Clay Shirky: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (French Edition)
Unfairly maligned in some quarters, Shirky's 2010 book on the rise of mass participation is balanced and deeply thoughtful. It remains essential reading for anyone interested in user-generated content and the new amateurism.
Richard Gilpin: Mindfulness for Black Dogs and Blue Days
Movingly drawing on his own experience of depression and his own uses of mindfulness meditation to come to terms with it, Gilpin has written a short but rather wonderful, free-wheeling, eclectically sourced and ultimately inspiring book.
Bruce M. Hood: Self Illusion: Why There Is No 'You' Inside Your Head
Cognitive Development expert Hood argues that the sense of self in which we all ground ourselves is in fact an illusion created by the brain to enable us to cope with reality. Beautifully written, densely argued and highly entertaining.
Jon Kabat-Zinn: Full Catastrophe Living
JB-K's seminal 1991 text is a highly detailed, practical and wide-ranging guide to the use of formal and informal mindfulness practice in living with "the full catastrophe" of stress in our lives. It's also profoundly moving.
David Shields: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
A highly entertaining, thought provoking and at times exasperating investigation into the way that reality is seeping into - taking over, even - contemporary art, through techniques as diverse as (auto) biography, sampling, montage & documentary.
MJ McGrath: The Boy in the Snow
The second in the Edie Kiglatuk series is a dark read, but brilliant. I reviewed it fully here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Boy-Snow-M-J-McGrath/dp/0230748198/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357562680&sr=1-1
John E. Sarno: Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection
Sarno's 1991 book, an exploration of how mind-body interactions affect back pain (and a host of other conditions) *should* be a classic, but along with most of his work is overlooked by the medical mainstream. A tragedy, because from experience I can only say that his therapeutic technique unquestionably works.
Barry Green & Timothy Gallwey: Inner Game of Music
Originally published in 1986, this still holds a lot of weight. Green takes the principles Gallwey had used to coach elite athletes and applies them to (mostly classical) music performance, asking how we overcome "inner" obstacles create/perform more effectively.
Ian Watson: Miracle Visitors
Watson is one of the underrated giants of British SF. This 1978 novel is quite one of the most unhinged yet atmospheric I've read in a long while - a multi-layered, constantly shifting story about UFO visitations. Or perhaps not...
Lynn Sherr: Swim: Why We Love the Water
Sherr's beautiful little book is partly a wide-ranging history of swimming and partly a personal memoir as she prepares to swim the Bosphorous in her middle years. A kind of aquatic version of MacDougall's Born to Swim and equally compelling - and inspiring!
Jon Kabat-Zinn: Wherever You Go There You Are
Kabat-Zinn's book is now considered something of a classic amongst meditation practitioners, and rightly so. It's eloquent and charming and yet a practical, no-nonsense guide to the practice of mindfulness meditation.
Iain M. Banks: The Hydrogen Sonata
The latest in Banks' now massive Culture series doesn't have much new in it, and is a bit of a shaggy dog story in all. But, but... it's brimming with brilliant set pieces, is witty and humane and, well, I romped through its 600 pages in about three sittings. But I am a fan boy.
Tom Chatfield: How to Thrive in the Digital Age (School of Life)
Chatfield's short and thoroughly readable book is a well-balanced and wide-ranging look at the issues facing us all as individuals, citizens and consumers in the face of ubiquitous digital communications technology. Highly recommended.
Andy Summers: One Train Later: A Memoir
Summers' memoir is brilliantly written, witty and at times ranty. The account of the 60s and 70s music scene is fascinating, as is that of the rise of the Police, but what swung it for me was the deep guitar geekery on display on every page.
Gary Marcus: Guitar Zero: The Science of Learning to be Musical
In which neuroscientist Marcus takes a year's sabbatical and learns to play the guitar. A meditation on the science of learning - and how age affects it - and why we play music; I found it highly readable and at times genuinely moving.
Don DeLillo: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
These nine short stories, written between 1979 and 2011, are DeLillo at his most condensed - and most rewarding. The subjects are as diverse as the third world war, the financial crisis and holy miracles, but DeLillo's language - spare, poetic - binds them together. That and a sense of emotional stasis reminiscent at times of Ballard.
