are actually fairly tame, but what is threatening here is Ponyboy’s matter-of-factness. He acknowledges that his love of cigarettes may impair his track team activities, in the same manner an adult might allow that their evening indulgences interfere with their morning runs, but there is no hierarchical hand-wringing, nor prurient fascination, regarding the corruption of innocents. The book has a mature view of brawling and bloodshed as both too common to escape, yet fundamentally useless. These things are, Hinton seems to be saying. Kids experience them as much as adults do, and often more acutely. For adult readers, her treatment refuses to cloak such wrenching experiences in the language of the fantastical or faraway, the foreign or the long ago. For kids, she seems to say: Walk right in.

On the 40th anniversary of The Outsiders, the book critic Dale Peck pointed out in The New York Times that Hinton, like any writer learning on the job, absorbed her literary influences in a way that showed, “borrowing” from high and low, from Moby-Dick to The Sound of Music. He argues that this technique softens her debut’s subversive qualities but enhances its power as a work of art.

Hinton does rely on cliché quite a bit (a frightened character is “White as a ghost”; under attack, Ponyboy stands “like a bump on a log”), which may be literary inexperience, or maybe not. In any case it works, in Ponyboy’s voice, and the generic phrasing does nothing to detract from the sense of menace. He gives a rundown of his world’s vocabulary and rules of engagement early (“Greasers are almost like hoods; we steal things and drive old souped-up cars,”; “Tough and tuff are two different words. Tough is the same as rough; tuff means cool, sharp”) and moves on to the meat of the story: the bonds between vulnerable young people, and the chance for redemption in an unforgiving environment. With material that strong, linguistic bravura could only get in the way.

That blankness of tone is ultimately what makes The Outsiders a work of young adult fiction, and not simply a novel with a juvenile protagonist. I mean this as a high compliment, by the way — when I tried to read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, I had the nauseating sense that I was being force-fed some other generation’s madness, some other generation’s solace and myth. What is so pleasurable about Hinton’s book is its openness to interpretation. Any reader can enjoy the superficial details that separate the warring tribes here — the long-haired hoods and the madras-wearing, clean cut rich kids — while still being able to project their own experiences along the have-and-have-not divide. There is just enough leather and fighting with broken bottles to give you a hit of postwar American cool, but not too much to interfere with a healthy sense of Je Suis Ponyboy.

Even when she stepped in it on Twitter, in October of last year — by arguing with a teenager’s interpretation of Dallas and Johnny’s relationship as homoerotic — Hinton ended up sounding like the tough and knowing den mother of outsiders everywhere. “Young gay kids can identify with the book without me saying the characters are gay,” Hinton tweeted. “I never set out to make anyone feel safe.”

Books, Music, Movies : Best of the past 1000 years

Back in 2000, Amazon ran a poll asking their customers what they thought were the best books, music, and movies of the past 1000 years. The results were archived by the Internet Archive.

. . . The lists include works by Shakespeare, Stephen King, and Ayn Rand; music by the Beatles, Mozart, and Miles Davis; and films such as The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather, and Star Wars. (It bears noting that the Bible received the most votes among books, but we had to leave it off our list because it was not written within the past 1,000 years.) We've also compiled tallies for the top author, musical artist, and director, based on the total votes each received for their various works. Dig deep and enjoy!

The winners in each category (and links to their works) were:

Author of Millennium: J.R.R. Tolkien with runner up Ayn Rand

Artist of Millennium: the Beatles with runner up Pink Floyd

Director of the Millennium: Steven Spielberg with runner up George Lucas

 

Here are the full top 10 lists:

Books
1. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
3. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
4. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - J.K. Rowling
6. The Stand - Stephen King
7. Ulysses - James Joyce
8. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
9. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
10. 1984 - George Orwell

See all 100 winners

 

Music albums
1. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles
2. The Beatles (The White Album) - The Beatles
3. Millennium - Backstreet Boys
4. Dark Side Of The Moon - Pink Floyd
5. Abbey Road - The Beatles
6. Thriller - Michael Jackson
7. The Joshua Tree - U2
8. The Wall - Pink Floyd
9. Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis
10. Nevermind - Nirvana

See all 100 winners

You can listen to the top ten albums here. 

 

Movies
1. Star Wars
2. Titanic
3. Citizen Kane
4. Gone With the Wind
5. The Godfather
6. Schindler’s List
7. The Matrix
8. Saving Private Ryan
9. Casablanca
10. Braveheart

See all 100 winners

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Stealing from The Princess Bride

"Pablo Picasso is widely quoted as having said that “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Whether or not Picasso was truly the first person to voice this idea is in some dispute. One can find passages in T. S. Eliot’s critical works which discuss how artistic theft of others’ work contributes to the creation of new art. The idea itself is probably much older. Shakespeare routinely stole plotlines and even whole scenes from other writers for his own plays." (via) Even Steve Jobs believed this ideology allowed for the best of what humanity had to offer to emerge. 

