Here are 42 books that Awakened Cosmos fans have personally recommended if you like
Awakened Cosmos.
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I'm just a curious person. I have always been fascinated by literally everything. Everything is jaw-dropping: whether it's lying under a dark sky and marveling at the fact that what you see is the past (the time it takes for light from distant stars to reach your retina) or that your feelings for loved ones boil down to biochemistry, or thinking that intelligence is everywhere—from bacteria to plants and fungi, to Homo sapiens. As a university professor, I only understood later in life that I needed to leave that “ivory tower,” listen to non-academics, and read popular books that, in their apparent simplicity, can reach further and deeper.
I'll be frank: if you read a book at the beach and a year later you still have lasting memories that resonate within you, that must mean something.
I still remember how Wulf walked me through the revolutionary vision of Humboldt, how he could “see” what nobody else was capable of in his days, and to the naked eye: that everything is interconnected. I again felt dizzy, with a sense of myopia, when thinking about how shortsighted we are in 2024.
We keep missing the plot! If only there were more Humboldts and Wulfs to inspire us as she did!
WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2016
'A thrilling adventure story' Bill Bryson
'Dazzling' Literary Review
'Brilliant' Sunday Express
'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist
'A superb biography' The Economist
'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon.
I’m a travel writer, photographer, and lover of wilderness. I am the co-author of three travel guides about swimming: Places We Swim Australia, Places We Swim Sydney, and my new book, listed below. Together with my wife, we write about the connection between water, wilderness, and culture. I am fascinated with how people and nature interact and change one another. All of these books and authors on my list reveal how their experiences in nature have fuelled, anchored them, and inspired their craft.
This book forever changed the way that I look at trees. It’s a work of fiction, but elements are inspired by the life and research of ecologist Peter Wohlleben and his amazing discoveries of how trees communicate and cooperate.
It is incredibly well crafted and beautifully woven with ecological research in a digestible way. I admire an author who can weave together so many distinct narratives and lives, including the lives of trees.
It did the rounds in my family. Everybody was reading it across the world at the same time, and we loved chatting about it and discussing how much our minds were blown.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
For decades, I have been identified as a poet-farmer—I have a friendship with the earth forged through many seasons of cultivation, husbandry, and harvest. Enrolled in an MFA program abroad in creative writing, I found my way to Ireland, Oxford, and eventually to Cornwall, England, where I learned the art of cliff meadow farming. Returning to America, I became part of an agricultural revival called Community Supported Agriculture. I continued to write and teach poetry, enlivened by literature and the silt-loam soil of the Long Island peninsula. The language of the garden and the language of poetry and prose in sympathy with the earth, for me, are inseparable.
I feel the same about this book as Barry Lopez—who wrote a most wonderful introduction—when he notes that throughout his reading of the text, he often had to take a break to walk outside; the writing was just so stimulating.
Appealing to me as a poet, this is a slim book—about 90 pages—really a meditative essay that I return to again and again. I am fascinated by the originality of the author’s thought process, his supple prose, and his discussion of the polarities that exist between cultivated nature and wildness.
One singular sentence in this book (“The wood waits…”) has such resonance for me that I chose it as an epigraph for a book of my own.
John Fowles' writing life was dominated by trees. From the orchards of his childhood in suburban Essex,to the woodlands of wartime Devon, to his later life on the Dorset coast, trees filled his imagination and enriched his many acclaimed and best-selling novels.Told through his lifelong relationship with trees, blending autobiography, literary criticism, philosophy and nature writing, The Tree is a masterly, powerful work that laid the literary foundations for nature-as-memoir, a genre which has seen recent flourishings in Roger Deakin's Wildwood, Richard Mabey's Nature Cure, Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways and Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk.As lyrical and precise…
For decades, I have been identified as a poet-farmer—I have a friendship with the earth forged through many seasons of cultivation, husbandry, and harvest. Enrolled in an MFA program abroad in creative writing, I found my way to Ireland, Oxford, and eventually to Cornwall, England, where I learned the art of cliff meadow farming. Returning to America, I became part of an agricultural revival called Community Supported Agriculture. I continued to write and teach poetry, enlivened by literature and the silt-loam soil of the Long Island peninsula. The language of the garden and the language of poetry and prose in sympathy with the earth, for me, are inseparable.
