Here are 100 books that Billy, Me & You fans have personally recommended if you like
Billy, Me & You.
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I was a funny little anxious kid, and still remember the relief of coming across friends who opened up and told their darkest thoughts and silliest moments. This is what I seek out in books and try to show in my own stories. To say...Look! We’re all deeply weird! You are not alone! Comics and graphic novels have such a unique and immediate way of whispering into your heart and it amazes me that so many people haven’t yet discovered what a wonderful art form they are.
Every panel of Hot Comb is full of music and movement. The dialogue is so perfectly observed it's like sitting on a park bench with a good old friend and overhearing conversations as they pass by. Some of the stories are directly autobiographical I think, and some are not, but they all feel very real and the dynamics of the relationships very familiar. A beautiful and sharp book about small personal everyday things and how huge and political they really are.
Hot Comb offers a poignant glimpse into black women s lives and coming-of-age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. The titular Hot Comb is about a young girl s first perm a doomed ploy to look cool and stop seeming too white in the all-black neighborhood her family has just moved into. In Virgin Hair, taunts of tender-headed sting as much as the perm itself. My Lil Sister Lena shows the stress of being the only black player on a white softball team. Lena s hair is the team…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I was a funny little anxious kid, and still remember the relief of coming across friends who opened up and told their darkest thoughts and silliest moments. This is what I seek out in books and try to show in my own stories. To say...Look! We’re all deeply weird! You are not alone! Comics and graphic novels have such a unique and immediate way of whispering into your heart and it amazes me that so many people haven’t yet discovered what a wonderful art form they are.
Wallis Eates is the master of picking scabs and upturning stones to see what scuttles beneath. And often among all the dirt and bugs, she finds such amazing treasure. In this book, she has such vivid and detailed memories I found myself staring into her wonderful pencil marks and time travelling back into the mind of my own little self and feeling all the fear and awe of those years. I was going to write, it's like happening upon someone’s secret diary, but it's so visceral, it's more like being Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap and suddenly, wonderfully finding yourself in someone else’s body for a minute.
When I was a kid in the 80s the superhero comics I was obsessed with were beginning to deal with the real world in a new way. And their creators were beginning to push and pull at the boundaries of the medium with a new spirit of play and provocation. I still love comics that seriously deal with real life – its complexities and its profound weirdness – and that push the medium in new directions and reckon with its history. I also want to be absorbed and moved and to identify intently with characters. It’s what I try to do in my own work, and what I look for in that of others.
Everything Lynda Barry touches is earthy human gold.
One! Hundred! Demons! is one part memoir of a difficult childhood, one part comics how-to, and six parts warmth and humor and unruly red hair. It isn’t quite as dark as some of her other work, though it certainly gestures in that direction at times.
It also exemplifies Barry’s knack for finding beauty and delight inside the most difficult, unfair garbage life can throw at you. Such a great book.
Inspired by a 16th-century Zen monk s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full colour vignettes. In Barry s hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you and stay with you: your worst boyfriend; kickball games on a warm summer night; watching your baby brother dance; the smell of various houses in the neighbourhood you grew up in; or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager. As a cartoonist, Lynda…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I was a funny little anxious kid, and still remember the relief of coming across friends who opened up and told their darkest thoughts and silliest moments. This is what I seek out in books and try to show in my own stories. To say...Look! We’re all deeply weird! You are not alone! Comics and graphic novels have such a unique and immediate way of whispering into your heart and it amazes me that so many people haven’t yet discovered what a wonderful art form they are.
Most of the books I’ve chosen are a bit wild and frantic like my own. Sunburning is very still and quiet and so, so funny. I felt the oceans of emotions under the surface though everything is drawn in such a careful way, and the brilliant pacing recreates the strange and humourous tension of being a human in this crazy old world. The dialogue is so well-drawn and in the gaps in between it I felt I could hear the whirr of Kieiler’s busy brain. Another book to make you feel less alone.
In an era where personal lives are meticulous curated and presented, Keiler Roberts' unflinching and intimate comics reveal real life to be as absurd as it is profound. In a sequence of vignettes, Roberts delineates the complicated life of a mother and artist that can be comical, melancholic and delightful.
Keiler Roberts' autobiographical comic series Powdered Milk has received an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Series and was included in the The Best American Comics 2016. Her work has been published in The Chicago Reader, Mutha Magazine, Nat. Brut, Darling Sleeper, Newcity, and several anthologies.
I am a
trained neuroscientist. I was teaching and performing research at Harvard
Medical School when a blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. On
the morning of this rare form of stroke I became vegetative, an infant in a
woman's body in that I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my
life. It took eight years for me to completely rebuild the left half of my
brain. During this experience,I gained true insight into the difference between our left and right cerebral hemispheres.
This therapeutic technique is designed as an evidence-based treatment program that trains the reader how they have the ability to not only recognize the different parts of their brain but how they have the ability to embody those different aspects of their character. This program is designed to help people heal their injured parts so they can live a healthier life.
Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) provides a revolutionary treatment plan for PTSD, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders and more.
Using a non-pathologizing, accelerated approach -- rooted in neuroscience -- IFS applies inner resources and self-compassion for healing emotional wounding at its core. This new manual offers straight-forward explanations and illustrates a wide variety of applications. Easy to read and highly practical.
I am now a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. I co-wrote Mind Hacks with technologist Matt Webb; we had great fun doing it. My research has always been in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, using experiments to understand the mind and brain and how they fit together.
