Here are 100 books that The Yellow Envelope fans have personally recommended if you like
The Yellow Envelope.
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I am an avid lover of all cultures, especially travel memoirs. I had a goal to travel to 30 countries in 30 years, and I wrote a memoir, Traveling in Wonder. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting both the author and side characters in all of these books, as each brings something extraordinary to the story. I also loved the descriptions in these memoirs, which brought me back to my memories!
Eliza does an incredible job of sharing her story with her readers. I enjoyed her stance on moving from the President’s Wife of Iceland to building her own name, Eliza Reid.
In the book, I learned about a multitude of amazing women who have created a safe space to read about their journeys and triumphs!
"Secrets of the Sprakkar is a fascinating window into what a more gender-equal world could look like, and why it's worth striving for. Iceland is doing a lot to level the playing field: paid parental leave, affordable childcare, and broad support for gender equality as a core value. Reid takes us on an exploration not only around this fascinating island, but also through the triumphs and stumbles of a country as it journeys towards gender equality." -Hillary Rodham Clinton
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 am an avid lover of all cultures, especially travel memoirs. I had a goal to travel to 30 countries in 30 years, and I wrote a memoir, Traveling in Wonder. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting both the author and side characters in all of these books, as each brings something extraordinary to the story. I also loved the descriptions in these memoirs, which brought me back to my memories!
Michael’s book was such a great read as growing up I’ve always known that Scandinavia is known for being the happiest batch of countries in the world.
In this book, Michael walks through the experiences throughout each country, sharing with the reader their interesting travelogue. It made me want to travel back to Scandinavia again!
The Christian Science Monitor's #1 Best Book of the Year
A witty, informative, and popular travelogue about the Scandinavian countries and how they may not be as happy or as perfect as we assume, “The Almost Nearly Perfect People offers up the ideal mixture of intriguing and revealing facts” (Laura Miller, Salon).
Journalist Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians for more than ten years, and he has grown increasingly frustrated with the rose-tinted view of this part of the world offered up by the Western media. In this timely book he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks…
I am an avid lover of all cultures, especially travel memoirs. I had a goal to travel to 30 countries in 30 years, and I wrote a memoir, Traveling in Wonder. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting both the author and side characters in all of these books, as each brings something extraordinary to the story. I also loved the descriptions in these memoirs, which brought me back to my memories!
I enjoyed the writing style and the adventures the author went through. They were vulnerable and honest in their book, which I really also liked because I felt like I was really being told an honest story overall!
I truly enjoy Nordic culture and books about Nordic culture, so this was right up my alley!
A Finnish journalist, now a naturalized American citizen, asks Americans to draw on elements of the Nordic way of life to nurture a fairer, happier, more secure, and less stressful society for themselves and their children.
Moving to America in 2008, Finnish journalist Anu Partanen quickly went from confident, successful professional to wary, self-doubting mess. She found that navigating the basics of everyday life—from buying a cell phone and filing taxes to education and childcare—was much more complicated and stressful than anything she encountered in her homeland. At first, she attributed her crippling anxiety to the difficulty of adapting to…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I am an avid lover of all cultures, especially travel memoirs. I had a goal to travel to 30 countries in 30 years, and I wrote a memoir, Traveling in Wonder. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting both the author and side characters in all of these books, as each brings something extraordinary to the story. I also loved the descriptions in these memoirs, which brought me back to my memories!
Eric does a fantastic job of connecting Nordic and Scandinavian cultures with the Minnesotan and American cultures within my state. Living in Minnesota, I’m always interested in books that discuss cultural or societal norms like the ones I interact with on a daily basis.
I truly enjoyed broadening my knowledge on this search!
Growing up with Swedish and Norwegian grandparents with a dash of Danish thrown in for balance, Eric Dregni thought Scandinavians were perfectly normal. Who doesn't enjoy a good, healthy salad (Jell-O packed with canned fruit, colored marshmallows, and pretzels) or perhaps some cod soaked in drain cleaner as the highlights of Christmas? Only later did it dawn on him that perhaps this was just a little strange, but by then it was far too late: he was hooked and a dyed-in-the-wool Scandinavian himself.