I have admired Macfarlane’s exquisite prose through book after book, though this book, his second, holds a special place in my heart.
Having lived for 10 years in the UK—on a rather wild peninsula—I have traveled through some of the landscapes the author describes with a passion that is personal, universal, precise, and magical. I share with Macfarlane a love for what he calls “the lost words,” as well as a reverence for words he has “found” in this book: beechwood, moor, river-mouth, ridge, and holloway.
I am drawn instantly to a writer who begins a book with, “The wind was rising, so I went to the wood.” It was a joy to travel with this eloquent writer as he rediscovers wildness, a search I imagine as possible, day by day.
"The Wild Places" is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space. Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places. Certain birds, animals, trees and objects - snow-hares, falcons, beeches,…
I was born to privilege in Manhattan. A seeker from the get-go, I perpetually yearned to see below the surface of the pond and understand what lay beneath and how the world really works. Not connecting with Western philosophy, religion, or culture, I turned to the wisdom of the East at a young age. I stayed the course through decades of training in Chinese martial arts, eventually reached some understanding of them, and realized my spiritual ambitions when I was ordained a Daoist monk in China in an official government ceremony. I write about China then and now and teach meditation and tai chi around the world.
This novelized biography of a poet some consider China’s greatest pleases me over and over again. Rendering Li Po (sometimes Li Bai) as a libertine living on a barge, drinking too much and partaking with gusto in the pleasures of the flesh at the red-candle district near which he moors, really helps bring alive the great man’s life and work. There’s also a bit about his relationship with Du Fu, more of a straight arrow. Those two, along with Wang Wei really offer a picture of the Daoist life I so adore and the feeling of watching the world spin out of control in war but also the peace and solitude of a mountain retreat.
I was first exposed to Western literature when working as a teenage farm worker in the jungle of south Yunnan decades ago and have kept my interest alive ever since. As an undergraduate at Peking University, I majored in English and American language and literature before I switched to the study of Chinese archaeology and history at the graduate level. Over the last three decades and more, I have been teaching Chinese and World history and doing research on Chinese history at a US university. In addition to dozens of articles, I have published several books both in English and Chinese, all on premodern China with a focus on the Sui-Tang period.
The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf. It was a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. And, he shows that under Chinese rule, painting, and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets (Wang Wei, Li Bo (Li Bai), and Du Fu).
This book is a useful companion volume to my book, which is about the founding and the rise of the Tang dynasty.
The Tang dynasty is often called China's "golden age," a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.
The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital,…
I was a pretty poor student in high school and college but did reasonably well in my history classes. Much of the credit goes to a few inspired teachers who, at least in memory, made me feel that I was a witness at every turn to some grand Gibbonesque moment of truth. Perhaps they aroused in my mind the wonderful prospect of a life spent roaming unfettered in the realm of ideas. In reality, much else comes with the territory but it is nevertheless true that we academic historians get to use up a fair number of unpoliced hours doing just that. Mine have largely been expended on problems of collective identity and the formation of national movements.
This book was recommended to me in graduate school and was a natural fit for the kind of comparative research I was then busy with concerning the global dispersion of national ideas among cultural elites in the nineteenth century. That story is contextualized here through an examination of the life and thought of Yen Fu (1854-1921). Shwartz's work was immediately praised as a model for such a study and continues to appear frequently in bibliographies and course reading lists.
In a serious effort to divine the secret of the West's success in achieving wealth and power, Yen Fu, a Chinese thinker, undertook, at the turn of the century, years of laborious translation and commentary on the work of such thinkers as Spencer, Huxley, Adam Smith, Mill, and Montesquieu. In addition to the inevitable difficulties involved in translating modern English into classical Chinese, Yen Fu was faced with the formidable problem of interpreting and making palatable many Western ideas which were to a large extent antithetical to traditional Chinese thought.
