Here are 100 books that Life on Earth fans have personally recommended if you like
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I fell in love with reading and writing as a child, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered the magic of poetry and began writing it myself. I began to immerse myself in poetry and, in particular, the poetry of Pablo Neruda through a course on The Poet’s Voice in which we explored how the poet’s voice changes over a lifetime of writing. For many years, I thought of myself as a fiction writer, but gradually I turned to poetry, and poetry saved my life. I start each day with a poem or two, and much of my work is inspired by the poets and poems that I read.
I heard about this delightful book from a friend and knew I had to read it. It is a meditation on the color blue. Each of Nelson’s “propositions” explores blue metaphorically, literally, historically, emotionally.
Reading this book I immersed myself in blue and all its facets, and through doing so I discovered the worlds of other colors, so that when I step outside, I see not only green but all greens, not only brown but all browns, and blue, of course, everywhere.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color ...A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the…
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 fell in love with reading and writing as a child, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered the magic of poetry and began writing it myself. I began to immerse myself in poetry and, in particular, the poetry of Pablo Neruda through a course on The Poet’s Voice in which we explored how the poet’s voice changes over a lifetime of writing. For many years, I thought of myself as a fiction writer, but gradually I turned to poetry, and poetry saved my life. I start each day with a poem or two, and much of my work is inspired by the poets and poems that I read.
I fell in love with Pablo Neruda and his poetry when I read this book, initially for a course called the Poet’s Voice in grad school. I’ve been reading it ever since. The book takes me through Neruda’s entire career, from 1924, when he published Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair, to 1967, when he published La Barcarola.
This book is the story of a life in poems. When I read this book, I discovered that I could write about anything because he did. I took hypnotic walks with him through his consular postings in Burma, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. With his odes, I saw the beauty in even the most mundane pieces of life—laziness, a book, a tomato. I basked in the wry and generous voice of a poet.
Pablo Neruda, el gran poeta chileno del siglo xx, premio Nobel de Literatura en 1971, es mucho más que un poeta político, comprometido o de denuncia. También nos ha dejado la sencillez optimista de las odas, esos homenajes llenos de amor a las cosas concretas (la madera, un tomate, una campana, el tren...) en los que fija una mirada amable y esperanzada sobre la vida corriente de la gente corriente... El recorrido poético de este creador inagotable bebe de las principales tendencias estéticas de vanguardia de la época que le tocó vivir: modernismo, surrealismo, expresionismo... En esta antología, adornada con…
I fell in love with reading and writing as a child, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered the magic of poetry and began writing it myself. I began to immerse myself in poetry and, in particular, the poetry of Pablo Neruda through a course on The Poet’s Voice in which we explored how the poet’s voice changes over a lifetime of writing. For many years, I thought of myself as a fiction writer, but gradually I turned to poetry, and poetry saved my life. I start each day with a poem or two, and much of my work is inspired by the poets and poems that I read.
This is the book I turn to for inspiration. Similar to Neruda’s poetry, Crooker turns the everyday into poetry. No matter the page, I find a poem that inspires more poems. I rediscover the magic of this morning, this day, again and again.
Crooker has trouble writing a poem and turns to Betty Crocker, the dry martini, cream puffs. I can then enter my own day with my eyes open wide enough to see its gifts in even the simplest of things.
Some Glad Morning, Barbara Crooker's ninth book of poetry, teeters between joy and despair, faith and doubt, the disconnect between lived experience and the written word. Primarily a lyric poet, Crooker is in love with the beauty and mystery of the natural world, even as she recognizes its fragility. But she is also a poet unafraid to write about the consequences of our politics, the great divide. She writes as well about art, with ekphrastic poems on paintings by Hopper, O'Keeffe, Renoir, Matisse, Cezanne, and others. Many of the poems are elegaic in tone, an older writer tallying up her…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I fell in love with reading and writing as a child, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered the magic of poetry and began writing it myself. I began to immerse myself in poetry and, in particular, the poetry of Pablo Neruda through a course on The Poet’s Voice in which we explored how the poet’s voice changes over a lifetime of writing. For many years, I thought of myself as a fiction writer, but gradually I turned to poetry, and poetry saved my life. I start each day with a poem or two, and much of my work is inspired by the poets and poems that I read.
I love kisses, and this is a book full of them. I was reminded of Neruda’s first book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
This is a book about love and loss, good kisses, bad kisses, and even “Generic Kisses.” This is a small book, literally, a portable book I can take with me in my coat pocket or a purse and bring out to read whenever I need the kiss of a poem.
'Ideally, a reader should finish this book, then find someone to kiss.' - Tess Gallagher
'This is the best book of love poems since Neruda's.' - Bill Knott
'There are as many nuances and inflections for kisses as there are lips to kiss,' says American poet Tess Gallagher. And so with these playful, serious and sassy poems about kisses, a whole book devoted to the kiss. Portable Kisses is a book which kept growing. The earliest poems were published in a hand-printed limited edition called Portable Kisses in 1978. But the poems wouldn't stop, like the best of kisses, and…
People come to songwriting from all different directions. Some have wanted to do this since they were little kids. Some like to make their parents mad. Some are wildly talented but crippled with doubt. All I can say is that no matter which way you’re facing, I think I can help you. I say this because I’ve been teaching college-level songwriting for years now, and every semester I have students who want to meet with me for office hours. They’re all repeat customers and I’ve noticed that many of them ask repeat questions. The point of my book, Music, Lyrics, and Life, is to try to address those repeat questions because chances are good that you have them, too.