Recently, while reading The Princess Bride with my kids, I read the following scene and chuckled. Because I know of another artist who stole it.

The scene reads:

She was outside his hovel before dawn. Inside, she could hear him already awake. She knocked. He appeared, stood in the doorway. Behind him she could see a tiny candle, open books. He waited. She looked at him. Then she looked away.

He was too beautiful.

"I love you," Buttercup said. "I know this must come as something of a surprise, since all I've ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more. I thought an hour ago that I loved you more than any woman has ever loved a man, but a half hour after that I knew that what I felt before was nothing compared to what I felt then. But ten minutes after that, I understood that my previous love was a puddle compared to the high seas before a storm. Your eyes are like that, did you know? Well they are. How many minutes ago was I? Twenty? Had I brought my feelings up to then? It doesn't matter." Buttercup still could not look at him. The sun was rising behind her now; she could feel the heat on her back, and it gave her courage. "I love you so much more now than twenty minutes ago that there cannot be comparison. I love ou so much more now than when you opened your hovel door, there cannot be comparison. There is no room in my body for anything but you. My arms love you, my ears adore you, knees shake with blind affection. My mind begs you to ask it something so it can obey. Do you want me to follow you for the rest of your days? I will do that. Do you want me to crawl? I will crawl. I will be quiet for you or sing for you, or if you are hungry, let me bring you food, or if you have thirst and nothing to quench it but Arabian wine, I will go to Araby, even though it is across the world, and bring a bottle back for your lunch. Anything there is that I can do for you, I will do for you; anything there is that I cannot do, i will learn to do. I know I cannot complete with the Countess in skills or wisdom or appeal, and I saw the way she looked at you. And I saw the way you looked at her. But remember, please that she is old and has other interests, while I am seventeen and for me there is only you. Dearest Wesley - I've never called you that before, have I? - Westley, Westley,, Westley, Westley, Westley, - darling Westley, adored Westley, sweet perfect Westley, whisper that I have a chance to win your love." 

And with that, she dared the bravest thing she'd ever done; she looked right into his eyes.

He closed the door in her face.

Without a word. 

Without a word.

Buttercup ran. She whirled and burst away and the tears came bitterly; she could not see, she stumbled, she slammed into a tree trunk, fell, arose, ran on; her shoulder throbbed from where the tree trunk hit her, and the pain was strong, but not enough to ease her shattered heart. Back to her room she fled, back to her pillow. Safe behind the locked door, she drenched the world with tears. (pg 49-51).

Here is M. Night Shyamalan's "stolen" version:

"Good artists borrow, great artists steal," and perhaps the greatest artists of them all steal from great artists.

Well done M. Night Shyamalan. Well done.

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37 Nonfiction Books Every Artist Should Read

Creativity

• Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils and Rewards of Artmaking, David Bayles and Ted Orland
• Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert
• Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon
• What It Is, Lynda Barry
• In the Company of Women: Inspiration and Advice from over 100 Makers, Artists, and Entrepreneurs, Grace Bonney
• The Cheese Monkeys, Chip Kidd

Drawing

• Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes: Volume 1: The Walt Stanchfield Lectures, Walt Stanchfield
• Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, James Gurney
• Creative Illustration, Andrew Loomis
• Picture This: How Pictures Work, Molly Bang

Writing

• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott
• The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
• Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, by Derrick Jensen

Typography

• Thinking with Type, Ellen Lupton
• Hand Job: A Catalog of Type, Michael Perry
• The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst

Picture Books

• Writing Picture Books, Ann Whitford Paul
• Caldecott and Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures, Maurice Sendak
• Writing with Pictures, Uri Shulevitz
• Words and Pictures, Quentin Blake
• Illustrating Children’s Books, Martin Salisbury

Comics

• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
• Making Comics, Scott McCloud
• Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner
• Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, Will Eisner
• Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden

Storytelling

• The New Kings of Nonfiction, Short stories collected and edited by Ira Glass
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion

Business

• The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss (I don’t agree with everything he says, but there are some real gems here.)
• The Freelancer’s Bible: Everything You Need to Know to Have the Career of Your Dreams — On Your Terms, Sara Horowitz
• My So-Called Freelance Life: How to Survive and Thrive as a Creative Professional for Hire, Michelle Goodman

Psychology

• When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chödrön
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, Stephen R. Covey

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” 

— W.B. Yeats

From Christine Nishiyama

7 Best Books That Will Radically Shift The Way You See The World

by Mindvalley Authors

I’m often asked what my favorite books are — which ones impacted me the most and which ones I would recommend. And sure, I do have a list of personal growth books at the top of my head that shaped my view of the world.

