Here are 77 books that Poverty Creek Journal fans have personally recommended if you like
Poverty Creek Journal.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve been running for a quarter of a century now, ever since I got the irresistible urge in high school to quit the soccer team and make my way over to cross-country practice junior year. In that time, running has been a source of mental clarity and physical expression for me, a source of joy and even of meaning. Naturally, it has become one of the focuses of my writing life, too. I’ve written three books about running and now write the On the Run column forSport Literate. It is gratifying to write about a sport that has such a rich literature.
I might call Donald Porter’sInner Runninga forgotten classic if I could tell that it had ever been known. Running’s answer to Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, it emerges from the human-potential movement of the nineteen sixties and seventies, with the tube socks and tracksuits to prove it. Porter’s promotion of slow, meditative, and inward-focused style of running offers an antidote to the hyper-competitive, results-obsessed attitudes that tend to rule running. You’ll feel grounded just by reading it and especially if you put it into practice.
All runners can attest to the well known fact that running is beneficial to the heart, weight control, and general fitness. But many runners ignore a benefit that can not only add enjoyment to a run, but can actually change a runner's attitude about life itself. In Inner Running, author Donald Porter examines the psychological and spirtual aspects of running. He explains how the sport can server as a soothing mini-vacation from the pressures of modern life. Using Porter's inner methods the runner needn't push to complete a set time or distance. The inner runner glides easily and runs solely…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve been running for a quarter of a century now, ever since I got the irresistible urge in high school to quit the soccer team and make my way over to cross-country practice junior year. In that time, running has been a source of mental clarity and physical expression for me, a source of joy and even of meaning. Naturally, it has become one of the focuses of my writing life, too. I’ve written three books about running and now write the On the Run column forSport Literate. It is gratifying to write about a sport that has such a rich literature.
“Running,” Catriona Menzies-Pike tells us, “has a way of dragging you into the present moment of exertion.” Yes, it sure does. As a group, runners exhibit an uncommon tendency toward rumination for which running often serves as a form of treatment, its mental benefits following directly from its physical nature. In writing so beautifully about such rewards, Menzies-Pike captures the feeling of running for any runner, fast or slow, in a disarmingly real and unromantic voice that rings with truth.
No one ever expected Catriona Menzies- Pike to run a marathon. She hated running, and was a hopeless athlete. When she was twenty her parents died suddenly - and for a decade she was stuck. She started running on a whim, and finally her grief started to move too. Until very recently, it was frowned upon for women to run long distances. Running was deemed unladylike - and probably dangerous. How did women's running go from being suspect to wildly popular? How does a high school klutz become a marathon runner? This fascinating book combines memoir and cultural history to…
I’ve been running for a quarter of a century now, ever since I got the irresistible urge in high school to quit the soccer team and make my way over to cross-country practice junior year. In that time, running has been a source of mental clarity and physical expression for me, a source of joy and even of meaning. Naturally, it has become one of the focuses of my writing life, too. I’ve written three books about running and now write the On the Run column forSport Literate. It is gratifying to write about a sport that has such a rich literature.
Sheehan’s classic lives up to its billing as a “philosophical bible for runners.”Running & Beinguses running as a means by which to explore the deepest questions about what it means to be human. But running is not only a means of questioning, for Sheehan, it is also a means of answering. There is a wisdom in recognizing the truth that our thinking is always embodied and a liberation in celebrating this fact. What runner does not know what Sheehan means when he writes, “On the road... I am occupied with my own inner life. I am constructing a system that will justify my own way of being in the world. And discovering, as Emerson said, that there are thoughts in my brain that have no other watchman or lover or defender than me?"
A New York Times bestseller for 14 weeks in 1978, Running and Being became known as the philosophical bible for runners around the world. More than thirty years after its initial publication, it remains every bit as relevant today. Written by the late, beloved Dr. George Sheehan, Running and Being tells of the author's midlife return to the world of exercise, play and competition, in which he found "a world beyond sweat" that proved to be a source of great revelation and personal growth. But Running and Being focuses more on life than it does, specifically, on running. It provides…
Mia Lark is running out of options. There is only one way to change the score: the fantasy planet Revivium.
