100 books like Frames of Mind

The music lesson is a must-read for not only every musician but an inspiration to non-musicians as well. The book captures the real reason for playing music. The book straddles between a fictional novel and an indispensable true story of why we play music. It is clear in every word, page, and chapter that we play music to share feelings and communicate inspirational messages that can change your life, make you happy, fulfilled, inspired, and thirst for more. 

I love this book not only for the content and inspirational message, but for the style of writing. It’s so engaging to read because he makes you feel like you are in the same room, on the same stage, and with the same band as Victor. Love it!

The Listening Book is about rediscovering the power of listening as an instrument of self-discovery and personal transformation. By exploring our capacity for listening to sounds of music, nature, and one’s own breathing, we can awaken and release our full creative powers. Mathieu guides the reader to hearing the connections between all sounds of music and everyday life. It is insightful and surprising to notice what is around us at any moment of the day and apply this heightened awareness to understanding and connecting with music listening or performance. This awareness can be neglected but applicable to connecting our inner soul with the outside world and to life. Brilliant illuminations from a genius composer, musician and teacher W.A. Mathieu. 

This amazing book draws on nearly one hundred interviews with creative people in every field and thirty years of research on the subject of creativity. There are multiple stories from musicians and composers while Csikszentmihalyi abstracts the common characteristics of the creative process that transcends the arts, science, architecture, and technology. He studies personalities, family backgrounds, and the environments that inspire the creative process. We learn to accept that many uniquely creative people have channeled their contributions by focusing their energy through unique structures that include conflicts, disease, handicap, stress, poverty, and emotional instability. The 426 pages of research and interviews are captivating, informative, and insightful and can inspire creative expression from new sources of understanding. 

A Soprano on Her Head was inspired by W. Timothy Galley’s Inner Game of Tennis book, applying these principles to musical performance and creativity. It is a wonderful anecdotal collection of delightful experiences in playing any instrument, dancing, or singing with the inner freedom that all artists long for. The book is as much about learning from your own experience, the creative process, and harnessing these tools as they could apply to music performance, teaching, and learning. She explores nervous energy and stress through insight and common sense. Her stories make an effortless and delightful read filled with applicable knowledge and skills for daily living. 

I personally recommend this book because it is a must-read for anyone dealing with students who struggle with learning or underperform in certain subjects.

Over the course of my 45-year career, I have encountered hundreds of individuals, including myself, who have struggled with math despite being highly skilled in drawing or art.

Howard Gardner, the head of Harvard University's Project Zero, has been a leader in the field of intelligence research since the late 1970s. His work rendered IQ tests irrelevant for measuring intelligence in education.

Understanding Gardner's work is critical to understanding how individuals function, and it has changed the way I interact with difficult students.

Reading this book gave me a new perspective on intelligence and helped me see it in a completely different light.

Profound idea that everyone has a primary time focus: either Future-focused, Present-focused, or Past-focused. Fascinating implications of each. Because I'm so future-focused, reading this book helped me understand people who are very present-focused. Also great advice on shifting your focus when needed. I read it 7 years ago, but still think about it almost every day.

David Hilbert was the most important mathematician at the dawn of the 20th century. In 1900, he gave the mathematical community its homework for the next 100 years setting out the list of open problems that had to be solved by 2000. While to the rest of the mathematicians, he may have appeared as their professor, he was also the class clown. As colorful and funny as he was brilliant, you cannot but come away loving this great mathematical genius.

Fablehaven is this author’s most popular series, but Sky Raiders begins my favorite. Cole is a somewhat unwilling hero. He is frequently terrified or overwhelmed by the difficult situations he’s in, yet he just can’t help but do the next right thing each time it’s presented. The author has supplied different rules for magic in the different kingdoms in a way that works to keep things interesting. I also applaud Mr. Mull for using real vocabulary in his books for kids. Reading this might improve someone’s SAT score.

Need a book that will give you all the feels, only to wring you out, then immerse you in that bath of hopeful salty tears once more? Queer teen Connor Major’s life is blown apart when his mother sends him to a remote conversion camp. Now, he and the other LGBTQ+ ‘guests’ at ‘Nightlight’ band together to expose the camp’s terrible truths and take it down. Trauma, despair, resilience, joy, and hope make this a riveting and memorable YA adventure thriller. This book made me cry so ugly that my iPhone wouldn’t recognise my face to tell people about it for like an hour after...

This book is out of print, but I include it in the hope that some public-spirited publisher may be persuaded to reissue this large-format picture book. It was the first book on mathematics that I read at about the age of ten and it contained precisely what I needed to show me that this was a subject with a history and a use. (Nor am I the only mathematician to have this experience.)

As an adult, I found the same author’s Mathematics for the Million a bit crass and utilitarian but I pardon him everything for a wonderful first experience.