Books like Unlikely Animals — picked by fans

My mom was an excellent artist, and my father was an accomplished scientist, so I grew up with a passion and mission to combine these in my life’s work. I have played clarinet since 8, in classical, jazz, world, experimental, and sound healing, and have mastered a variety of visual storytelling arts (painting, sculpture, filmmaking, game development). My fascination with mind/body led me to neuroscience research and developing edtech for autism. These all integrated into writing my book and offering this inspiration to others. This book list has nurtured my deepest interests and propelled me to discover more of our human potential to experience sound, storytelling, and well-being.

I’m a psychologist in Los Angeles specializing in helping people identify their blind spots and break the cycles of their past by retraining their mindset about the future. I developed a new treatment called Future Directed Therapy and I’ve been helping people build better lives for over 15 years. I’m very passionate about empowering my clients to find practical skills and tools for taking charge of their emotional health and achieving the things they want in life. I recommend these books to my clients on a regular basis and find inspiration in them for my own blog Living Forward which I write as a featured expert for Psychology Today. 

As a parent, a former educator, and a children’s museum administrator, my passions have always centered around children and encouraging them to believe in themselves. I wrote my book to empower my own grandchildren with a growth mindset, which, in simple terms, means to believe in our own abilities, accept challenges, learn from our mistakes, and persevere. It is the belief that our abilities and talents are malleable as opposed to the view that we are either good at something or we are not. Adapting a growth mindset has been valuable in my own life, as well – it’s not just for kids. Please take a look at these books to give yourself and the kids in your life a healthy new perspective.

I am immersed in the topic of brain and mental health every single day. I love devouring books on the topic because it helps me personally with my diagnosed bipolar depression. I know what it’s like to attempt suicide and to live with chronic thoughts that can be overwhelming. So, reading books like these helps me better balance my brain health, and they help me offer hope to others to whom I can recommend these kinds of books. As host of the Hinesights Podcast, where I interview folks in the field of mental health from all walks of life, being able to put a list like this together is a gift. 

Dr. Alice Sterling Honig, Professor Emerita of Child Development at Syracuse University, has spent over a half century working with and studying young children and creating numerous courses on how best to nurture early development. She has lectured widely in many countries and is the author of over 600 articles and chapters, and dozens of books on children and their caregivers. For nearly 40 summers she conducted an annual workshop  “Quality caregiving for infants and toddlers”. As a licensed  New York State psychologist, she has worked with families to ameliorate troubles in development and behavior. In Beijing, she was invited to give the “Dr. Alice Honig award” to a prominent Chinese pediatrician. She was awarded the Syracuse University Chancellor’s Citation for Academic Excellence.

I like trying to solve problems about the mind: Is the mind just the brain? What is consciousness, and where is it in the brain? What happens in the brain during aesthetic experience? Why are we prone to self-deception? In approaching these questions, I don’t limit myself to one discipline or set of techniques. These mental phenomena, and the problems that surround them, do not hew to our disciplinary boundaries. In spite of this, someone needs to collect, analyze, and assess information relevant to the problems—which is in many different formats—and build theories designed to make sense of it. During that time, more data will become available, so back you go.

I’m a British neuroscientist and writer who’s been using computers to study the brain since 1998, and writing about it since 2016. How I ended up a neuroscientist is hard to explain, for my formative years were spent devouring science books that were not about the brain. That’s partly because finding worthwhile books about the brain is so hard – few delve into how the brain actually works, into the kinds of meaty details that, for example, Hawking offered us on physics and Dawkins on evolution. So I wrote one to solve that problem; and the books on my list are just that too: deep, insightful works on how the brain does what it does.

Creativity is a practical, problem-solving, risk-taking endeavor, something we all do, whether we claim it or not. After working for many years with groups of graduate business students, artists, writers, business professionals, women in recovery, men in prison, with those just discovering their creative ability—and with myself and my own creative journey, I realize the question isn’t “Am I creative?” The question is “Am I using it?” or “Am I continuing to grow?” Nothing is more exciting than watching others as they realize just how creative they are.

When my kids were toddlers, there was a Burger King in the neighborhood with an indoor playground. It was glorious. A random guy walked up to me while we were there. “How do you do it, you know, the whole Dad thing” he asked. "Well… you don’t necessarily need to do a whole lot. Mostly just show up. Stick around." Never mentioned that by this time, I’d written and/or illustrated at least a couple dozen children’s books. I asked my nine-year-old daughter how she’d describe me as a Dad. “Most people think you’re creative, but I think you’re pretty average.” That’s good enough for me.

I am an author, science journalist, and storyteller. I worked for the PBS science series NOVA for many years, producing documentaries, podcasts, digital video series, and interactive games on everything from asteroids to human origins to art restoration. But I am particularly fascinated by strange brains, which is why I wrote my first book, The Memory Thief. I am currently at work on a second book about a different neurological disorder.