Summer Reading List for Creativity (2021)
Summer is a time for fun and rest. Many summer activities can inspire creativity, but sometimes we forget to exercise the brain. Challenge yourself with a summer reading list to learn while resting and inspire creative thinking.
Summer reading programs date back to the 1890s as a way to encourage a lifelong habit. No matter your age, having a summer reading list can help you retain knowledge and improve skills for the year ahead. Learning is a necessary part of the creative process and an easy habit to pair with other fun summer activities to inspire creativity.
More Reading Recommendations
From the bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals comes a new book that explores the power of not knowing. Learn how to embrace the unknown and the joy of being wrong. The modern world needs this mindset to cultivate creative thinking and living.
Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn. In this changing world, there are cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening people’s minds. He makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he’s right but listen like he’s wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong.
Think Again reveals that we don’t have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It’s an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.
Most of us have had this experience: browsing through countless options on Netflix, unable to commit to watching any given movie—and losing so much time skimming reviews and considering trailers that it’s too late to watch anything at all.
In Dedicated, Pete Davis argues that this is the defining characteristic of the moment: keeping our options open. This culture of restlessness and indecision, Davis argues, is causing tension in the lives of young people today: We want to keep our options open, and yet we yearn for the purpose, community, and depth that can only come from making deep commitments.
In Dedicated, Davis examines this quagmire, as well as the counterculture of committers who have made it to the other side. Weaving together examples from history, personal stories, and applied psychology, Davis offers a meaningful answer to our modern frustrations and a practical path to joy.
What if you could exploit the plasticity of personality to change yourself in specific ways?
Would you choose to become less neurotic? More self-disciplined? Less shy? Until now, we’ve been told that we’re stuck with the personality we were born with: The introvert will never break out of their shell, the narcissist will be forever trapped gazing into the mirror.
In Be Who You Want, Dr. Christian Jarrett takes us on a thrilling journey, as he not only explores the ways that life changes us but shows how we can deliberately shape our personalities to influence the course of our lives. Dr. Jarrett draws on the latest research to provide evidence-based ways to change each of the main five personality traits, including how to become more emotionally stable, extroverted, and open-minded. Dr. Jarrett features compelling stories of people who have achieved profound personality change, such as a gang-leader turned youth role model, a drug addict turned ultra-runner, and a cripplingly shy teenager turned Hollywood mega-star. He also delves into the upsides of the so-called dark triad of personality traits – narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy – and how we might exploit their advantages without ourselves going over to the dark side.
The Creativity Gene is an essential resource for creators in every industry to empower their unique abilities to produce new, impactful results.
Rose Gabler exposes the need for creative clarification in personal and professional endeavors. She has identified five of the most impactful contributing factors to achieving creative success through interviews with dozens of experts in various industries worldwide. These five traits, including your Life Experience, Expertise, Environment, Flexibility, and Grit, will empower your unique creative advantages and inspire you to find creative connections with your goals.
Learn how to identify your creative strengths, empower your creative potential, and align your creative superpower with your goals.
Decoding Greatness is an indispensable guide to learning from the best, improving your skills, and sparking breakthrough ideas.
For generations, we’ve been taught there are two ways to succeed—either from talent or practice. In Decoding Greatness, award-winning social psychologist Ron Friedman illuminates a powerful third path—one that has launched icons in a wide range of fields, from artists, writers, and chefs, to athletes, inventors, and entrepreneurs: reverse engineering.
To reverse engineer is to look beyond what is evident on the surface and find a hidden structure. It’s the ability to taste an intoxicating dish and deduce its recipe, to listen to a beautiful song and discern its chord progression, to watch a horror film and grasp its narrative arc.
Using eye-opening examples of top performers—from Agatha Christie to Andy Warhol, Barack Obama to Serena Williams—and groundbreaking research on pattern recognition, skill acquisition, and creative genius, Friedman reveals the staggering power of reverse engineering and teaches you how to harness this vital skill for yourself.
Rebecca Schwarzlose is a neuroscientist at Washington University in Saint Louis. In her new book Brainscapes, she combines unforgettable real-life stories, cutting-edge research, and vivid illustrations to reveal brain maps’ surprising lessons about our place in the world—and about the world’s place within us.
