Books like This Boy's Life — picked by fans

As in my second recommendation, Harari adds the historical perspective to humanity’s survival.

The coming battle with AI is just the latest for humans. One hundred thousand years ago, at least six humanoid species inhabited the Earth and battled for survival. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.

Harari does a beautiful job of explaining how our species succeed in the battle for dominance. He describes how our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms; how did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism?

We need to understand our past to properly control our future with AI.

I recently saw a clip of Rick Rubin talking about art and AI. To paraphrase, he explains that he’s interested in artists because of their point of view. AI has no point of view. I watched him speak so eloquently (and so simply) about something I have tried to put words to for months. 

Creativity is akin to magic. It’s what sparks joy. It’s what makes you remember the details you do. What makes creativity powerful isn’t polish, but presence. Part of that story is the ability to notice, to feel, to pay attention to what most people rush past and capture it, if only for a moment. 

In The Creative Act, Rick Rubin distills that instinct into a way of being. He reminds us that creativity is a birthright. A way of moving through the world with sensitivity and curiosity. Rubin’s words are art in and of themselves.… show more.

Investigative journalism has always been the dream. When I was 17, I thought I would change the world, cracking mysteries open one interview at a time like in the movies. Life didn’t quite work out that way, but narrative investigation is still a revered and epitomized medium. 

Stolen Focus embodies this investigative approach. It explores how constantly switching between technologies erodes creativity and offers a call to action to reclaim attention. Technology being so present in our daily lives is still relatively new. I was born in 1990 and grew up with a toe in both worlds, but television and computers of some form have been a part of my life since I can remember. 

The book speaks directly to my own concerns, which I eventually went on to write about, including “tab overload” and lost concentration. It blends human stories with scientific research, making it accessible to readers… show more.

Since journalism school, I have always been drawn to storytelling that tells the truth, but better. Journalism that reads like fiction, that makes you feel something, and makes you think differently. The stories that stick with you and change your perspective on more than just the direct subject. Conversations questioning the self, identity, and the world around us, ultimately in the pursuit of happiness, make me feel alive. 

In university, I studied philosophers like Descartes, Voltaire, Plato, and Machiavelli. Then I fell in love with the classics like The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno. From there, it was Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf. Through all of it, a common thread. How do we define humanity?

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows explores themes like attention, discipline, cultural commentary, thought process, and emotional clarity. Over the last few decades, we have been experiencing a digital-age shift, and Carr’s writing shares the very human… show more.

I wasn’t sure how an entire book could be written on the topic of reading to my kids. I also thought I knew how to read to my kids. This book took our time together to a new level! The Read-Aloud Family challenged me to make the most of our reading time, equipped me to ask the right questions, and created an incredibly precious space in our days to share together in the delight of stories! Our Read-Aloud time is now my favorite time of the day. This book encouraged me that “Ten minutes matters.” If all I have is ten minutes, it’s worth it to pick up a book and read with my kids. Quickly, that ten minutes turned into one hour a day. This book also includes a very helpful resource guide with lists of suggested reading for each age group.

What I love about this highly unusual memoir from Julian Barnes is how he invites us to join him on his meanderings through a smorgasbord of intriguing topics and unexpected thought worms. As he explores his fear of death, he meets, greets, and remembers everyone from historical figures, poets, writers, and philosophers to friends and family members.

I found this book unexpected, poignant, and, at times, very funny. And as is true of so much of what I enjoy reading, this meditation on death does much to shed light on what makes us human. 

It is something of a commonplace that the most important subjects in life are somehow the least amenable to the long essay. Where are the great books on love, grace, revelation, understanding, or peace? 

And what about childhood? Everyone has one, and many people want to be parents, but where are the transformative and indispensable books on this subject? Now we have one, at last, this capacious, passionate, searching, learned book, by one of the most gifted prose stylists writing in English in the present day. It’s beautiful to read, and essential for our cultural moment. 

For anyone who has been shattered by a terrible loss and could not imagine a road to recovery, this intimate, poetic, and philosophically astute exploration of bereavement, of the mental ravages brought on by the loss of a child, will be a bracing and transformative reading experience.

This short and brilliant book has forever changed how I understand what it means to grieve and to master one’s suffering—it makes you feel less alone.

This memoir of Alexandra Fuller’s childhood is a hilarious take on her family’s experience of farming in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia in the 1970s and 1980s. It is a refreshing reminder of what it was like to live and grow up as a member of the white minority intent on remaining in power during a fast-changing, violent, and deeply unstable period in the history of southern Africa. It is a wonderful portrayal of some of the traumas of growing up with a witty, mad, and heavy-drinking mother who had to endure the unspeakable tragedy of losing a child, a chain-smoking father who farmed by day and fought terrorists by night, and a glamorous older sister. It is a book that keeps you laughing or crying the whole way through.

This book is so subtle and intelligent that it makes me smile at almost every line. Sarraute hates nothing more than clichés and the narcissistic self-indulgence of memoirs. In Childhood, the inner dialogue between the narrator and her memory allows her to avoid these pitfalls and resurrect the past with an amazing emotional accuracy. The questions asked by her critical self deepen her memory and lead to a delicate, vivid, and funny rendering of her childhood at the beginning of the twentieth century in Paris between her divorced Russian parents.