Fave Books

“So many books, so little time.”

Big Books

Some of the super-important books that leap to mind just now… Favorites for one reason or another

• Long Life: Essays and Other Writings, Mary Oliver
• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Women of the Left Bank, Shari Benstock
• Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, Carolyn Steedman
• In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon, Bhikkhu Bodhi
• Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Jane Hirshfield
• Fierce Attachments: A Memoir Vivian Gornick
• Figuring, Maria Popova
• A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
• A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
• William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
• Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, Louise W. Knight
• Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, Anne Truitt
• Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, Jane Hirshfield
• Natural Liberation: Padmasambhava’s Teachings on the Six Bardos, Padmasambhava
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson
• The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, Daniel J. Siegel
• Turning Confusion into Clarity: A Guide to the Foundation Practices of Tibetan Buddhism, Yongey Mingyur
• All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
• The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk
• Rumi: The Big Red Book, Rumi
• Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson
• Eleanor Roosevelt, a Biography, Blanche Wiesen Cook
• My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Christian Wiman
• Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Megan Marshall
• Breach, Annie Holmes
• Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
• Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
• The Gift, Lewis Hyde
• The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf
• Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative, Paul John Eakin
• Upstream: Select Essays, Mary Oliver
• The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, Lauren Markham
• The Garden Party and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield
• Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, John O’Donohue
• The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa
• The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche
• Snow Hunters,  Paul Yoon
• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches,  Audre Lorde
• Virginia Woolf, a Biography, Hermione Lee
• Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Tibetan Buddhist Meditation, Tsongkhapa
• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• American Heritage Dictionary, Volumes 1 & II,  Thank you Mom
• The Letters of Virginia Woolf,  Virginia Woolf
• The Genius of Birds, Jennifer Ackerman
• Vanessa Bell, a Biography, Frances Spalding
• Foundations of Christian Faith, Karl Rahner
• Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, Robert K. Barnhart (ed)
• The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Varela, Thompson, Rosch
• Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward, Mark Freeman
• Cutting for Stone,  Abraham Verghese
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Birth of Pleasure, Carol Gilligan

Some Really Good Reads

A bit of a hodgepodge — delightful or powerful or disruptive — all to be commended

• Twenty Years at Hull House, Jane Addams
• Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, Stephen Batchelor
• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
• Half Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
• Orlando, Virginia Woolf
• The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Vivian Gornick
• A Life of One’s Own, Marion Milner
• Feminist Practice and Postructuralist Theory, Chris Weedon
• In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson
• Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago, Journeys Along an Ancient Way in Modern Spain, Nancy Louise Frey
• A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney, Susan Quinn
• The Moosewood Cookbook, Molly Katzen
• Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton
• The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, Karen Armstrong
• Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler
• The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
• Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening, Stephen Batchelor
• Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, D.T. Suzuki
• A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
• Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
• Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology and the Brain, Gary D. Fireman
• The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
• Lytton Strachey: The New Biography, Michael Holroyd
• This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe L. Moraga
• Women S Livesthe View from the, Carolyn G. Heilbrun
• Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, Richard Rodríguez
• He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art, Christian Wiman
• Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life, Jerome S. Bruner
• Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, Nancy Princenthal
• Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, Erik Larson
• The World Is Made of Stories, David R. Loy
• Lytton Strachey, a Biography, Michael Holroyd
• Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank, Andrea Weiss
• When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, Terry Tempest Williams
• Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Alexandra Fuller
• The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown
• On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, Jerome S. Bruner
• Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
• Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
• Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria E. Anzaldúa
• Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu, Jeffry Quilter & Gary Urton
• Tassajara Bread Book, Edward Espe Brown
• A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
• The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography, Deborah Levy
• In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
• Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
• Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
• The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
• Hot Milk, Deborah Levy
• A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman
• The Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway
• Coming Home to Tibet: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Belonging, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit
• The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
• The Awakening and Selected Stories, Kate Chopin
• News of the World Paulette Jiles
• Agnes Martin, Frances Morris
• Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything, Barbara Ehrenreich
• The Odyssey, Homer