But what does it actually mean to grow up Scandinavian-American or to live with these Norwegians, Swedes,…
I’ve always enjoyed reading memoirs that pull me in, take me on a unique journey, and entertain me with real-life drama. Nonfiction can be better than fiction, when the experiences and a compelling voice are present. I have been a writer and a nomad since 2003 and, during my thirties, sailed throughout the Caribbean and South Pacific for eight years with a partner and two dogs. When publishing my own account of this journey, I merged the present tense with enticing elements of fiction writing, like flashbacks, foreshadowing, and cliffhangers. Using correct grammar and eliminating typos are important to me as well, which is why I am a picky reader.
While I enjoyed readingOne Girl One Dreamand have unconventional ideas like the author, I’m torn about a child sailing the world instead of going to school.
Laura sailed single-handedly around the world when she was 14, finishing at 16. This fascinating achievement made her the youngest circumnavigator in the world.
The first chapter is a page turner; the subsequent ones are written like a diary. I am usually not a fan of this style, but because her story remains an exciting and courageous feat from beginning to end, it kept me wanting to learn more. It was also fun to read Dutch words and traditions, because I grew up in Belgium.
I wouldn’t call Laura’s memoir a high-quality narrative or good writing, but it held my attention and that means something for this picky reader.
The amazing autobiographical account of the youngest ever solo circumnavigation of the Earth. First time in English! If you want to see the other side of the world, you can do two things: turn the world upside down, or travel there yourself. In 2012, at the age of just 16, Laura Dekker became the youngest sailor ever to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe. In realising her long-held dream, she had not only braved the wild oceans and long weeks of solitude at sea, but also the doubts and sometimes hostile resistance of officials. In this remarkable account of her incredible journey…
Similar to many other men and women, when I was younger and more naïve, I had the romantic dream of sailing around the world, exploring and experiencing new times in exotic places. Like many others who turned that dream into reality, I quickly learned the new and exotic moments were far out-shadowed by the life-threatening, dream-ending, nightmare realities of ocean sailing. Fortunately, I ended the voyage before I killed myself. I wanted to share my dream and nightmare experiences with those who dream.
I like this book because it was the first book I read as a child about sailing around the world. It filled me with a sense of adventure that ignited in me a desire to do the same while also filling me with a sense of dread.
Unfortunately, I focused more on the romance of the story than on the reality.
"The classic of its kind." —Travel World "One of the most readable books in the whole library of adventure." —Sports Illustrated "The finest single-handed adventure story yet written." —Seafarer Challenged by an expert who said it couldn't be done, Joshua Slocum, an indomitable New England sea captain, set out in April of 1895 to prove that a man could sail alone around the world. 46,000 miles and a little over 3 years later, the proof was complete: Captain Slocum had performed the epic "first" single-handedly in a trusty 34-foot sloop called the "Spray." This is Slocum's own account of his…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I have loved writing since I was in grade school and after graduating university with a degree in International Affairs I became a journalist. I’ve written six non-fiction books and also teach Journalism at SUNY Purchase. I’ve always been fascinated about the way one person’s life or one seemingly small episode in history allows us a way to examine the larger picture: whether it was how Fanny Bullock Workman showed what it meant to be a woman in a predominantly male world of mountain climbing or how the deliberate sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in the closing days of WWII showed that war is never black and white, that there are layers to people and stories and events that we should always try to consider.
Eighty Days takes readers behind the scenes of the lives of Bly and Bisland, two successful women who made a name for themselves during the late 1800s. It reveals the private women behind the public personas during an era when women were expected to mind house and home.