A series of poetry lectures not intended for publication, they combine to form an astounding journey into language and art. You don’t need to be a poet to love the casual way she delivers bomb after bomb, and to wish you’d been her student. I guess this is as close as I’ll get, and it’s taken a long time (I’m still not done) because I can just sit on a phrase or a page for an entire subway ride. Definitely would have failed her class, but having the lectures written out is like getting an extension without needing to grovel for it.
This is one of the wisest books I've read in years...--New York Times Book Review No writer I know of comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates in the odd mystery and mysticism of the act--the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back...Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle's work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that's vital and welcome, that doesn't make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun. -The Kenyon…
As a teacher, I often talk with my students about current events and highlight how disasters can spiral. Wildfire seasons are worsening, storms are getting stronger, wars are starting and never-ending, and sometimes, my students express some despair in the face of such cycles. Though it’s not a cure-all for this anxiety, I encourage my students to try and create something from this existential worry. Rather than scrolling through all the bad things that cross our screens, creativity can help us imagine a better world to work towards. Poetry about disasters can help us see them through.
What I love most about this book is the strident, confident way the poems tackle our expectations about prose and poetic genres. Right from the collection's first poem, the book says that language is only the beginning; it still has its limits, though it can achieve longevity in the right conditions.
However, my favorite poem of the collection is 'Shakespeare Doesn't Care,' a poem where Dove imagines Shakespeare’s confident, coy response to comments on his prolific, inimitable career. In doing so, she highlights how his work points the finger of judgment through time. Dove does this, too.
This is not a book of portents, nor is it strictly a celebration or mourning of an apocalyptic world; instead, it highlights the strange echoes of history.
In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding the world's experiments in democracy.
Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history's grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives-the simmering resentment of a lift operator, an octogenarian's exuberant mambo, the mordant humour of a philosophising cricket.
Audaciously playful yet grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
I’ve tried my hand at street poetry with a typewriter and been surprised by the hugs and tears my little efforts sometimes provoke. This book shows me why: people are hungry for someone to listen and care. And something about a mechanical intermediary promotes attention, while digital tech pushes us apart.
I was absorbed by Sonia-Wallace’s stories and jealous of his chance to be Amtrak’s writer-in-residence, typing poems on a train across America.
It might surprise you who’s a fan of poetry — when it meets them where they are.
Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, “What do you need a poem about?” To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian’s poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life.
As a poet and a dreamer, I believe in a world where we live in harmony with other people, nature, and the Divine. During the completion of my Master of Arts degree, I discovered a love of poetry: the lyrical cadences of the romantic poems reminded me of the sung psalms of my youth. No life is without sorrow, and the gift of poetry — both writing and reading it — has offered me hope through many a dark time, inspiring me to push on towards a new dawn. My wish for you is that, in these poetry collections, you too find a light during these turbulent times that we’re living in.
While this book of poems, first published in 1964, does hark back to a past era, the poems themselves are timeless. There’s an underlying sense of peace, which gives me solace when I feel bleak and filled with a nameless anxiety. Despite the sorrows, there’s grace in these poems, and in the world Berry speaks of — a simpler world than the one we live in today. Yet, each time I read them, I’m enriched with comfort and hope that frees me from the melancholy of living in a modern world that appears to be losing its way.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The poems of Wendell Berry invite us to stop, to think, to see the world around us, and to savour what is good. Here are consoling verses of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging; luminous hymns to the land, the…
As Rebecca Roberts in Apocalypse was an ancestor whose achievements have been largely ignored-maybe because of gender-it seemed to be time to redress the balance. A female author may have done the job better, but none stepped forward at the time and Hollywood screenwriter K.Lewis was keen to write a screenplay, requiring a concept screenplay outline as a guide. It was that which later became the 1st Edition of Apocalypse.
As well as being the best Gothic style verses in the English language with the possible exception of some by Edgar Allan Poe-there are some way ahead of their time. "If Earth & Moon were gone" prefigures Mach's Principle, which was only formulated 4 decades after EJB thought of it. Anyone lucky enough to find an edition with EJB's Essays she wrote in Brussels will have a copy of her formulation of Evolutionary theory 2 decades before Mr. Darwin claimed it as his own.
In 1846 a small book entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bellappeared on the British Literary scene. The three psuedonymous poets, the Bronte sisters went on to unprecedented success with such novels as Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and Jane Eyre, all published in the following year. As children, these English sisters had begun writing poems and stories abotu an imaginary country named Gondal, yet they never sought to publish any of their work until Charlotte's discovery of Emily's more mature poems in the autumn of 1845. Charlotte later recalled: "I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in…
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…
For my first 18 years, I slept in the same room (opposite my parents) in the same house (116 Monticello Avenue) in the same city (Piedmont) in the same state (CA) in the same country (USA), but soon after leaving for college in Evanston, IL, I pined for elsewhere and ended up peripatetic. That peripateticness plagued me, as a woman/wife/mother. While growing our family, my French husband and I moved: Israel to France to California to New York to Israel to New York to Israel. Finally, in my early fifties, I understood home is more about who you are than where you live.
This book combines compressed prose with nonfiction truth-telling but it isn’t linear or a complete story as much as a snapshot of Fennelly’s childhood, home life, and keen observations.
This book showed me that the quality of writing trumps the quantity of words. Short and sparse, when well written, can find a place on a bookshelf and shine.
The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of non-fiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer and deeply original observer of life's challenges and joys.
Some pieces are wistful, some wry and many reveal the humour buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments and awakens us…
