It’s getting colder, colors are changing, and people are slowing down. It must be fall. Here’s the 2022 fall reading list for creative minds.
Autumn is a period of transition. Embrace the changes and cultivate new creative fall habits that foster well-being and readiness for winter. One creative practice to help you slow down and support the creative mind is reading. Whether you’re looking for new science to help you overcome a creative problem or seeking inspiration from famous creative minds, this creative reading list is for you.
Find more creative book recommendations and reading lists here.
Curious Minds: The Power of Connection by Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett is an exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people.
Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett say curiosity is a practice of connection. It connects ideas into networks of knowledge and connects knowers themselves. Using historical examples and the neuroscience of curiosity, the authors have identified three styles of curiosity that embraces everyone’s unique type of curiosity.
Three Styles of Curiosity:
- The Busybody – who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks
- The Hunter – who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks
- The Dancer – who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones.
Daily Creative: A Practical Guide for Staying Prolific, Brilliant, and Healthy by Todd Henry is an inspirational guide that can help spark creative energy daily.
From the bestselling author of The Accidental Creative and Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day comes another great book to support creative lifestyles. Learn and discover tools to be creative every day, even if you don’t consider yourself to be a creative person. The Daily Creative is great for busy professionals, creative and otherwise, designed to help you gain focus for your day and advance toward your goals.
Each daily reading is:
- Quick: Takes less than 5 minutes to complete
- Focused: Centers around a specific theme
- Inspiring: Includes a quote from great thinkers and creatives throughout history
- Actionable: Wraps with a daily action to help you achieve results
Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most by Cassie Holmes is about learning to reframe your time around life’s happiest moments to build days that aren’t just full—but fulfilling.
Our most precious resource isn’t money. It’s time. Since we can’t add more hours to the day, how can we experience our lives as richer? Based on her wildly popular MBA class at UCLA, Professor Cassie Holmes demonstrates how to immediately improve our lives by changing how we perceive and invest our time.
Happier Hour provides empirically based insights and easy-to-implement tools that will allow you to:
- Optimally spend your hours and feel confident in those choices
- Sidestep distractions
- Create and savor moments of joy
- Design your schedule with a purpose
- Look back on your years without regrets
It all starts by transforming just one hour into a happier hour.
Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by celebrated literary and cultural historian Lucy Worsley is a new perspective on the creative life of Agatha Christie.
Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife when she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, “She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern.” She went surfing in Hawaii, loved fast cars, and was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through her devastating mental illness.
With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley’s biography is both authoritative and entertaining. It makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was.
Discover more inspiring creative biographies and autobiographies from history’s most creative minds.
Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides by Geoffrey L. Cohen is a new book coming this fall that explores groundbreaking research on myriad problems of communal existence and offers concrete solutions for improving daily life.
We live in enormously divisive times. How did we become so alienated? Why is our sense of belonging so undermined? What if there were a set of science-backed techniques for navigating modern social life that could help us overcome our differences, create empathy, and forge lasting connections even across divides?
In Belonging, Cohen shares how small acts can establish connections and other practices that Cohen defines as “situation-crafting” that have been shown to lessen political polarization, improve motivation and performance in school and work, combat racism in our communities, enhance health and well-being, and unleash the potential in ourselves and our relationships.
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf is an inspiring book to add to your fall reading list that explores the creativity and radical ideas of a group of poets, novelists, philosophers, and artists who launched the Romanticism movement.
From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story that explores the extremely modern tension between the dangers of selfishness and the thrilling possibilities of free will. The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape of Europe, but the young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that transformed our world forever.
Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control by Ryan Holiday is sure to be another New York Times best-selling book. Like his previous books that cover different Stoic virtues, Holiday explores the importance of self-discipline.
In Discipline Is Destiny, Holiday draws on the stories of historical figures we can emulate as pillars of self-discipline, including Lou Gehrig, Queen Elizabeth II, Toni Morrison, and John Wooden. Readers will learn the Golden Mean from Aristotle, establishing the idea that virtue is usually the midpoint between two excesses, and will discover the true meaning of ambition from Marcus Aurelius.
Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, and Expand the Future by Yung Pueblo is a radically compassionate plan for turning inward and lifting the heaviness that prevents us from healing ourselves and the world. Sure to be another best-seller, Lighter is a must for any fall reading list.
Yung Pueblo is a New York Times bestselling author and inspiring creative writer that has explored many areas of creative living and healing. In Lighter, he demonstrates how we can all move forward in our healing, from learning self-compassion to letting go to becoming emotionally mature. He hopes that as more of us heal, our actions will become more intentional, our decisions will become more compassionate, our thinking will become clearer, and the future will become brighter.
Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin Ph.D. is a new book to add to your creative reading list this fall that reveals, celebrates, and advocates for the special minds and contributions of visual thinkers.
Grandin draws on cutting-edge research and examples to better understand visual thinking and proposes new approaches to educating, parenting, employing, and collaborating with visual thinkers.
In a highly competitive world, this important book helps us see, that we need every creative mind on board.
Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami is a charmingly idiosyncratic look at writing, creativity, and the author’s own novels.
In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author and famously reclusive writer shares what he thinks about being a novelist; his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians.
Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his strangely surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing.
Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.
