Books like How Dogs Love Us — picked by fans

How perfect to go on a road trip with one of my favorite writers plus his gentlemanly, loveable dog!

I smile just thinking about this book. I was delighted every step of the way. I felt like I was in the passenger seat, handing biscuits to Charley, stopping to meet strangers, and ruminating on how the USA has changed over the decades.

I loved hearing his thoughts in his older, wiser years, after his great successes, but still passionate, or slyly ironic, on so many topics. I love that he’s matter-of-fact in discussing disillusionment, loneliness, racism, or anything – but he’s hopeful in the end, always.

I want to buy a stack of these and hand them out as gifts.

I read this book after I had already sent my manuscript to my agent and was surprised that the plot involved the main character unexpectedly caring for a dog after losing a loved one, as my novel does. Told from the point of view of a writing professor whose best friend and mentor has taken his own life, it traces the protagonist’s slow psychological unraveling as she tries to come to terms with both her friend’s death and the place he had held in her life. Adopting his dog takes her out of her ordinary routine in concrete ways and also grounds her and requires her to take part in the details of a new kind of daily life, even if reluctantly. 

Part of what I love about this book is the many ways in which it’s experimental. It combines fiction, autofiction, and essay writing. It contains blank pages. There… show more.

I love this book because of Enzo, the canine narrator. In fact, he may be my favorite narrator of all time. He is one of those narrators I would love to be friends with or who I would love to have as a professor or a spiritual guide. 

The first time I tried reading it I put it down because I ugly-cried in the first chapter when Enzo recounted the story of how he planned to simplify his beloved human’s life. Thankfully, a trusted friend convinced me to give it another try because it’s now one of my all-time favorite books. Coming from an English teacher of twenty plus years, who reads a lot of good books, I think that's pretty high praise.

Yes, I cried a lot in this one, too, but I also laughed and did not want to leave Enzo or the humans he loved so dearly… show more.

You will likely never see finer photographs of shelter dogs than those inside Shannon Johnstone’s exquisite book. The photographs capture the dogs’ character, grit, and heart as they run, jump, fetch, or simply stare into the distance. Their faces are joyful, wistful, earnest. In most cases, these photographs saved lives. Posted on a North Carolina shelter’s website, the dogs captured the imaginations of those who would adopt them. Photographs of dogs with their new families cap off the book.

This book does a great job of describing what is possible and what is not when it comes to neuroscience. Poldrack, a professor of psychology at Stanford, makes sure we don’t lose the forest for the trees, boiling down the basics of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a way that anyone can understand. He is particularly strong on describing about how this technology might be used outside of university laboratories, discussing potential applications in law, advertising, and treatment of mental illness.

This is a fascinating exploration into the consciousnesses and personality differences between our left and right hemispheres through the lens of our potential for psycho-pathology. Dr. Schiffer is a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and shares with us innovative ideas about how to unravel the complexity of our psyche. 

I love this book because it explores a new way of understanding human emotions. When you laugh, cry, or scowl with anger, you often assume that the emotions you're feeling are the same as everyone else’s. Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that this is not necessarily the case, according to the new science of emotion.

She clearly describes the research, including her own, that shows that emotions are not hard-wired at birth but are constructed by our brains and our bodies as we go through life. It means that we can be the architects of our emotional lives, and the implications for society are profound. Reading this book has excited me and given me a great deal of hope and optimism about how we can have more agency over our emotional lives. 

A book written after decades of research by a leading neuroscientist to share his love of the brain with the general public. An ideal starter book for those of you who want to get a sense of all the different parts of the complex organ that comprise the human brain. In a series of chapters on the many different parts, regions structures, and brain processes this book provides a succinct yet comprehensive overview of the brain. It explains what the different parts do to make your brain work and how they work together they make us do what we do and makes sense of what we are.

I am deeply engaged in the lifelong work of neuroscientist Nina Kraus in the area of sound and music. My background as a sound designer and neuroscientist resonates with Dr. Kraus’ curiosity to unravel the mysteries of how we hear and make sense of the sonic world.

I really was blown away when she demonstrated how a famous rock melody created an electric signal in the brain of the listener, which was then transformed back into an audio signal that sounded exactly like the original melody. This book is full of hardcore explanations about the wondrous experience of the human brain’s interpretation of our world of sound, which I use for self-exploration and professional application in sound design.

Many years ago a young neuroscientist asked to visit me; he had just come to the U.S. from Brazil and was seeking advice on a lab he could join to train in the function of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex. He soon became spectacularly successful, showing that the brain forms different perceptions and controls different movements by overlapping distributions of cortical neurons that constitute an internal reality of the external world.

Building on this knowledge, Nicolellis has led the way in constructing brain-machine interfaces to enable a patient, for example, to learn to walk after suffering a stroke. In doing so, he has come to realize that everything humans experience in our lives is due to the reality constructed by the brain to represent the reality of the external world. As he expresses it, brain reality is the true creator of everything. Some may find this new view disturbing,… show more.