Armed with the powerful magic in the helm and the friendly AI, Hex that goes with it, Mia throws caution out the window. It’s time to find the main guildhall…
I’ve been running for a quarter of a century now, ever since I got the irresistible urge in high school to quit the soccer team and make my way over to cross-country practice junior year. In that time, running has been a source of mental clarity and physical expression for me, a source of joy and even of meaning. Naturally, it has become one of the focuses of my writing life, too. I’ve written three books about running and now write the On the Run column forSport Literate. It is gratifying to write about a sport that has such a rich literature.
For a bit of levity, Mark Remy’s Runners of North America presents a mock classification of twenty-three subspecies of runners, including the Fashion Mag Runner (Lopus lulemonus) and the Dramatic Weight Loss Runner (Lopus saladus). Have fun identifying yourself and your running friends and gaining insight into what makes you all tick differently. A treat from running’s premiere humorist.
If there's one thing that Mark Remy knows, it's running. After 25 marathons and a career of writing for and about runners in Runner's World, he is well equipped to dissect the running world and the odd creatures that make up its population.
The North American Runner has evolved greatly over the years, adapting to changes in environment, including new threats, technologies, food sources, and fashion. These mysterious, brightly clad creatures live side by side with humans, but how many of us truly understand them?
In Runners of North America, a comprehensive guide to the 23 subspecies of runners (ranging…
I’m the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once. I often say it’s a book about being a mess in your twenties, but to speak more personally, writing it was a necessity, a way to make sense of both the intensity and mundanity of my own experiences. I love a book where you can palpably feel the author working to make sense of their own life, through language—and, in turn, sorting out what it is for any of us to be a person. Books like these are essential reading when life feels thorny, beautiful, and impossible to make sense of, and all you can do is try to write it down.
I don’t set much store by orderly chronology, in life or writing—as might be clear from my book, where old memories live vividly alongside the present moment!
More interesting to me is how memory accumulates and morphs over time, and how stories live in our minds. Needless to say I adore Julavits’s non-chronological diary The Folded Clock (and what a title)! In gorgeously detailed individual sections, she immerses us in her life without regard for the precise sequence of events. We’re left with a beautiful jumble, which is surely truer than how life is anyway.
Rereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they “revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor.” Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life—now as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendship and romance, faith and fate, and art and ambition, in The Folded Clock one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters explodes the typically confessional diary form with…
As an independent traveller, and throughout a career supporting international nature conservation, I’ve been fortunate to see many far-flung places of the world. Over the years, technology (eg. smartphones, internet, social media) has radically changed the way we travel, and indeed our expectations. Nowadays we want instant access, instant answers, instant results; we hate waiting for anything. However, long-haul travel still demands us to wait... in airport lounges, at train stations, bus stops, and onboard our transport while we endure long hours before reaching our destination. While some aspects have changed, patience, humour, and a good book still remain the best companions for any long journey.
The Bridget Jones series is amongst my all-time favourite reads. Bridget’s character has so many aspects that I can identify with, and so many of us experience insecurities about our looks, our talents and our love lives. The whole series is extremely entertaining, but there’s a specific part of The Edge of Reason that resonates with me: the fear I’ve always had when travelling, of ending up in police detention abroad through no fault of my own. It’s fabulously entertaining, but also thought-provoking.
9st 2, cigarettes smoked in front of Mark 0 (v.g.), cigarettes smoked in secret 7, cigarettes not smoked 47 (v.g.).
Bridget's second diary ushers in a reformed woman. She is no longer a smoker (well, not much), the wilderness years are over, and she is at last united with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy. But things aren't perfect: there's an eight-foot hole in the wall of her flat, she's increasingly worried about a certain boyfriend-stealing beauty, and her friends' mad advice is getting her nowhere - something has to change. And so Bridget decides to…
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
Social history has always been my passion: unless you know how people thought, felt and lived, even down to how they dressed and ate, it is often impossible to understand why they acted as they did. And no period is as fascinating to me as the inter-war years; after WW1, the greatest conflict the world had ever seen, the upcoming generations determined to break barriers, discard the last vestiges of what they saw as hidebound custom, to invent new, freer ways of writing, painting, dancing - and to have fun. And for most of this post-war generation, there was nowhere like Paris.