Broks draws upon his experience as a neuropsychologist to tell illuminating case studies of those with brain injury and other anomalies of experience. Woven through are reflections on the philosophy of what it means to have a mind which is based on the meat of the brain and what it means for our sense of selves to have damage to that brain.
Humane and moving, with flashes of dark humour, Broks brings back from the outlying lands of human experiences lessons that are relevant for all of us.
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I’ve sat in many grief circles and listened to fellow grievers share their pain at being abandoned or misunderstood by their friends and families as they grieve. Often we suffer the secondary loss of community because our culture has not taught us how to grieve or how to be a friend to those in grief. My wife and I found some invaluable tools that helped us communicate our needs to our community, and keep them close on our grief journey. One of those tools is grief books. I’ve read dozens of them, and while everyone responds to grief books differently, I think these five books are the very best.
This book is a wonderful practical guide to grieving that is accompanied by charming illustrations from the author. This might make it sound child-like or cutsie, but it’s not at all.
It’s an honest and fierce guide that doesn’t use any cheesy aphorisms or simplistic clichés about grief. It tells it like it is, but with kindness and hope. It helped me feel not so alone.
Welcome to the Grief Club--a place where one human who experienced a terrible loss, Janine Kwoh, is at the door to welcome other humans who are grieving. It is not an instruction manual, or a step-by-step playbook, or a memoir. It is, rather, a fresh, empathetic approach to all of the surprising, confusing, brutal, funny, and downright bizarre parts of grief. Combining her own experiences with grief--the author's partner died when both were in their late 20s--with what she learned from others in her "grief club," Kwoh uses brief writings and observations, hand-drawn illustrations, and diagrams to explore all the…
I love any book that carries me away into a different world, allows me to feel new possibilities, and makes me think. That is what I call magic. This creative magic has filled all aspects of my life. In addition to writing, I am a theatre artist, a mentor, an advocate for women and girls, and a creativity facilitator. In other words, I believe in the creative powers of people to make a more just and enriched world. My goal is always to inspire others to find their own voice, and to use it to make a difference. That’s what guides my reading, and my book recommendations. Enjoy!
This might seem like a strange book to include in a list that has a touch of magic, but in many ways this book sparked my first novel. I am a firm believer that women can (and should) do whatever they want. I also accept that there are differences between men and women based on things like brain structure and biology. These differences are not limitations, but rather things to celebrate.
As I read, I began to ask questions. What if women have more access to their brain’s abilities than men? What if our connection with creative power were seen as more important than physical strength? My characters became my answers. That, in itself, is magic—because magic is simply answering the question “what if,” with “anything is possible.”
Since Dr. Brizendine wrote The Female Brain ten years ago, the response has been overwhelming. This New York Times bestseller has been translated into more than thirty languages, has sold nearly a million copies between editions, and has most recently inspired a romantic comedy starring Whitney Cummings and Sofia Vergara. And its profound scientific understanding of the nature and experience of the female brain continues to guide women as they pass through life stages, to help men better understand the girls and women in their lives, and to illuminate the delicate emotional machinery of a love relationship.
When my kids were toddlers, there was a Burger King in the neighborhood with an indoor playground. It was glorious. A random guy walked up to me while we were there. “How do you do it, you know, the whole Dad thing” he asked. "Well… you don’t necessarily need to do a whole lot. Mostly just show up. Stick around." Never mentioned that by this time, I’d written and/or illustrated at least a couple dozen children’s books. I asked my nine-year-old daughter how she’d describe me as a Dad. “Most people think you’re creative, but I think you’re pretty average.” That’s good enough for me.
I read this book a few years ago. Some of its essays really stuck with me. This is a popular science book, largely having to do with the limitations of popular science. I like to read anything that challenges my assumptions. Spending so much time in Dad mode, your brain can really atrophy.
My Dad was always interested in science. He never finished high school. In the pre-internet days, he subscribed to science magazines. He read instruction manuals cover to cover. I think he would’ve really enjoyed this book.
There is so much we don’t know. We tend to misinterpret what we do. Too often, we have good ideas and abandon them. This book serves as a reminder that creativity requires diligence and reflection alongside imagination.
At its core, I think these essays speak with indomitable optimism. Things could be better. My kids will grow up to be much more…
Over 150 of the world's leading scientists and thinkers offer their choice of the ideas, strategies and arguments that will help all of us understand our world, and its future, better. This title includes contributions from: Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Clay Shirky, Daniel Goleman, Sam Harris, Lee Smolin, Matt Ridley, Mark Henderson, David Rowan, Sir Martin Rees, Craig Venter, Brian Eno, Jaron Lanier and David Brooks ...among others. With his organisation Edge.org, the literary agent and all-purpose intellectual impresario John Brockman has brought together the most influential thinkers of our age. Every year he sets them a question,…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I am a neuroscientist and author who wants to help people break the mold and become the best possible versions of themselves. While working with people, I noticed that many repeated things like "I could never," "I am just wired this way," and “I am not good enough.” Even worse, they're holding onto a statement that was said to them in their formative years, which has dictated their trajectory as people. I want you to know that your brains can change…at any age! You can exhume your best traits and break the cycle of the habits and behaviors holding you back.
This is an amazing book that shows just how far we can go when it comes to changing the neural networks in our brains. It helped me understand the mechanisms involved in wanting to change some deep-rooted beliefs.
Doige writes about some of the most extraordinary cases of stroke patients rewiring their brains for functionality after their strokes. The brain is remarkable, and it can change if we so wish it to.
An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D., traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they've transformed-people whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety…