Your brain is a collection of maps: detailed representations, scrawled across your brain’s surfaces, of the sights, sounds, and actions that hold the key to your survival. Although scientists began discovering these maps over a century ago, we are only now beginning to unlock their secrets—and comprehend their profound impact on our lives. Brain maps distort and shape our experience of the world, support complex thought, and make technology-enabled mind reading a modern-day reality. They shine a light on our past and our possible futures. In the process, they invite us to view ourselves from a startling new perspective.
In The Deadline Effect, Writer and magazine editor Christopher Cox explains how readers can understand the psychological underpinnings of expectations and time, the dynamics of teams and customers, and techniques for using deadlines to make better, more assured decisions.
Perfectionists and procrastinators alike agree—it’s natural to dread a deadline. Whether your goal is to complete a masterpiece or check off an overwhelming to-do list, the ticking clock signals despair. Christopher Cox knows the panic of the looming deadline all too well—as a magazine editor, he has spent years overseeing writers and journalists who couldn’t meet a deadline to save their lives. After putting in a few too many late nights in the newsroom, he became determined to learn the secret of managing deadlines. He set off to observe nine different organizations as they approached a high-pressure deadline. Along the way, Cox made an even greater discovery: these experts didn’t just meet their big deadlines—they became more focused, productive, and creative in the process.
A century after his death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion until 25,000 unpublished papers were discovered in a large, wooden trunk.
Pessoa: A Biography by Richard Zenith draws on this vast archive as well as on unpublished family letters to tell the story of this poet’s life during the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history. Zenith reveals the true depths of Pessoa’s teeming imagination and literary genius. Pessoa explores the poet’s unwavering commitment to defending homosexual writers whose books had been banned, as well as his courageous opposition to Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, toward the end of his life. In stunning, magisterial prose, Zenith contextualizes Pessoa’s posthumous literary achievements―especially his most renowned work, The Book of Disquiet.
A modern literary masterpiece, Pessoa immortalizes the life of a literary maestro and confirms the enduring power of Pessoa’s work to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world.
Our favorite albums are our most faithful companions: we listen to them hundreds of times over decades, we know them far better than any novel or film. These records don’t just soundtrack our lives but work their way deep inside us. They shape our outlook and identity, forging our friendships, and charting our love affairs. They become part of our story.
In Long Players, fifty authors write about the albums that changed their lives, from Deborah Levy on Bowie to Daisy Johnson on Lizzo, Ben Okri on Miles Davis to David Mitchell on Joni Mitchell, Sarah Perry on Rachmaninov to Bernardine Evaristo on Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Part meditation and part candid self-portrait, each essay reveals music’s power to transport the listener to a particular time and place. This collection is an intoxicating mix of memoir and music writing, spanning the golden age of vinyl and the streaming era and showing how a single LP can shape a writer’s mind.
You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico takes a close look at iconic Warhol muse and Velvet Underground collaborator Nico. Rock and roll cultural historian Jennifer Bickerdike makes a convincing case for Nico’s enduring importance and legacy as an influential yet underappreciated singer-songwriter.
Throughout her career, Nico was an ever-evolving myth: art film house actress, coveted fashion model, Dietrich of Punk, Femme Fatale, Chelsea Girl, Garbo of Goth, The Last Bohemian, Heroin Junkie. Lester Bangs described her as ‘a true enigma.’ At age 27, Nico became Andy Warhol’s newest Superstar in his one commercial break-out hit film Chelsea Girls. She became famous for being Nico. Yet Nico’s talent and her contribution to rock culture are often overlooked. She spent most of her career as a solo artist on the road, determined to make music against all the odds. She endured empty concert halls, abusive fans, and the reality of being an aging artist and drug addict. Her unique projects inspired a generation of artists, including Henry Rollins, Morrissey, Siouxsie Sioux, the Banshees, and Iggy Pop.
Still Mad explores American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination. Using examples from writers and other creatives like Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, and more, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar trace the evolution of feminist literature and feminism’s second wave.
As Gilbert and Gubar chart feminist gains―including creative new forms of protests and changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality―they show how the legacies of second-wave feminists, and the misogynistic culture they fought, extend to the present. In doing so, they celebrate the diversity and urgency of women who have turned passionate rage into powerful 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.