Vikram Chandra: Sacred Games
Chandra's book is massive in many senses. An epic, moving, violent, disturbing, richly complex, beautifully observed and, yes, occasionally meandering Indian crime thriller set across four decades and with a giant cast of policemen, yogis, gangsters, beauty queens and terrorists. Extraordinary.
W.G. Sebald: On the Natural History of Destruction (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Sebald's rightly lauded series of reflections on the impact of the Allied destruction of more than 130 German cities at the end of WWII is moving, shocking and deeply disturbing by turns and is shot through with the constant question: why and how was this so thoroughly excised from German cultural memory?
John E. Sarno M.D.: The Mindbody Prescription
A fascinating, potentially life-changing (and socially revolutionary) account of the role of our unconscious plays in the development of so many first world ailments, from back pain, through ulcers to CTS. I approached with scepticism but found myself completely won-over by the argument.
Marguerite Duras: The Malady of Death
Hardly a novel, barely a short story, in some ways more a script, but supremely powerful for all that, Duras's account of an ongoing, weeks-long paid-for sexual encounter between two unnamed characters is claustrophobic, erotic and profoundly disturbing.
50 Cent & Robert Greene: 50th Law
Self-help via military history, philosophy, jazz and hip-hop... and much else besides. Greene and 50's book examines the role of fearlessless in 50's own life and throughout history, and lays out ways we can all learn from it. It shouldn't work but it does - pretty inspiring stuff.
Lem Stanislaw: Solaris
Lem's 1961 novel about mankind's - and one man's - contact with a sentient ocean on an alien planet is rightly regarded as a masterpiece: moving, funny and, by the end, truly creepy. I read the 1970 translation by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox.
Christopher McDougall: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
A straight three-day read for me - a brilliant, compelling account of MacDougall's adventures with the distance-running Mexican Tarahumara Indians and, arguably, the book which kick-started the barefoot revolution, or at least took it mainstream. Essential reading for all runners.
M. John Harrison: Viriconium
Neglected for years by the SF mainstream, Harrison is a giant of British speculative fiction and is enjoying a renaissance, partly thanks to props from Mieville, it should be said. This is arguably his masterpiece: a collection of Gothic tales set in the distant post-apocalyptic future.
Timothy Ferriss: The 4-Hour Work Week
Feriss’ first book is also a call-to-arms, but this time for the would be ‘New Rich’ – not those rich in cash – or stuff – but in time, and life. Nothing less than a challenge to re-think our lives from the ground up.
Timothy Ferriss: The 4-Hour Body
For all the cerebral lit I put in this sidebar, the truth is that the “4HB” has had a more profound effect on me than any book since “Straw Dogs”, albeit for very different reasons! Part health guide, part call-to-arms for the self-testing movement, it’s formidably wide-ranging, immensely well researched and, well, life-changing.
William Gibson: Distrust That Particular Flavor
This is the first anthology of Gibson’s non-fiction, and is the equal of his best fiction (for that matter better than much of it). Essential reading for anyone fascinated by the brilliant weirdness that happen at the intercises of human culture and technology.
Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)
Early Stephenson, Stephenson finding his feet and it's all here: the brilliantly (and darkly) comic turn of phrase, the astonishing, violent set pieces and yes, the tendency to show off just a tad. Personally I love it, although I maintain that The Diamond Age is his masterpiece.
China Mieville: Embassytown
Mieville's qualified return to form is pure SF; set on a vastly distant planet in a vastly different time, it explores the relationship between human settlers and a host species so alien that it calls into question the nature of language, thought and identity. I have a few minor quibbles, but really, this is virtuoso stuff and I enjoyed every page.
Marguerite Duras: Destroy, She Said
Barely a novel, but not quite a play - although later a film directed by Duras herself - this is an exquisitely lean, constantly threatening portrait of a few days in the life of a quartet of characters who might of might not be insane, in what might or might not be an asylum. Dark, erotic and surreal: a minimalist masterpiece.
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