Summer Reading List for Creative Minds (2022)
Add these inspirational, fun, and helpful books to your 2022 summer reading list to support your creative mind and work.
It’s summer, and that means vacations, relaxing outside, and supporting the creative mind in healthy ways. One important summer habit for creative living is reading books. These upcoming books cover different areas of creative living, work, and more to support the creative mind.
Find more creative book recommendations to add to your summer reading list, check here.
What Artists Wear by Charlie Porter is an illustrated journey through the clothes worn by famous artists and what they reveal to us. Fashion can be many things, especially as a tool of expression, storytelling, resistance, and creativity.
Charlie Porter, a fashion critic and art curator, explores creative living through what artists wear. From Yves Klein’s spotless tailoring to the kaleidoscopic costumes of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman, from Andy Warhol’s denim to Martine Syms’s joy in dressing, Porter weaves a perceptive analysis with original interviews and contributions from artists and their families and friends. The result is a radical, gleeful inspiration to see each outfit as a canvas on which to convey an identity or challenge the status quo.
Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise by Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz explores the value of silence to reveal how to go beyond the ordinary rules and tools of mindfulness and find a presence that creates energy, clarity, and deeper connection.
Justin Zorn, a policymaker and a meditation teacher in the U.S. Congress, and Leigh Marz, a collaboration consultant, take us on an unlikely journey—from the West Wing of the White House to San Quentin’s death row; from Ivy League brain research laboratories to underground psychedelic circles; from the temperate rainforests of Olympic National Park to the main stage at a heavy metal festival—to explore the meaning of silence and the art of finding it in any situation.
Golden is a field guide for navigating the noise of the modern world—not just the noise in our ears but also on our screens and in our heads. Marz and Zorn make the bold and convincing argument that we can repair our world by reclaiming the presence of silence in our lives.
Ideas on a Deadline: How to Be Creative When the Clock is Ticking by Phil Cooke explores the challenge of finding inspiration and ideas when under a deadline. In this fast-paced world, creatives don’t always have the luxury of waiting for inspiration to strike, especially in the workplace.
As artist Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for amateurs—the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Whether you’re a creative professional, a designer, writer, musician, filmmaker, or an executive, engineer, teacher, or salesperson, this book will show you how to “prime the pump” of your creativity, overcome the blocks, and deliver great ideas when you need them the most.
James Patterson by James Patterson: The Stories of My Life by James Patterson is one of the most anticipated creative memoirs of 2022. With a Guinness World Record for most #1 New York Times bestsellers by a single author, a total of 67, James Patterson has lived an incredible and productive, creative life.
In this memoir, Patterson shares stories from his life, from being a kid that didn’t like to read to meeting inspiring creatives at a mental hospital in Massachusetts, working in advertising, and more. Look into the creative life of how a boy from small-town New York became the world’s most successful writer.
Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte is a summer reading book to enhance productivity, create flow, and increase your ability to capture, remember, and benefit from the unprecedented amount of information all around us.
Tiago Forte, one of the world’s foremost experts on productivity, shares a new approach to empowering people in a modern world of the constant influx of information that is often overwhelming. Learn how to create a personal system for knowledge management, otherwise known as a Second Brain. Discover the full potential of your ideas and translate what you know into more powerful, more meaningful improvements in your work and life by Building a Second Brain.
The Great Book of Journaling: How Journal Writing Can Support a Life of Wellness, Creativity, Meaning, and Purpose by Eric Maisel Ph.D. and Lynda Monk (MSW RSW CPCC) is a useful writing reference book to help people not only improve their writing skills but also learn journaling techniques to grow, heal, and boost creativity.
The Great Book of Journaling is full of practical tips, evidence-based research, and rich anecdotes from some of the best therapeutic journaling experts in the world.
The Great Book of Journaling can help:
- Create high self-esteem, self-love, and self-confidence
- Improve your health and your sense of wellbeing
- Calm your worry and anxiety
- Serve your creative needs
- Deepen your personal writing
Leading with Heart: Five Conversations That Unlock Creativity, Purpose, and Results by John Baird and Edward Sullivan is a book that leaders should add to their creative summer reading list. Work culture is changing. The Great Resignation has opened up many people’s eyes that hustle culture and how we’ve been working is wrong.
At a time when workplaces are struggling to build high-morale and connected cultures, this book will help leaders unlock the best version of themselves and those around them with transformative results.
Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness by Steve Magness is a must summer read for parents and coaches and anyone else looking to prepare for life’s biggest challenges. From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and co-author of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of how we perceive toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.
Drawing from mindfulness, military case studies, sports psychology, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Magness provides a roadmap for navigating life’s challenges and achieving high performance that makes us happier, more successful, and, ultimately, better people.
Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems by Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis is an insightful and inspiring book for your creative summer reading list that teaches how both/and thinking can help you make more creative, flexible, and impactful decisions in a world of competing demands—a guide to life, work, and leadership.
In Both/And Thinking, Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis help readers cope and thrive with multiple, knotted tensions at the same time. Drawing from more than twenty years of pioneering research, they provide an actionable framework for transforming these tensions into opportunities for innovation and personal growth.
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.