But beyond the personal growth field, there are a several of books in science, sociology, and philosophy that have had an equally profound impact on me.

And today, I just wanted to share my top seven books in these fields that will help you better understand our role on this giant space-rock we call earth.

The books won’t just blow your mind — they will expand your mind to whole new levels and make you see the world in a very different way from politics, to ecology, to sex and religion.

Enjoy this list. I loved and enjoyed every single one of these books.

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything

By Bill Bryson

Do you recall your boring science textbooks in school?

Not likely. This book will change that for you. Bryson has taken his background in travelogue writing and merged it with science. His genuine curiosity for science includes an investigation of known and unknown scientific pioneers. And the best part: You’ll finally understand complex scientific subjects — from gravitational constants to the calculation of the Earth’s mass.

And you wouldn’t believe how brilliant minds across the ages came up with inventive ways to push science forward.

Key Insight: We are capable of doing and achieving many things, especially when we apply our minds to solve problems that are seemingly impossible.

Favorite Excerpt and “Why on Earth did I not learn this in School?” moment:

“Some scientists now think that there could be as much as 100 trillion tons of bacteria living beneath our feet in what are known as subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems — SLiME for short. Thomas Gold of Cornell has estimated that if you took all the bacteria out of the Earth’s interior and dumped it on the surface, it would cover the planet to a depth of five feet. If the estimates are correct, there could be more life under the Earth than on top of it.”

2. Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire

By Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa

How do you explain biology? Two words: Evolutionary Psychology.

This book presents disturbing, yet fascinating insights on how evolution ensures our survival. One example: Evolution has leveled the playing field for men and women when it comes to mating. As the title suggests if you’re a beautiful couple, you’ve been hard wired through evolution to have a greater chance of producing daughters than sons. As a result, as evolution marches on, women are evolving to be more and more beautiful. And men more and more ambitious. You’ll have to read the excerpt below from the book to understand why.

Key Insight: Some facts are debatable. But these hypotheses could help you understand your life choices so far.

Favorite Excerpt:

“So physical attractiveness, while a universally positive quality, contributes even more to women’s reproductive success than to men’s. The new hypothesis would therefore predict that physically attractive parents should have more daughters than sons. Once again, this is indeed the case. Young Americans who are rated “very attractive” have a 44 percent chance of having a son for their first child (and thus a 56 percent chance of having a daughter). In contrast, everyone else has a 52 percent chance of having a son (and thus a 48 percent chance of having a daughter) for their first child. 21 Being “very attractive” increases the odds of having a daughter by 36 percent!”

3. Sapiens

By Yuval Noah Harari

This book is eye-opening and one of the singular best books I have ever read on ANY subject.

There was a time when at least six different species of humans co-existed on earth. Every other species, except Homo Sapiens (our species of humans) became extinct. Learn how our Savannah-dwelling primate ancestors dominated the planet and paved the way to who we are today.

Key Insight: Regardless of color, ethnicity, and background, we have more commonalities than differences. But sadly, we’re also predictable apes governed by certain laws.

Favorite Excerpt: On the Religion of Consumerism.

“The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ The capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect.”

“Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum.

In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How though do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.”

4. The True Believer

By Eric Hoffer

Read this and you’ll understand how Brexit and Trumpism happened.

There are two historians to read to understand why Americans voted Trump. Plato and Eric Hoffer. Hoffer wrote this book in the early 1950s. He was a legend in his field and was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Hoffer’s writing style is daring and observant. He is straightforward even when discussing sensitive topics. His insights are scary but with Trump, they came true.

Key Insight: We often make fun of the common denominators of countries. While they don’t represent the whole, they do represent the future as the excerpt below reveals.

Favorite Excerpts:

“There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair, this tendency has some justification. For the character and destiny of a group are often determined by its inferior elements.”

“The inert mass of a nation, for instance, is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the nation’s work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends — the best and the worst.”

“The superior individual, whether in politics, literature, science, commerce or industry, plays a large role in shaping a nation, but so do individuals at the other extreme — the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one, in the ranks of respectable humanity. The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”

“The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present.”

“They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking — hence their proclivity for united action. Thus they are among the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they imprint their mark upon these upheavals and movements which shape a nation’s character and history.”

5. Abundance

By Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler

The world is improving at an accelerated rate — and it’s getting better and better.

