Books like Wabi, Sabi, Suki — picked by fans

I've spent the last three decades thinking about Japanese aesthetics, and in particular if and how they can be meaningfully used beyond Japan. I'm the author of several books on the subject: Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, Place Time and Being in Japanese Architecture, This Here Now: Japanese Building and the Architecture of the Individual, and most recently, The Constructed Other: Japanese Architecture in the Western Mind. I teach about Asian Pacific architecture at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa.

As a teenager, I worked on cars and motorcycles in my spare time while apprenticing in an architectural millwork shop, paneling the homes of the rich and famous. Thus I discovered the great joys and satisfactions of working with my hands. After a long stint in graduate school, then four years as an editor at Fine Woodworking magazine and for Taunton Press books, I opened a custom design furniture business in 2000. Travel, writing, and reading are aligned passions, and I’ve lived, taught English, and woodworking here and abroad in France, Slovakia, India, and Japan.

Who hasn’t caught themselves staring at a shadow? I certainly have. I have always found shadows fascinating. They are both there and not there, present and absent, and this in-between, fleeting nature keeps me staring. Shadows open a space for contemplation, and the list presented here traces a range of responses to the enigma they represent. Transitory images that exist on a fleeting border between light and darkness, shadows seem to invite me to make sense of their vague and shifting outlines, leading to both the joy of imagination as well as to that unsettling but pleasurable feeling of the uncanny as I struggle to fill in their outlines.

I've spent the last three decades thinking about Japanese aesthetics, and in particular if and how they can be meaningfully used beyond Japan. I'm the author of several books on the subject: Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, Place Time and Being in Japanese Architecture, This Here Now: Japanese Building and the Architecture of the Individual, and most recently, The Constructed Other: Japanese Architecture in the Western Mind. I teach about Asian Pacific architecture at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa.

I never thought I’d be a poetry lover. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature. During that time, I took quite a few poetry classes, even though I didn’t consider myself a huge poetry fan. Over the course of those classes, I learned that poetry isn’t all about abstract, obscure themes, and academic language. It’s also a way for humans to communicate the feelings and experiences in one heart to another. Once I learned that poetry doesn’t have to be difficult and confusing, I found that I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to help other people discover that poetry can be more accessible and satisfying than what they may have studied in school. 

I’m a philosopher with a voracious appetite for literature. I inhabit a world of abstract ideas but always return to fiction because it vividly portrays the real-world consequences of our beliefs and reminds us that ideas also move us irrationally: they’re comforting or disturbing, audacious or dull, seductive or repellant. I prefer world literature because it plants us in new times and places, helping us, like philosophy, see beyond our blinders. Deprived of the assumptions that prop up our everyday arrogance, we can clear a mental and emotional path to what we’ve ignored or covered up, as well as rediscover and reaffirm shared values, arrived at from new directions. 

I’m a journalist and critic who fell in love with the ancient art of rhetoric through Shakespeare, Chaucer… and Barack Obama. It was when I watched Obama’s consciously and artfully classical oratory as he campaigned for the 2008 election that my undergraduate interest in tricolons, epistrophe, aposiopesis and all that jazz surged back to the front of my mind. I went on to write a 2011 book arguing that not only is this neglected area of study fascinating, but it is the most important tool imaginable to understand politics, language, and human nature itself. Where there is language, there is rhetoric.  

I have always been fascinated by beauty and art. As a child growing up in India, I sketched frequently. Later, I became obsessed with photography. In 1999, I moved from my first academic job to join the newly forming Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. The move was an opportunity to rethink my research program. In addition to studying spatial cognition, attention, and language, I decided to investigate the biological basis of aesthetic experiences. At the time there was virtually no scholarship in the neuroscience of aesthetics. It has been an exciting journey to watch this field grow. And, it has been exhilarating to start the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, the first research center of its kind in the US.

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 lucky to have grown up as all these new genres and kinds of games were being invented and gaining in popularity: euro-boardgames, role-playing games, videogames, collectible card games, gamebooks, ALL the games. What a time to be alive since I’ve always been curious about, interested in, and passionate about them. Again, I was fortunate to learn about the nascent academic study of games just as I was entering my college years. So, I’ve been playing games and studying games for over a quarter century! But you can teach an old dog new tricks (and to play new games), and the books on this list have helped me do just that!