83 Books Like The Wander Society

I love this book because it reminded me that creativity isn’t something reserved for a certain type of person, it’s something I get to claim.

This book is for all us types who don’t see ourselves as creative or working in a creative field; it simply lays out our ability to bring creativity to our work.

This book taught me how we need to take risks with our creativity, especially when deciding what we want and how to get it. I connected with its message about imagining more for your work and life.

This classic is my go-to for the challenges of living the creative life and how to push through them.

In short, punchy chapters, it identifies the main source of blocks writers and artists have and how to push through them.

I love its approach to the workmanlike attitude one needs to have to create consistently and move toward a goal, and how to be clear-eyed about the inner “resistence” we all have that seems to want to stop us.

We all dream about it: a life free of scrolling, tweeting, liking, faving, streaming, replying, apologizing for not replying, and other assaults on our poor, saturated brains. But what would an analog world actually look like? Award-winning writer, Chris Colin, paints a picture in his bedtime fantasy book for adults titled Off: The Day the Internet Died. 

Delivered in a pitch-perfect, tongue-in-cheek biblical style, this little book imagines an alternate reality that will hit home in our tech-addled worlds. Un-barraged by celeb gossip and political news, we begin to notice nature again. Rinee Shah’s playful illustrations perfectly capture the absurdity of life reflected in our screens. Whether you’re addicted to tech or not, you’ll see something of yourself when you put down your phone and pick up this smart, funny book.

Off is “So funny and so necessary. For humanity to stay sane, this must be read like the… show more.

This is a rare book. It is written by a philosopher. It can be read in an afternoon. And it will change your life. Forget your next self-help book. Read this instead. In Stand Out of Our Light, James Williams gives a straightforward (but extremely satisfying) account of the digital ‘attention economy’ and what is wrong with it. Williams used to work for Google, before he realised that things weren’t quite right. After all, the world built by big technology companies isn’t the one many of us would choose.

This book introduced me to the concept of joy spotting and changed the way I see the world. Well-researched and hugely engaging, I was fascinated to discover why I’m consistently drawn to certain color combinations, patterns, and environments. Full of ‘aha’ moments, I loved connecting the dots (in my case, multi-colored) and clarifying what and where truly brings me joy.

Few books have impacted my life and creativity so much and on such an ongoing basis. But since reading this book, I’ve embraced my love of color throughout my home, garden, and wardrobe and embedded the concept of joy spotting at the heart of my work. I highly recommend it! 

People have called Henri Nouwen many things: a priest, an author, a spiritual guide, a natural mystic. His books have sold millions of copies and continue to resonate deeply with people from all walks of life. In 2000, when asked to share the book that had most influenced her life, Hillary Clinton chose Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. The following sentence, in particular, she said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, hit her “like a lightning bolt”: "The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a "gift to be celebrated with joy." 

“I had never thought of gratitude as a habit or discipline before,” she explained, “and I discovered that it was immensely helpful to do so.” I first discovered Henri when I was eighteen years old and gifted with… show more.

What if reality was an illusion? This book messed with my mind and challenged my perceptions of what I thought was real. It made me think carefully about how I react to and think about my life and helped me understand how we develop biases.

This was one of the first books I read that helped me understand the impact and effects of ambiguity and uncertainty on my decisions, my happiness, and how I approach the world. It was instrumental in developing the Ambiguity habit in my DANCE framework for developing a creative mindset.

This book gave me the confidence to follow a dream that I thought was frivolous and silly: to be a professional speaker. As I read this book, I realized that following my heart was difficult for me, as I am a veterinarian and driven by science. As a result, I lost touch with my intuition and my confidence in doing what was true to myself, not what others expected of me.

When I read the part where she talks about thinking that your dream couldn’t be that because it seems too big and following that little voice that says, “What if?” It put me on the path of taking a chance on a dream, regardless of what it looked like to other people. 

This fifth pick isn’t fiction. But like the best fiction, poetry can pierce through to the very essence. Although shaggy poet Whitman was the furthest thing from a soldier imaginable, he was deeply involved in the war effort nonetheless. After the Battle of Fredericksburg, Whitman traveled to Virginia to find his wounded brother. He then chose to remain in Washington, DC, nursing wounded soldiers. Whitman’s war-time experiences gave rise to some of the finest poems in Leaves of Grass such as “The Wound-Dresser,” “Come Up from the Fields Father,” and “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.”

I read this book as a young person in college, but it wasn’t until I re-read it about 10 years ago that I was able to experience the depths of its power.

This classic collection of 19th-century poems was a beacon at the time and holds true today for modern people who long to re-claim our interconnectedness with the natural world and embrace ourselves in all of our complexity. It’s a book I keep in my campervan to read on camping trips and one that I go to when I need inspiration with my own writing.