Look past the depressing world headlines, and focus more on the successful trend lines. It’ll remind you of the positive human potential we have going forward. The media is mostly negative because our reptilian brains evolved to pay more attention to danger than happiness. So if you only read the newspapers, you’re likely to be more afraid and make dumb choices based on fear (especially in voting for politicians). But in reality, the world is getting safer and better at an exponential rate.

Key Insight: We need to teach our young ones, and our pessimistic selves, to not give up on the future.

Favorite Excerpts:

“The twentieth century, for example, witnessed both incredible advancement and unspeakable tragedy. The 1918 influenza epidemic killed fifty million people, World War II killed another sixty million. There were tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, floods, even plagues of locust. Despite such unrest, this period also saw infant mortality decrease by 90 percent, maternal mortality decreased by 99 percent, and, overall, human lifespan increase by more than 100 percent.”

“In the past two decades, the United States has experienced tremendous economic upheaval. Yet today, even the poorest Americans have access to a telephone, television, and a flush toiletthree luxuries that even the wealthiest couldn’t imagine at the turn of the last century. In fact, as will soon be clear, using almost any metric currently available, quality of life has improved more in the past century than ever before. So while there are likely to be plenty of rude, heartbreaking interruptions along the way, as this book will demonstrate, global living standards will continue to improve regardless of the horrors that dominate the headlines.”

6. The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

By Alan Watts

More philosophical than science, you’ll want to read this if you want to add a good dose of funny into your life.

The subject is almost unwritable but Watts successfully presents alternative views to the common problem of connecting to a personal identity. The book questions the hoax of the temporary roles we play in our lives and why we struggle to attain self-fulfillment.

Key Insight: We need new experiences instead of a new religion.

Favorite Excerpt:

“Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness — an act of trust in the unknown.”

“An ardent Jehovah’s Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.”

“Therefore The Book that I would like to slip to my children would itself be slippery. It would slip them into a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling. It would be a temporary medicine, not a diet; a point of departure, not a perpetual point of reference. They would read it and be done with it, for if it were well and clearly written they would not have to go back to it again and again for hidden meanings or for clarification of obscure doctrines.

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience — a new feeling of what it is to be ‘I.’”

7. Death By Black Hole

By Neil deGrasse Tyson

This book acts as a portal to everything that enlightens and terrifies us about the universe.

Try reading it in the great outdoors. You’ll be able to see that much clearly where your space is in the universe.

Key Insight: The journey of the mind teaches us how humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos.

Favorite Excerpts:

“We register the world’s stimuli in logarithmic rather than linear increments. For example, if you increase the energy of a sound’s volume by a factor of 10, your ears will judge this change to be rather small. Increase it by a factor of 2 and you will barely take notice.”

“The same holds for our capacity to measure light. If you have ever viewed a total solar eclipse you may have noticed that the Sun’s disk must be at least 90 percent covered by the Moon before anybody comments that the sky has darkened. The stellar magnitude scale of brightness, the well-known acoustic decibel scale and the seismic scale for earthquake severity are each logarithmic, in part because of our biological propensity to see, hear, and feel the world that way.”

Possible reading lists for 2017

Around the world in 80 books - Take a trip around the globe with these books from the eighty most populated countries in the world. 

A well rounded 2017 - A list of 12 books on three different tracks: Modern Classics, YA Novels for Adults too, and Genre Sampler Pack.

18 Books to fuel your wanderlust - both fiction and nonfiction, these books will inspire you to get off the couch and travel! But don't forget to bring a good book. 

37 books with mind-blowing plot twists - if you're into that sort of thing.

10 best selling (e)books from 2016 - if your feeling left out.

18 short classics you can read in one sitting - including publisher's descriptions, these books are 200 pages or less.

Or the book challenge, either a 26-book version or 56-book version (it's not too late to start).

President Obama's Library, From the Past Eight Years

President Obama is a reader. NY Times book critic Michiko Kakutani interviewed Obama about his reading just before he left office.

Last Friday, seven days before his departure from the White House, Mr. Obama sat down in the Oval Office and talked about the indispensable role that books have played during his presidency and throughout his life — from his peripatetic and sometimes lonely boyhood, when “these worlds that were portable” provided companionship, to his youth when they helped him to figure out who he was, what he thought and what was important.

During his eight years in the White House — in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions — books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.

During his tenure in office, the President publicly recommended 86 different books, compiled into one list by Entertainment Weekly. Here are several of them, some of which I have also read and recommended on this very site:

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Dr. Atul Gawande
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
Seveneves, Neal Stephenson
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert
Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan
The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro
Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Working, Studs Terkel
Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow
The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin
What Is the What, Dave Eggers

Not a bad list.

Repost from kottke.org