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Your Body Is Your Brain: Leverage Your Somatic Intelligence To Find Purpose, Build Resilience, Deepen Relationships and Lead More Powerfully by Amanda Blake I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen The patron saint of chefs and travel tragically died by suicide in 2018. Listen to the audio version of the memoir that made him famous; it’s read aloud by the man himself. It will make you miss him all over again, but you’ll also laugh and smile for what he once gave us. It might seem strange to include a nonfiction book about climate change in a list of feel-good books, but in it, Vince tells how she quit her job as a journalist to travel the world and find people who are having to adapt to our changing world. What she uncovers is an uplifting story of the ingenuity of humans. It’s beautifully written, and you will come away inspired.
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown (TED talk: The power of vulnerability) This is a short read, but this classic novel touches on creativity, learning, freedom from conformity, and flying, one of my favorite elements. I first read it when I was in my early 20s and then re-read it years later. It’s served as a touchtone to finding and flying through one’s own passions and paths. Air Traffic was written by one of my mentors, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Pardlo. It helped me deal with the complicated range of emotions that I struggled with after I lost my father last year. This memoir is about a difficult relationship between a father and son, and it shows us love in a form that we rarely see displayed openly. It’s work to try to understand and accept a complex person while still seeing them in all their humanity — including their anguish and their ugliness.Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Change by Stacey Abrams (TED talk: 3 questions to ask yourself about everything you do) Paley’s soothing voice — at times, it feels as if her rhythmic English is an effortless translation of the Yiddish once used by many Jewish immigrants — has the capacity to make the reader enter an alternative universe, one in which empathy is the law of the land. Yet she was also a tireless activist who saw writing as a way to denounce those who abuse power. Her legacy makes one grateful that literature, even though it may appear insignificant to some, is what actually remains. Science fiction isn’t a genre usually associated with comfort reads, but Willis is an expert at exploring speculative concepts through lovable, quirky characters. Here, her time-travelling Oxford University professors become embroiled in a Victorian-era farce of mistaken identity, temporal paradox and love. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this contemporary fiction book initially. Eleanor bugged me in a way that I could not identify. She is not supposed to be likable initially which is why I persevered and I ended up loving the book and Eleanor.
But when she hurts herself and is unable to return to work at full capacity, she grows close with her replacement, Cameron, a young man newly arrived in town looking for his birth mother. Ian Firth (TED talk: Bridges should be beautiful) If you want to enjoy a book with your favorite little personBeing clear that the role of the Book Club is to help with wellbeing rather than crisis – and that it is a commercial, not a donor, experience – drove Samaritans to create the Feel Good Book Club brand identity. This nonfiction book is aimed at the technologically minded but also at anyone who has an interest in the historical development of civilization. Around the turn of the millennium, the author was asked to find and write about the most useful tool of the previous 1,000 years. I won’t spoil what it was — you need to read it to find out, but it’s certainly something that none of us can do without. Why it makes a good book club book: Winter Street is the first book in the Winter Street series of four books, so if book club members like it, they can stay busy with the remainder of the series during the rest of the holiday season. It also offers the storylines of several family members to talk about. Over the course of a decade, they spend Christmas in New York together as friends, but impending major life changes are threatening the continuation of their annual festivities. When she was in graduate school, ornithologist Caroline Van Hemert began to worry that she had lost touch with the love of nature that spurred her studies in the first place. So she and her husband embarked on an incredible 4,000 mile journey to the Arctic Circle via boat, sled, and ski. This is a beautiful memoir about reconnecting with nature and the important lessons the wilderness can teach us.
The science of the soul. Tiny jumping spiders who can see the moon. Firestorms. Fantastic beasts. You can’t go wrong with the latest installment of this annual series — it will leave you filled with questions, knowledge, motivation and wonder! Read it because: Owens writes beautifully, you will feel like you’re sitting in the marsh with Kya surrounded by the gulls and sand.It's a great one to discuss too: not only can you discuss the Where the Crawdads Sing ending for hours, but the real-life inspiration behind the story is a thorny but interesting topic for discussion.
Evergreen classics for book club books
Parr delivers an impactful message in an impactful way. This children’s book empowers kids to be who they are, accept who others are, and do so without judgment. I read this with my toddler son at least once a week. Mara Mintzer (TED talk: How kids can help design cities) If you’d like to be closer to the people in your life
It was the first new identity that Samaritans had launched in that way,” explains Gilbert. “But it’s also one that just completely makes sense. And because of the power of the Samaritans brand, we felt we could be quite confident in using it in an understated way. People know that they’re supporting Samaritans through it, absolutely. But also know that it’s about the experience first and foremost.” razor-sharp quotes from some of history’s most inspiring female leaders, including Maya Angelou and Malala Yousafzai. I reach for this whenever I’m looking to feel re-energized in the fight for women’s issues. Read it because: It’s a romance done right. O’Leary is known for her witty and fun characters and this book delivers on that. It’s the perfect leisurely read and you’ll be desperate to finish it in one sitting. There’s nothing quite like a good book to warm your heart, lift your spirits, and bring you comfort. Whether they’re feel-good classic novels or recently published uplifting books, I’m always turning to books to add a little more joy to my day.As part of the design sprint, the team dug deeper into their audiences. Geraghty describes how they developed ‘user personas’ to sketch out the target audience. For the Feel Good Book Club, the initial persona was “a woman...35 plus, who’s interested in her own wellbeing, and potentially the wellbeing of her family and the other people around her”. In a Holidaze is a holiday rom-com that starts after a Christmas in which a lot goes wrong for Maelyn at her family’s usual “Christmas with friends” at a snowy Utah cabin. She leaves wishing to find happiness, and it seems like things can’t get worse until a car crash occurs. This book highlights our place in the universe in a very uplifting way. The earth, this place we call our home, is just a tiny spot in the vastness of space, and the book shows us that the small “pale blue dot” where we live is a small dot full of life and love.
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