97 books like Everyday Matters

This is a large, beautiful book filled with urban sketches from all over the world. It is an absolute treasure trove and curated by the instigator of urban sketching himself.

I found it absolutely fascinating to explore the vast styles of urban sketching and also how popular the activity is, with sketchers representing a mind-blowing number of countries around the world.

This is a holy book of urban sketching and one you will keep returning to for more and more inspiration.

This is another book I got early on in my sketching career. I love James Hobbs's sketching style. He uses a thick black pen for the most part, and his style is simple–the perfect inspiration for a beginner.

He also includes examples of many other sketchers’ work–all of which emphasise that you do not need to have perfect drawing skills to capture the world around you. As someone who did not do very well in art at school myself, I found this book to be my permission slip to draw anyway.

I learned from this book that drawing is a way to record and understand the world in your own way, not a test on how accurately you can copy it in your sketchbook.  

Tommy Kane is an insane artist and this book collects together some of his beautiful sketches from all over the world, from both observation and his imagination.

I feel like I am leafing through his sketchbooks. The book is large and beautifully produced so that you can see the artwork in all its glory. Tommy does have another book of drawings, too, which I have yet to purchase, but I am sure I will at some stage!

Tommy has an amazing sketching style influenced by MAD magazine and veganism. I could look at his work forever. Indeed, I regularly get his book from the shelf and leaf through it. 

Koosje is an incredible art educator, and I was so excited to see she had created a book. This book is super thick and juicy. She shares her sketches from her life, along with exercises and inspiration on how to do the same.

I have followed Koosje for many years, and I love her lighthearted “anyone can do it” approach to teaching and inspiring others to keep a sketchbook of their life. I often return to this book to look through Koosje’s sketches and remind myself of both the value and pure joy sketching your life can bring.

From the very first page, I was intrigued by Shriver's exploration of maternal complexities. It shone a light on motherhood that I’d never seen before. I found the raw emotion and psychological depth unparalleled and loved how the narrative really delved into nature versus nurture and went so far as to question: are people born evil? 

Being a mother myself, I couldn’t imagine living through the horror of my child becoming withdrawn and that disengagement resulting in such devastation in a community. The dismissal of the mother’s concerns by the father was also an interesting social commentary.

Finally, Shriver’s writing is beyond beautiful yet so accessible for the readers.

Daniel Pink provides a unique perspective on finding meaning and purpose in life by embracing the transformative potential of regret.

As you explore your sense of meaning and purpose, this book offers valuable insights into how reflecting on past experiences and learning from mistakes can enrich your life's journey. It made me rethink past so-called regrets, and whether they might have positively or negatively influenced my sense of meaning.

Through thorough primary research and compelling stories, Pink demonstrates how regret can inspire personal growth, self-improvement, and a clearer understanding of your life's direction. The book encourages you to use regret as a powerful resource, which only can help your sense of meaning and purpose.

This beautifully written history focuses on another nineteenth-century Black New Yorker who defies expectations and deserves our attention. Like Educated for Freedom and Black Gotham, White’s story places us in historical moments surrounding the 1827 law ending slavery in New York State. White puts us on the vibrant, noisy, streets of the city, inviting us to see both hope and defiance in how Black people dressed, how they walked down the street, and what they did at the theater. At the center of this history emerges James Hewlett, a man whose life is worthy of at least one feature film, but has remained largely unknown outside of specialists in the field. Hewlett was a Black Shakespearean actor who insisted on his right to interpret Shakespeare for himself and for the community, even as white tastemakers sought to keep the bard’s words to themselves.

By most accounts, immigrant literature deals primarily with how immigrants struggle to adapt to their adopted countries.

Its readers have come to expect stories of identity formation, of how immigrants create ethnic communities and maintain ties to countries of origin. Yet such narratives can center exceptional stories of individual success or obscure the political forces that uproot millions of people the world over.

This novel simulates the intimacy of immigrant memoir by seemingly giving readers access to his narrator’s interiority; it seems to cater to readerly expectation. And yet this is ultimately a ruse to obtain readerly investment, which Cole then redirects to the global history of forced migration and dispossession.

I love the combination of erudition and subtlety in a novel that, while ranging across three continents, allows readers to think simultaneously about dislocation across history and in our contemporary world.

I love the way Bushra Rehman writes about immigrant New York in the 80s – in vignettes that thread together to convey a sense of time, place, and geography.

All her characters are portrayed sensitively and complexly: from the main protagonist Razia coming into her queerness, to Pakistani aunties with their own histories and trauma, to friends who grow further apart.

I love how much this story is about women as the cornerstones of community. 

In 1951, Sydney Taylor invented the memorable Brenners—papa, mama, five sisters, and baby brother—a Jewish family on the Lower East Side in turn-of-the-century New York. Taylor’s words and Helen John’s illustrations in this book, the first in a series, set the scene. A calendar in the parlor announced that it was 1912. Tenements lined city streets. When I read these novels as a child, I did not yet know that they were closely based on Taylor’s own life. When the entire series was republished in 2014, I quipped: I became a Jewish historian because of these books.