Here are 100 books that The Rest of Our Lives fans have personally recommended if you like
The Rest of Our Lives.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I am a 30-year veteran who has achieved success in three industries: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. I rose to the top of Wall Street, arguably one of the most grueling professional work environments in the world. I want to share the tips that helped me reach financial success with anyone who feels disadvantaged in the corporate game (i.e., women, people of color). My book leans heavily on research into cognitive biases and human nature, but focuses almost exclusively on actionable ideas. It is high on practical, often offbeat, tactics with an emphasis on gamesmanship, and is accessible to any reader, working at any job, due to its humorous, irreverent, satirical tone.
The Happiness Curve is a fabulous exploration of the science of happiness, its natural highs and lows, and how individuals can navigate the midlife slump to find greater satisfaction and purpose in life.
This is a book that will help put everything into perspective. It will help you figure out what makes people happy and why that changes over time. By learning its secrets, perhaps you can find happiness too!
"In this warm, wise, and witty overview, Jonathan Rauch combines evidence and experience to show his fellow adults that the best is yet to come.” ―Steven Pinker, bestselling author of Enlightenment Now
This book will change your life by showing you how life changes.
Why does happiness get harder in your 40s? Why do you feel in a slump when you’re successful? Where does this malaise come from? And, most importantly, will it ever end?
Drawing on cutting-edge research, award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch answers all these questions. He shows that from our 20s into our 40s, happiness follows a U-shaped…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
As an author of a dual-timeline thriller series set in Venice in the present-day and 16th century, I’ve spent countless hours researching the world’s most mesmerizing city. I’ve been there three times, including on a research trip. I’ve worked with historians and experts on various aspects and have explored the ancient streets and buildings first-hand. I’ve also read dozens of books set in Venice.
There are so many amazing books set in Venice, but no list is complete without Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. It’s a literary classic from 1912 that not only stands the test of time, it exceeds the hype.Death in Venice follows Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author who travels to Venice in search of inspiration. Instead, he finds obsession. Death in Venice is erotic and dark, but what I love most about this book is how it captures the city’s bewitching personality.
One of the most famous literary works of the 20th century, the novella "Death in Venice" embodies themes that preoccupied Thomas Mann (1875–1955) in much of his work; the duality of art and life, the presence of death and disintegration in the midst of existence, the connection between love and suffering, and the conflict between the artist and his inner self. Mann's handling of these concerns in this story of a middle-aged German writer, torn by his passion for a Polish youth met on holiday in Venice, resulted in a work of great psychological intensity and tragic power. It is…
I’m a writer, journalist, and occasional translator. Originally from Poland, I now live in the Netherlands with my German husband and three multilingual children. Since my children were born, I’ve become fascinated by the various ways culture and society affect the way we raise our children. I have written about various topics, but mostly parenting for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the BBC, among others. When not writing or thinking about writing, I can be found reading books, drinking tea, and doing nothing.
In this essay collection, accomplished writer Jessi Klein shares her thoughts about the changes she went through since becoming a parent. The red thread connecting these essays is the hero’s journey – and how mothers receive a call to adventure that they often refuse, meet mentors and find themselves in a completely new world. The ordeal leaves them changed but ultimately, they learn new lessons and become better and wiser for it.
Not only are the essays hilarious and thought-provoking but I especially loved how Klein compared mothers to heroes. Because isn’t that exactly what we are?
An instant New York Times bestseller, I'll Show Myself Out is the eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed debut You'll Grow Out of It.
"Sometimes I think about how much bad news there is to tell my kid, the endlessly long, looping CVS receipt scroll of truly terrible things that have happened, and I want to get under the bed and never come out. How do we tell them about all this? Can we just play Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire and then brace for questions? The first of which should be,…
The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram
by
Dean Snow,
An ordinary sailor named David Ingram walked 3600 miles from Mexico to Canada over the course of eleven months in 1568-9. There, he and two companions were rescued by a French ship on the Bay of Fundy. They were the first Englishmen to explore the interior of North America.
As I’ve reached middle age, I’ve found that many books about this period are about trying to regain lost youth or the hardships that aging can bring. I want to read more books about women who have lived through some things and are more powerful (and funnier!) because of it. In my writing, I try to highlight the stories of women with a little bit of history behind them and show that a long life–if we’re lucky–is also a full one. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have!
