Spring is a season of growth. With warmer weather, brighter colors, and longer days, it’s a great time to support the creative mind. Here’s a spring reading list to spark creativity in 2023.
What are your spring habits to support creativity? Do you spend more time outside in nature? Do you travel to relax and experience new things? What about starting new healthy habits to get in shape and support a healthier and happier lifestyle? One habit that can support all of these is reading, and this spring, there are a ton of new books coming out to support and inspire the creative mind.
March
Goodreads Rating: 4.05
Change Your Brain Every Day: Simple Daily Practices to Strengthen Your Mind, Memory, Moods, Focus, Energy, Habits, and Relationships by Daniel G. Amen, MD, is your daily guide to a better brain, mind, and creative life.
Psychiatrist and clinical neuroscientist Daniel Amen, MD, draws on over 40 years of clinical practice with tens of thousands of patients to give you the most effective daily habits he has seen that can help you improve your brain, master your mind, boost your memory, and make you feel happier, healthier, and more connected to those you love.
Learn Daily Habits to Help You:
- Manage your mind to support your happiness, inner peace, and success
- Develop lifelong strategies for dealing with whatever stresses come your way
- Create an ongoing sense of purpose in a way that informs your daily actions
- Learn major life lessons Dr. Amen has gleaned from studying hundreds of thousands of brain scans
Goodreads Rating: 3.91
Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross is a creative book on the science of neuroaesthetics, which offers proof of how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts—and how this knowledge can improve our health, enable us to flourish, and build stronger communities.
Authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more are essential to our lives. Using compelling research, they show how engaging in an art project for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol and can even extend your life by ten years.
New advancements in neuroscience, creativity, and art are pushing a new cultural shift in which the arts can deliver potent, accessible, and proven solutions for the well-being of everyone. Your Brain on Art is a portal into this new understanding of how the arts and aesthetics can help us transform traditional medicine, build healthier communities, and mend an aching planet.
Goodreads Rating: 3.82
The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans by Bill Hammack explores the creative methods used to build the world.
For millennia, humans have used one simple method to solve problems. Whether it’s planting crops, building skyscrapers, developing photographs, or designing the first microchip, all creators follow the same steps to engineer progress. But this powerful method, the “engineering method“, is an all but hidden process that few of us have heard of―let alone understand―but that influences every aspect of our lives.
Bill Hammack, a Carl Sagan award-winning professor of engineering and viral “The Engineer Guy” on Youtube, has a lifelong passion for the things we make and how we make them. In this creative book, explore the world of inventions that built the world spanning centuries and cultures with unique perspectives on how humans engineer solutions in a world full of problems.
Goodreads Rating: 4.18
Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell is shaping up to be a very interesting book for your spring 2023 reading list from the bestselling author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café.
This creative history book explores seven hundred years of writers, thinkers, scientists, and artists, all trying to understand what it means to be truly human. In this sweeping new history, Sarah Bakewell, herself a lifelong humanist, illuminates the very personal, individual, and, well, the human matter of humanism and takes readers on a grand intellectual adventure. Learn what has inspired people for centuries to make their choices by principles of freethinking, intellectual inquiry, fellow feeling, and optimism.
April
Goodreads Rating: 4.40
Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary by Ozan Varol is a simple guide to add to your spring 2023 reading list to unlock your originality and unleash your unique talents.
From the acclaimed author of Think Like a Rocket Scientist comes another creative book that explores how extraordinary people carve their own paths as leaders and creators. Learn how to discard what no longer serves you and discover your first principles—the qualities that make up your genius. This guidebook can help you discover how to look where others don’t look and see what others don’t see and more to unlock your creative potential.
Goodreads Rating: 4.06
Magnificent Rebel: Nancy Cunard in Jazz Age Paris by Anne de Courcy is a nuanced portrait of a complex woman set against the backdrop of the City of Light during one of its most important and creative decades.
From the author of Husband Hunters and Chanel’s Riviera comes another biography exploring a creative life, this time in Paris during the 1920s, a creative renaissance bursting with talent and creative lessons in the worlds of art, design, and literature. At its center was the gorgeous, seductive English socialite Nancy Cunard, scion of the famous shipping line.
This creative biography focuses on five of her most significant and lifelong friendships, from her affairs with acclaimed writers Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen, Louis Aragon, and the black jazz pianist Henry Crowder, as well as her friendship with the famous Irish novelist George Moore.
Highly intelligent, a gifted poet, and widely read, she founded a small press that published Samuel Beckett, among others. A muse to many, she was also a courageous crusader against racism and fascism. She left Paris in 1933, at the end of its most glittering years, and remained unafraid to live life on the edge until she died in 1965.
Goodreads Rating: 3.95
Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World by Gretchen Rubin is an inspiring and creative guide to living in the moment.
Perfect for your 2023 spring reading list for creativity, this book from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project explores a key element of happiness and creativity, the five senses.
Do you get stuck in your mind, thinking about distracting thoughts of the past or future that keep you from being in the present moment?