This three-volume epic that begins in 1918 and ends shortly before its author’s death in 1957 gives an unrivalled picture of the social and political mores that governed a certain section of English society.
Channon, a conscientious Member of Parliament for much of his life, was a crashing snob with a gift for observation and occasional piercing insights into his own character. He knew ‘everybody’ and his accounts of their intimate behavior – and his own – is compelling.
The Sunday Times bestselling edition of Chips Channon's remarkable diaries.
Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. Whether describing the antics of London society in the interwar years, or the growing scandal surrounding his close friends Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson…
Richard Vinen is a Professor of History at King's College, London, and the author of a number of major books on 20th century Europe. He won the Wolfson Prize for History for his last book, National Service. Vinen is a specialist in 20th-century European history, particularly of Britain and France.
Clark was a nasty man – not a lovable rogue but a real bastard with Nazi sympathies and a taste for young girls. The first volume of his diaries, however, are brilliant because they are so extraordinarily uninhibited. He reveals everything about himself including his own fraudulence.
The first volume of Alan Clark's diaries, covering two Parliaments during which he served under Margaret Thatcher - until her ousting in a coup which Clark observed closely from the inside - and then under John Major, constitute the most outspoken and revealing account of British political life ever written. Cabinet colleagues, royalty, ambassadors, civil servants and foreign dignitaries are all subjected to Clark's vivid and often wittily acerbic pen, as he candidly records the daily struggle for ascendancy within the corridors of power.
I’ve always had a passion for animals since I was nine years old and wrote my first ‘book’ on animals for a school library competition. I went on to study animal behavior at university and complete a doctorate in conservation biology and seabirds in the Scottish Outer Hebrides. I’ve worked in zoos and museums, written twelve books on animals as various as killer whales and koalas, extinct megafauna, and marine reptiles. Learning more about the natural world, the people who study it, and the importance of protecting it, has been the driving force behind all of my books and a joy to share with readers.
There are loads of great picture books that feature Australian animals but one of my favorites is Diary of a Wombat. It’s a very simple story told from the perspective of a wombat and it highlights their adorable, but also irascible and fairly destructive personalities. It’s incredibly difficult to pull off an ‘animal voice’ without it sounding like a person or a bit patronising, but Jackie French really nails it in this book, probably because of her extensive experience with looking after wombats. And the illustrations by Bruce Whatley are full of fun and joy. It makes me laugh every time I read it.
If wombats read books, I think this is the one they would love best, and what book about animals needs a better endorsement than that?
Take a trip with a wombat, and discover the ins and outs of her day in this modern classic Australian picture book. There are holes to be dug and territory to be defended - and don't forget all the eating and sleeping that needs to be squeezed in too!
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
Richard Vinen is a Professor of History at King's College, London, and the author of a number of major books on 20th century Europe. He won the Wolfson Prize for History for his last book, National Service. Vinen is a specialist in 20th-century European history, particularly of Britain and France.
Rose wrote the Albany column in The Sunday Telegraph and it is tempting to dismiss him as a gossip columnist who spread amusing and implausible stories about the bons mots of Princess Margaret. In fact, Rose was a more substantial person. He was interested in the British establishment but aware of himself as an outsider (partly because he was of Jewish origin). He was also, particularly during the early part of his career, an odd kind of modernizer – close to Tony Benn, whom he had known at university.
'The most detailed, amusing and accurate account ever of the post-war world of the English Establishment' William Shawcross, Daily Telegraph 'Extremely entertaining' Jane Ridley, Literary Review
Kenneth Rose was one of the most astute observers of the establishment for over seventy years. The wry and amusing journals of the royal biographer and historian made objective observation a sculpted craft.
His impeccable social placement located him within the beating heart of the national elite for decades. He was capable of writing substantial history, such as his priceless material on the abdication crisis from conversations with both the Duke of Windsor and…