In an absorbing study of Yen Fu's translations, essays, and…
I never wanted to have anything to do with money. I wanted to live a life of meaning in nature, of poetry, of spirit, and of relationship. The problem was that I couldn’t get anyone to pay me for it. My relationship with money from the very beginning was how can I accumulate it and manage it so I could deliver this life of freedom to myself in the shortest amount of time possible. In short, how could I “life plan” myself. I am the founder and thought leader of the life planning movement in financial advice now active in 30 cultures around the world with thousands of life planning practitioners.
Translated many times under different titles, this is my favorite edition, influencing my life planning journey. The text is an intermingling of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian thought.
Huanchu Daoren (who goes by various names) was a retired civil servant, as were many great philosophers and mystics in China. His book is written in brief paragraphs, each paragraph is a teaching of ethics or of spirit.
I carried a tiny version of the book that fit in the palm of my hand wherever I went for about ten years when I was going through the toughest time in my life just to give myself encouragement. Whenever I dipped into it, reading three or four sentences, I would feel as if there was something more profound than what I was going through.
The secrets of serenity and wisdom in a changing world can be found in these Taoist teachings, written during the late 16th century in the Ming dynasty. The author's reflections are an outgrowth of his upbringing in the science of neo-Confucianism, a lifelong career in public service, and his retirement at age 62 into Taoist apprenticeship.
I was in my teens when I discovered that if I focused on something hard enough I could manifest it. During my investigations into whether others had experienced this, I discovered the Adyar Bookstore in the Strand Arcade in Sydney, and that I had an insatiable thirst for all texts metaphysical, historical, and quantum theory. Turns out that many of the greatest thinkers in history believed that humans hold sway over many of the events and occurrence of their own lives, including Einstein, Plato, Tesla, Carl Sagan, and more. My books are the product of my exploration into the nature of personal reality, spirituality, and the meaning of life.
Tao de Ching is the basis of the Taoist belief system, which, unlike other spiritual text, is filled with not just profound, but practical advice for navigating this world in a way that benefits the self, others, and the world at large.
Tao de Ching simply means ‘The Book of the Way’. The name of the sage to whom this book is attributed, Lao-tzu, could be translated to mean ‘the Old Master’.
I was so inspired by these writings that I wished to create a book about such a Master - based in the time of those great adepts like Confucius, the Buddha, and indeed Lao-Tzu - and weave these life-changing teachings throughout.
Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way) is the classic manual on the art of living. In 81 short, poetic chapters, the book looks at the basic predicament of being alive and teaches how to work for the good with the effortless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao, or the basic principle of the universe.
Stephen Mitchell' s acclaimed translation is accompanied by ancient Chinese paintings that beautifully reflect Lao Tzu' s timeless words.
Growing up Jewish, third-generation in Latin America has given me a strong identity and a unique lens living as a double-minority. My entire life, I’ve been fascinated by life’s deep questions, the arts, and metaphysics. When no college major was clicking, I decided to pursue a B.A. in philosophy and comparative religion to better get to know my own faith and search for a universal truth across all world religions and cultures. It was in my college poetry class, where I first started writing as an outlet for my thoughts and many of the poems in my book were written then and reworked over the next two decades.
My father bought me this book when I was eight years old because he saw my interest in life’s deeper meaning and my tendency to overthink things, so he thought I would benefit from the positive-thinking mindset of the Tao.
The book is an ideal primer on Taoism for all ages because it cleverly introduces profound Eastern philosophical concepts through the whimsical world of Winnie the Pooh. Benjamin Hoff uses the beloved characters created by A.A. Milne to illustrate key Taoist principles simply.
To this day I embody the childlike curiosity of Pooh and live intentionally by being in the present moment, lessons I learned from this book.
"It's hard to be brave,' said Piglet, sniffing slightly, "when you're only a Very Small Animal." Rabbit, who had begun to write very busily, looked up and said: "It is because you are a very small animal that you will be useful in the adventure before us."
Winnie-the-Pooh has a certain way about him, a way of doing things that has made him the world's most beloved bear, and Pooh's Way, as Benjamin Hoff brilliantly demonstrates, seems strangely close to the ancient Chinese principles of Taoism. And as for Piglet, he embodies the very important principle of Te, meaning Virtue…
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