In this journey of self-experimentation, Rubin explores the mysteries and joys of the five senses as a path to a happier, more mindful life. Drawing on cutting-edge science, philosophy, literature, and her own efforts to practice what she learns, she investigates the profound power of tuning into the physical world to live a fuller, richer, and happier lifestyle.
Goodreads Rating: 3.66
Sacred Spaces: Everyday People and the Beautiful Homes Created Out of Their Trials, Healing, and Victories by Carley Summers is a book perfect for inspiring you to create sacred spaces in your creative home this spring.
This collection of sacred spaces features gorgeous photography of home interiors and profiles of the people who have transformed these spaces into sanctuaries. Through stories of brokenness, hurt, and healing, Sacred Spaces invites readers to dream of the home that will set them free.
Before she became an internationally renowned designer and photographer, Carley Summers suffered from alcoholism and addiction, spending nights in jail, the emergency room, and rehab. As someone who celebrates recovery today, she knows firsthand the importance of a warm and inviting home. Summers uses her life experience and her craft to ensure that the homes she photographs and designs are comforting, healing spaces to live and grow in.
Each section identifies a type of space that people have created, including:
- The Foundational Home – For those who have created spaces on a solid foundation for a lasting legacy.
- The Wandering Home – Highlights people who were lost in life, lost in travels, but never lost in their homes.
- The Cathartic Home – For people who realize that when they cannot change the outside world, they can change the inside of their homes to bring comfort through renewal and restoration.
Goodreads Rating: 4.45
Tasting History: Explore the Past through 4,000 Years of Recipes by Max Miller and Ann Volkwein is a fascinating and educational creative cookbook for your 2023 spring reading list.
Begin your food journey through the centuries and around the world with the first cookbook from the beloved YouTube channel Tasting History with Max Miller. Learn unique recipes and stories from ancient Rome to Ming China to medieval Europe and beyond to support creative thinking and a full and happy stomach.
Tasting History compiles over sixty dishes, such as:
- Tuh’u: a red beet stew with leeks dating back to 1740 BC
- Globi: deep-fried cheese balls with honey and poppy seeds
- Soul Cakes: yeasted buns with currants from circa 1600
- Pumpkin Tourte: a crustless pumpkin cheesecake with cinnamon and sugar on top from 1570
- And much more.
May
Goodreads Rating: 4.36
The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel is the story of art as it’s never been told before, from the Renaissance to the present day, with more than 300 works of art from women artists.
How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century?
From art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, Katy Hessel shares stories and creativity of women artists throughout history that you may or may not have heard of. Discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States, the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women-defining art in the 2020s. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it’s never been told before.
Goodreads Rating: 3.70
The Other Renaissance: From Copernicus to Shakespeare: How the Renaissance in Northern Europe Transformed the World by Paul Strathern is another creative history book to add to your spring reading list. It explores an original, illuminating history of the northern European Renaissance in art, science, and philosophy, which often rivaled its Italian counterpart.
It is generally accepted that the European Renaissance began in Italy. However, a historical transformation of a similar magnitude also took place in northern Europe at the same time. This “Other Renaissance” was initially centered on the city of Bruges in Flanders (modern Belgium), but its influence was soon felt in France, the German states, London, and even Italy itself. The Northern Renaissance, like the southern Renaissance, largely took place during the period between the end of the Medieval age (circa mid-14th century) and the advent of the Age of Enlightenment (circa end of 17th century).
Following a sequence of major figures, including Copernicus, Gutenberg, Luther, Catherine de Medici, Rabelais, van Eyck, and Shakespeare, Paul Strathern tells the fascinating story of how this “Other Renaissance” played as significant a role as the Italian renaissance in bringing our modern world into being.
Goodreads Rating: 4.06
A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs is a blend of memoir, criticism, and biography examining how women writers across the centuries carved out intellectual freedom for themselves—and how others might do the same.
After a recent divorce, Joanna Biggs went looking for inspiration from the lifestyle of free-spirited women writers of her youth and found a possible blueprint for intellectual fulfillment.
In A Life of One’s Own, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante are all taken down from their pedestals, their work and lives seen in a new light. Joanna wanted to learn more about the conditions these women needed to write their best work and how they addressed the questions she herself was struggling with: Is domesticity a trap? Is life worth living if you have lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman? Why is it so important for women to read one another?
This is a radical and intimate examination of the unconventional paths these women took—their pursuits, achievements, as well as their disappointments, and hardships. And in exploring the things that gave their lives the most meaning, we find fuel for our own singular intellectual paths.
Goodreads Rating: 4.67
Book of Earth: A Guide to Ochre, Pigment, and Raw Color by Heidi Gustafson is a guide where art meets science to help creatives create their own pigments from natural resources.
Part anthropological study, part art book, and part how-to, Book of Earth immerses you in the world of ochre, a naturally occurring mineral used to make pigment. Each chapter delves into author Heidi Gustafson’s rare pigment archive and provides a thorough exploration of natural color while challenging our notions of the inanimate world. The book includes practical advice and techniques for creating your own pigments and applying these skills in everyday life.
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.
