–The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson is an epic biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Wow. Wow. Wow. It’s a long one, but every page is full of gems.
–Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art by Jennifer New and 101 Things I Learned in Product Design School by Sung Jang, Martin Thaler, and Matthew Frederick were quick, fun reads.
-Oh my gosh, Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo is INSANE. So good. I originally picked it up to explore writing for emotional well-being, but it also doubles as a guide on how to write a book. I underlined or starred something on almost every page. You can see my enthusiasm scribbled all over the inside cover.
It’s one of my favorite books about writing, along with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Write For Life, Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing, Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure, and…
–The Art of Slow Writing also by Louise DeSalvo—a book I found going down the rabbit hole after reading Writing as a Way of Healing. It’s incredible. If you’re a writer, you need to read it. I love how she writes and what she writes about. So I of course had to pick up her memoir Vertigo, which is STELLAR so far. (More on that one next month!)
–The Autobiography of Malcolm X by, well, Malcolm X is just as powerful as everyone says. Super eye-opening. I considered things I hadn’t before. And it’s incredibly inspiring: a man reads his way through a prison library and becomes one of the most powerful activists in the world. He would be so sad to see the state of our country today.