Just because middle age can come with overwhelming demands, it doesn’t mean that talking about it can’t be fun. This is a realistic book and a really good time. The backbone of the book is another perk of middle age that is sometimes overlooked: close friends with whom you share decades of history.
The four fifty-something friends of this book are trying to figure out how to get back some of the joy they shared as twenty-somethings when they weren’t yet drowning in responsibilities. It turns out that it can be as simple and as hard as saying “no.”
I love a book about women who have been “through it” and come out stronger on the other side.
"Do yourself a favor and say yes to the perfect bookish escape." —Lucy Gilmore, author of The Lonely Hearts Book Club
You've heard of Year of Yes. Introducing... Year of No.
During one unforgettable year in their twenties, best friends Emma, Fern, Carolina, and Andi make a pact to embrace whatever life throws at them, inspiring Fern to write a memoir detailing their escapades and the magical power of saying Yes.
But fast forward twenty years and they have reached their bandwidth of responsibilities. Fern is a full-time writer struggling to pay the bills. Carolina is a fitness-obsessed workaholic. Andi…
I've been writing and providing pastor care for more than thirty years now. Since turning sixty, I have noticed that aging well is not a given. Many people seem to grow increasingly bitter, resentful, and hard. If we want to become more empathetic, grateful, and loving, we have to keep growing and do our spiritual and relational work. We also need trustworthy guides to help us find our way. I hope to be a wise, compassionate guide for my readers.
Hagerty is a meticulous reporter and deftly weaves personal stories with many facts and figures about midlife. She interviews experts in sociology, psychology, neurobiology, and genetics while exploring the question, "How do you thrive in midlife?" Hagerty argues that rather than seeing midlife as a time of crises, we should be able to experience it as a time of renewal: a time when we feel a growing sense of certainty about who we are and what we have to offer the world.
A dynamic and inspiring exploration of the new science that is redrawing the future for people in their forties, fifties, and sixties for the better-and for good.
There's no such thing as an inevitable midlife crisis, Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes in this provocative, hopeful book. It's a myth, an illusion. New scientific research explodes the fable that midlife is a time when things start to go downhill for everybody. In fact, midlife can be a great new adventure, when you can embrace fresh possibilities, purposes, and pleasures. In Life Reimagined, Hagerty explains that midlife is about renewal: It's the time…
I guess we all have a "calling." Mine has always been to explore the deeper, darker, less palatable aspects of being human. I’m a bit like a space explorer of the human psyche. I’m lucky in the sense that my day job permits me to research, teach, and better understand things like love, death, and loneliness. I’ve been researching and writing about them for many years now. I always treasure books that help me to shed light on these themes. They are like shiny pebbles or jewels that I pick up and keep in my pocket. I hope you enjoy and learn from some of the treasures in my personal collection!
I love the opening quote in this book. I’ve never, ever forgotten it since I turned the first page. It’s a quote from Dante’s Inferno: “Midway through life’s journey, I found myself lost in a dark wood, having lost the way.”
That’s exactly where I found myself when I started reading this book. Like millions of other people, I was lost when I found it. I was looking for someone or something–wiser than me–to help me recognize that what I was going through in early midlife is actually a very normal, perhaps essential part of life’s journey.
Author James Hollis' eloquent reading provides the listener with an accessible and yet profound understanding of a universal condition - or what is commonly referred to as the mid-life crisis. The book shows how we may travel this Middle Passage consciously, thereby rendering our lives more meaningful and the second half of life immeasurably richer.
A series of galactic empire building, space battles, and the personal struggle of an exiled war leader to bring down the Galactic Empire that killed his mother and destroyed the Keeno Order.
It was almost by accident that I became who I turned out to be as a professional, a developmental scientist interested in how early-life experiences shape who we become. Had someone asked me when I graduated from high school what were the chances of me becoming a scientist and teacher, I would have answered “zero, zero”! During my now 40+ year academic career I've come to appreciate how complex the many forces are that shape who we become. There's no nature without nurture and no nurture without nature. This emergent realization led me to learn about and study many aspects of developmental experience, like parenting and peer relations, and the role of genetics and evolution.
This book tells the story of the ground-breaking Minnesota Longitudinal Study, the first to document developmental effects of infant-mother attachment security/insecurity and so much more, a contribution to understanding that greatly shaped my own career.
The book shares discoveries which emerged in following more than 200 children growing up under high-risk conditions from birth to adulthood. In so doing it illuminates whether, how, and why early-life experiences foster problematic development or resilience in the face of adversity.
