Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Elizabeth Gilbert · 288 pages

Elizabeth Gilbert digs deep into her own generative process to share her wisdom and unique perspective about creativity, offering insights into the mysterious nature of inspiration. She asks us to embrace our curiosity and let go of needless suffering. She shows us how to tackle what we most love, and how to face down what we most fear. She discusses the attitudes, approaches, and habits we need i

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Irving Stone · 710 pages

Mr. Stone gives his signature style and thought to this story of Michelangelo. He points out often in this book that Michelangelo, before beginning a work, asks what it is he is trying to capture in the moment of his painting, sculpture, or poem. So it is with Mr. Stone. He wants to portray, as close as he can find, the moments of the life of this artist. What shaped him, what he loved, what (and

By My Hands

Florian Gadsby · 400 pages

Everybody's Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture

Fab 5 Freddy · 336 pages

A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

Michael Pollan · 320 pages

At a turning point in his life, writer Michael Pollan found himself dreaming of a small wood-frame hut in the woods near his house - a place to work, but also a "shelter for daydreams." Ordinarily more at home among words than things, the author was seized by the idea of building the place himself, with his own two unhandy hands. A Place of My Own recounts his two-and-a-half-year journey of disco

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Robert M. Pirsig · 418 pages

"The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called 'yourself.'"One of the most important and influential books of the past half-century, Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a powerful, moving, and penetrating examination of how we live and a meditation on how to live better. The narrative of a father on a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest with his young

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

Marie Kondo · 208 pages

Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your house once, you'll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever. The KonMari Method, with its revolutionary category-by-category system, leads to lasting results. In fact, no

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer · 207 pages

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose

American Philosophy: A Love Story

John Kaag · 259 pages

"John Kaag is a dispirited young philosopher at sea in his marriage and his career when he stumbles upon West Wind, a ruin of an estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that belonged to the eminent Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy and a direct intellectual descendent of William James, the father of American philosophy and

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl · 165 pages

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. At the heart of his theory, known a

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami · 179 pages

Tuesdays with Morrie

Mitch Albom · 192 pages

Tuesdays with Morrie is a memoir by American author Mitch Albom about a series of visits Albom made to his former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, as Schwartz gradually dies of ALS. The book topped the New York Times Non-Fiction Best-Sellers List for 23 combined weeks in 2000, and remained on the New York Times best-selling list for more than four years after. In 2006, Tuesdays with Morrie was

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke · 109 pages

Letters written to F.X. Kappus during the years 1903-1908. Chronicle of Rilkes's life for the years 1903-1908 (p. 81-123).

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol · 248 pages

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Atul Gawande · 283 pages

From surgeon and bestselling author Atul Gawande, a book that has the potential to change medicine—and lives. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should. Through eye-opening research

The Artist's Way

Julia Cameron · 238 pages

The Artist's Way is the seminal book on the subject of creativity. An international bestseller, millions of readers have found it to be an invaluable guide to living the artist's life. Still as vital today-or perhaps even more so-than it was when it was first published one decade ago, it is a powerfully provocative and inspiring work. In a new introduction to the book, Julia Cameron reflects upon

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi · 256 pages

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve me

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Austin Kleon · 160 pages

When asked to talk to students at Broome Community College in upstate New York in the spring of 2011, Austin Kleon wrote a simple list often things he wished he'd heard when he was their age: 'Steal like an artist; Don't wait until you know who you are to start making things; Write the book you want to read; Use your hands; Side projects are important; Do good work and put it where people can see

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution

Denis Dutton · 256 pages

About Looking

John Berger · 198 pages

This successor to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, written over the last ten years, searches for meaning within and beyond what is looked at. Why do zoos disappoint children? Why do we take snapshots of those we love? How do the media use photographs of agony? When an animal looks us in the eyes, what does that look mean? Berger describes how a sixteenth-century masterpiece he saw in the 1960s com

The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature

Jose Ortega y Gasset · 204 pages

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Wassily Kandinsky · 92 pages

A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his o

M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work

M.C. Escher · 96 pages

History of Beauty

Umberto Eco, Girolamo De Michele · 438 pages

From the Publisher: What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual