Fans pick 100 books like Daily Rituals

What will happen to the world if most of us—everyone except one or two humans, in fact—disappear?

According to Marlen Haushofer, the world will continue on just fine. I find that idea to be a little shocking, sure, but also comforting: maybe humans aren’t essential to the world’s existence after all. Maybe the world doesn’t need humans for drama, love, heartbreak, or healing.

This is what I would call an anti-post-apocalyptic book, one in which no one is a hero because humanity is beyond saving. Instead, the narrator has deep relationships with several animals—a dog, some cats, and a cow—animals that aren’t anthropomorphized in the slightest but treated with dignity, love, compassion, and complexity. I reread this slow and meditative page-turner every few years. I’m going to keep reading it for the rest of my life.

I could not stop reading this book—and when the TV series came out, I fell in love all over again. A trapped, imprisoned aristocrat who is elegant and only slightly snotty and who has a bedrock of humanity underneath any stiffness and propriety—that’s the protagonist, Rostov.

This novel features not one but two abandoned children, and, in both cases, their plights bring out the best in Count Rostov. He is naturally kind, but he also finds resources and courage he never knew he had. I’ve experienced the book three times—reading, listening to an audiobook, and watching the TV series and I was in love every time.

This fascinating and charming book was written by a French magazine editor after he suffered a massive stroke and was locked inside his own body, unable to speak or move. Incredibly, he wrote this book in his mind throughout the day and then each letter was slowly transcribed by blinking his eyes. I kept thinking about this book long after I read it. It’s a nightmare scenario, but he leads us all the way through it. We’re with him as he survives and even finds meaning when almost everything else is lost.

It spoke to my heart. It opened up a world of spirit and intuition, of love and grace that I had never connected with before. Discovering this book was like discovering a new and deep friendship.

The book read like poetry. It provided inspiration in my life at a time when I was new to spiritual seeking. I was so inspired by its words and insight that I typed up pages of quotes I wanted to remember. It felt as if it spoke to a wisdom deep within me and called it to awaken.

I’ve gone on to love other books written by John O’Donohue, but Anam Cara will always be my favorite.    

This is such a fun read―a fictionalised account of the real-life husband and wife’s experience of walking the Camino de Santiago. I love how the two protagonists, who start as strangers, take turns to tell their stories, especially the hilarity in the ‘he said–she said’ of their relationship―they really are opposites but both bring out something remarkable in the other. Romantic in a very real way.

This is the true story of Phyllis Pearsall who (amongst other adventures in a remarkable life that was also filled with personal tragedy) decided to chart and map the geographical districts of London – a project which eventually tuned into the A-Z map. Over a year Pearsall walked 23,000 London streets to achieve this remarkable feat and set up the Geographers’ Map Company. Pearsall is complex and flawed and Hartley wasn’t always able to separate fact from the fiction (Mrs P was a wonderful storyteller but sometimes contradicted herself). Ultimately Hartley concludes ‘If there is a scene, or a word, or a character, you believe to be too fantastical, it is likely they are real.’ Mrs P did have an extraordinary life.

As an undergrad, I was blessed to have two professors who changed the course of my life: Angela Davis and Whitney Chadwick. Both of these professors discussed the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. Women, Art, and Society was published in 1990, and in 2020, the sixth edition was released. Although women artists’ representation in art history pedagogy has improved since 1990, the art world in general still favors men over women, making Chadwick’s book a relevant read. It provides a historical and critical look at women artists from the Middle Ages to the present, covering a range of media and artists from various cultural and geographical backgrounds. It challenges the assumption that great women artists are the exception to the rule and charts the evolution of feminist art history. 

This book was on the bedside table at a friend’s house where I was staying. I picked it up, started it, and stayed up much later than I had planned!

I was so engaged with the idea of an eighteenth-century woman who began making these botanical paper cut-outs and achieved attention for her work in late life, and I was drawn along by Peacock’s clear, lyrical prose and how she wove in aspects of her own life as a poet.

I loved Mary Delaney’s creativity, spirit, and grit, and she now feels to me like a friend from 250 years ago. 

This book should be considered the bible of women’s artistic expression. Built on the idea of physical spaces and how they nurture the creative endeavor a woman does there, Where Women Create introduces you to dozens of extraordinary artists, textile designers, mixed media artists, book producers, entrepreneurs, and product designers. You get lost in their stories and inspired by their ingenious outlook on organization, clutter, and ways to keep the artistic spark alive.

Sometimes art is pretty to look at and sometimes art is powerful.

Ignotofsky shares short bios and gorgeous pictures of fifty female artists throughout history and across the globe, most of whom I wasn’t familiar with prior to reading the book. Not only will this book inspire young artists to create, but Women in Art will inspire them to research these artists further, as each one deserves her own picture book biography (some of which already exist!).