On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly, the crusading young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper, left New York City by steamship on a quest to break the record for the fastest trip around the world. Also departing from New York that day—and heading in the opposite direction by train—was a young journalist from The Cosmopolitan magazine, Elizabeth Bisland. Each woman was determined to outdo Jules Verne’s fictional hero Phileas Fogg and circle the globe in less than eighty days. The dramatic race that ensued would span twenty-eight thousand miles, captivate the nation, and change both competitors’ lives…
I remember the first time I stepped onto a sailing ship and that was the full-size replica of the Cutty Sark at Greenwich, London. The younger me descended below decks and started to imagine the enormity of risking everything on an expedition into the unknown. Since that time, I’ve become an eighteenth-century scholar, able to channel my wonder at the age of sail into researching, teaching, writing, and broadcasting about many aspects of the period. I hope the books on this list help you journey all over the globe with a sense of what it was like to trust your life to a self-contained floating world heading into unchartered waters.
Before I read this book, all I knew of Magellan was that he led the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe by sea and that he did it by finding the strait at the tip of South America that links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and that still bears his name.
I imagined the Strait of Magellan as a marine superhighway, easily found if sailing down the continent’s eastern seaboard. Bergreen made me realize how painstakingly slow was the process of finding and navigating the Strait, full of dead-end channels and submerged glacial moraine.
Before the book reaches the Strait, I was struck by Bergreen’s account of the mutinous tensions between the Portuguese Magellan and Spanish officers and crew. I finished the book, marveling that anyone made it back to tell the tale.
The astonishing tale of the first sea voyage to circumnavigate the entire globe. Magellan's dramatic maritime expedition in 1519 discovered the straits that enabled Europe to trade with the Eastern spice islands and changed the course of history.
In an era of intense commercial rivalry between Spain and Portugal, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator sailed to explore the undiscovered parts of the world and claim them for the Spanish crown in one of the largest and best-equipped expeditions ever mounted in the Age of Discovery. Yet of the fleet of five vessels under his command, only Victoria was to return…
My favorite place to be is on salt water, in a sailboat. When that’s not possible, I either write about sailing or seek out stories that take me out to sea. I was first on a sailboat at ten days old, and as a lifelong sailor and Olympian, I speak sailing. So, I really appreciate other authors who write about my passion in a truly knowledgeable voice. I’m so glad I took the time to put this list together because it reminded me of some old favorites I'm going to put back on my TBR list.
I read this book as a young teenager and as soon as I finished, I started reading again. I’ve since learned that the best thing we can do as authors is to make readers feel like they are not just reading but actually living the story, and in hindsight that’s why it made such an impression.
I could easily imagine myself sailing around the world, just like this other sailing kid who was only a few years older than me—and who had already achieved a lifelong dream.
3
authors picked
Dove
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
12,
13,
14, and
15.
What is this book about?
In 1965, 16-year-old Robin Lee Graham began a solo around-the-world voyage from San Pedro, California, in a 24-foot sloop. Five years and 33,000 miles later, he returned to home port with a wife and daughter and enough extraordinary experiences to fill this bestselling book, Dove.
I am a scientist, educator, successful entrepreneur, and author. I believe that human civilization is threatened by the wonderful and dangerous technologies that we created in the last two centuries: fossil fuels, nuclear weapons, gene editing, AI, and social media. As a creator of technologies, I feel responsible that more hasn’t been done to properly control them. My current mission is to sound an alarm about the potential tyranny of technology through my novels, 100 Years to Extinction and the sequel, 12 Years to AI Singularity, on my website and on social media. While the recommended books on my list are nonfiction, my fictional story presents the science and technology accurately as nonfiction would.
This is a wonderful book that I found difficult to put down.
It is about a different technology that made profound changes in civilization: our ability to navigate and explore the world. That new technology allowed European civilization to threaten the civilizations of indigenous people on other continents. Will it be similar to AI threatening the civilization of humans?
I was particularly struck by the wars going on between people of the same culture, but living on neighboring islands. Their lack of cooperative existence put their cultures at risk. Will human civilization have the same lack of cooperation in dealing with artificial intelligence?
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • A “thrilling and superbly crafted” (The Wall Street Journal) account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day.
“Hampton Sides, an acclaimed master of the nonfiction narrative, has taken on Cook’s story and retells it for the 21st century.”—Los Angeles Times
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest…
