The books I keep coming back to, and the ones I think about long after I've finished them. There's a shelf of guided journals too, for the nights you'd rather write than read.
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Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman points out that the average life is about four thousand weeks long. His argument is that you'll never get everything done, and that accepting this frees you to spend your time on what matters most.
The Other Side of Change
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and the host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans. She trained as a violinist until a hand injury ended that career. For this book she interviewed people who went through big changes they didn't choose, and combined their stories with research on how people find meaning afterward.
The Let Them Theory
Mel Robbins wrote this book with her daughter, Sawyer Robbins. When other people do things you can't control, let them, and put your energy into the things you can.
Radical Surrender
Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist at Stanford and the author of Dopamine Nation. Her new book is about control. She connects a lot of modern anxiety and loneliness to the need to control everything, and argues that letting go and accepting uncertainty can improve relationships and parenting.
The Whisper
Sara Jackson is a social worker and the founder of The Practice in Toronto. Her book opens on a feeling plenty of people will recognize. Everything looks fine from the outside, and still a small voice keeps asking whether this is really it.
Everyday Intuition
Elizabeth Greenwood set out to find what intuition actually is, and went looking in neuroscience, in psychology and, yes, with psychics. The book takes on the question most of us never ask out loud, which is how to tell a gut feeling apart from anxiety or plain wishful thinking. It's a little witchy, which feels right for October, when every Etsy witch is having the best month of her year.
The Mountain Is You
Brianna Wiest's book is about the ways we get in our own way. Her central idea is that sabotaging ourselves usually isn't random. It's often meeting a need, sometimes a very old one, that we haven't found a better way to meet yet.
A Map to Your Soul
Jennifer Freed brings a background in psychology to astrology, using the four elements to explore personality and everyday patterns. I like a book that treats a birth chart as a way into knowing yourself, and then trusting what you find.
The Burnout Workbook
Emily and Amelia Nagoski turned Burnout into something you can write in, with questions, exercises and little visual guides. It's about noticing when you're stuck and practising your way back out. You don't need to have read the book first, though the two sit nicely side by side.
The Courage to Be Disliked
A conversation between a student and a philosopher, and the best argument I have found for why you do not owe anyone an explanation for your guest list. How someone else feels about your choices belongs to them.