The definitive work on a groundbreaking study, this essential volume provides a coherent picture of the complexity of development from birth to adulthood. Explicated are both the methodology of the Minnesota study and its far-reaching contributions to understanding how we become who we are. The book marshals a vast body of data on the ways in which individuals' strengths and vulnerabilities are shaped by myriad influences, including early experiences, family and peer relationships throughout childhood and adolescence, variations in child characteristics and abilities, and socioeconomic conditions. Implications for clinical intervention and prevention are also addressed. Rigorously documented and clearly presented,…
It was almost by accident that I became who I turned out to be as a professional, a developmental scientist interested in how early-life experiences shape who we become. Had someone asked me when I graduated from high school what were the chances of me becoming a scientist and teacher, I would have answered “zero, zero”! During my now 40+ year academic career I've come to appreciate how complex the many forces are that shape who we become. There's no nature without nurture and no nurture without nature. This emergent realization led me to learn about and study many aspects of developmental experience, like parenting and peer relations, and the role of genetics and evolution.
How parenting—and other factors—shape infant-parent attachment security/insecurity and the effects of attachment on child, adolescent, and adult development has been the subject of extensive study for more than 4 decades.
This edited volume takes stock of what developmental scholars have learned as well as what challenges to attachment theory and research remain to be addressed. The contributors to this edited volume are all well-recognized experts in the field.
The ongoing growth of attachment research has given rise to new perspectives on classic theoretical questions as well as fruitful new debates. This unique book identifies nine central questions facing the field and invites leading authorities to address them in 46 succinct chapters. Multiple perspectives are presented on what constitutes an attachment relationship, the best ways to measure attachment security, how internal working models operate, the importance of early attachment relationships for later behavior, challenges in cross-cultural research, how attachment-based interventions work, and more. The concluding chapter by the editors delineates points of convergence and divergence among the contributions and…
I first started tending patients at age 15, as a candy striper at St. Joseph Hospital. That was a long time ago, and since then I’ve learned much at patients’ bedsides, in Congress, statehouses and courtrooms. Through sequential careers in nursing, medicine, law, and advocacy, I learned that end-of-life experiences have the most to teach us about being truly present to our lives, about learning to love well and growing in wisdom. Personal autonomy, individual empowerment, and guided planning are all key to moving past our fear of death. In the end, as Seneca observed, “The art of living well and dying well are one.”
As Sallirae ministered to the elderly in an upscale continuing care community, she wondered how some residents aged into a graceful presence that attracted people to them, while others drove people away with their grumpy discontentedness. Some remained curious and engaged in life, but others shrank in interest and spirit. She studied her subjects and their histories closely and rewarded readers with practical tips to adopt in middle age to prevent us from poisoning our later years with grief and regret. What exactly can we do now to live our old age in joy and contentment? Sallirae died in 2007 at age 66, too young to reap the wise and graceful old age she bequeathed to the rest of us. I hold her memory in gratitude as I myself grow old.
A minister and counselor takes on middle age and aging in this insightful book, guiding readers through this bittersweet but necessary life passage while exploring the choices that we face. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.
Wales between the wars, a place of poverty and a world full of anguish. Yet, there is hope. Within family, within community, and most of all in the brave heart of one young girl.
Set in the lush Dulais Valley; Carrie is fated to a life of hardship and sorrow,…
I was born in Odessa, USSR, a Southern Ukrainian city that many more people know now than when my family and I immigrated in 1977. Growing up in the US, everything I read about Soviet immigrants was either cliched, stereotyped, or plain wrong. A 1985 short film, Molly’s Pilgrim, about a (presumably Jewish) Soviet immigrant girl showed her wearing a native peasant costume and a scarf on her head which, for some reason, Americans insisted on calling a “babushka.” “Babushka” means “grandmother” in Russian. Why would you wear one of those on your head? I was desperate for more realistic portrayals. So I wrote my own. And the five books I picked definitely offer them.
Math reigned supreme in the USSR. I was never particularly good at it. I had to immigrate to the United States to marry an American nuclear engineer turned math and physics teacher. In Divide Me By Zero the heroine’s widowed mother describes love in mathematical terms. The passage reminded me of my husband. I forced him to listen to me read it out loud to him. “Wow,” he said. "That’s hot." Read this book for the heart-wrenching story—and the hot math.
As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, approaching forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Nothing is adding up.
With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United…
