88 books like Gift from the Sea

To live and work in a world of turmoil and change requires courage. Resilience is a life skill that can be learned—but it takes courage. In this book, Hurt and Dye come up with very practical but realistic ways to identify organizational practices that encourage or cut-off valuable conversations.

I’m in the field of communications and their advice is not only timely but timeless. I reach for their book when I went to coach someone who is overwhelmed by the workplace. It might be a manager trying to hold a team together, or individual contributors trying to determine if a role is right for them.  Hold this on your bookshelf. I guarantee you will use it for yourself—or for others.

On my nightstand, I have a journal in which I copy poems, writings that inspire, or insights I have. Two pages are filled with sentences I have copied from this book.  Why? Because getting older in these times of insanity and division can leave me anxious and without a rudder.

Parker has an amazing gift for making a statement that recharges and renews me:

“Calamites I once lamented now appear as strong threads of a larger weave, without which the fabric of my life would be less resilient.” Wow!

“Forget ego. Today’s peacock is tomorrow’s feather duster.”   Got it.

Or this one:  “Gravity pulls my skin down. But there is a counterforce called levity…Levity is the kind of humor that makes life’s challenges easier.” Get a blank book, a highlighter. Then read Palmer

I was so intrigued by Becky and her story that she became one of my case studies in my book. She has been through more traumatic transitions than most of us have in a lifetime. From her own experience and struggle, Becky has crafted a masterful model for sustaining and stabilizing our lives. 

She created the Four C’s as a foundation: comfort, control, community, and connection. I refer to her work as another guiding source when life becomes crazy…as indeed it will. From a place of feeling stabilized, Becky advocates a resilient response: how do you understand and use the experience? What assumption will offer support? And what resources do you have? I can and should refer to her book often for my own stabilizing.

Moving from burnout to breakthrough is about becoming clear on what really matters. Sam Horn, the most prolific and powerful wordsmith I have ever known, comes up with subtle and not-so-subtle ways of hitting you between the eyes and asking “what are you waiting for?” 

Becoming clear on what really matters is not about goal setting. But rather, it’s about what makes you excited, more playful, purposeful, and passionate about your life. As with the other books, I have highlighted so much. Now, my task is not just to read but to do. Sam not only crafts a process but her method of questioning will stop you in your tracks. She has a wealth of pertinent quotes that jump out on almost every page: from Buddha to Hugh Jackman, from Anais Nin to Eleanor Roosevelt.

A poignant, perceptive memoir of the author’s time in Africa—and her experiences there, her discovery of love and the loss of that love; evocations of people and sky, contemplations of weather and landscape unlike any other I’ve read.

It should be read (and always honoured) because it’s as close to a reverie on sorrow and wonder, the mystery of stark wildernesses and solitudes, as I’ve found. It’s the book I wish I’d written, above so many others.

As entertaining as the PBS series about Yorkshire veterinarian James Herriott (pseudonym for author James Alfred Wight) is, the book is even better.

A blend of memoir, travelogue, and journal, Herriott’s tales of life among the farmers of England’s Yorkshire Dales are heartwarming, hilarious, and riveting. From his familial relationships with the Farnon brothers, with whom he lives, to the sometimes endearing, sometimes mercurial encounters with his patients—both the 2-legged and 4-legged variety—reading the adventures of this country vet is both informative and engaging.

You’ll go places you never imagined, want to watch the series—original and remake—all over again, and will, if you’re like me, make a solemn pledge to visit the Dales before you die! 

This book makes me snort-laugh every time I read it.

The ridiculous, rudimentary illustrations perfectly capture the absurdity and weirdness of life, and the writing—about everything from dogs to depression—is smart, witty, and accurate. This book is a little crazy and since I often think I’m a little crazy, it’s perfect for me.

The book’s small slices of life (and cake, with which the author is obsessed) are the perfect antidote for any day that I feel the world has gone mad. So pretty much every day.

There is no finer memoir celebrating a love of place than Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. His opening lines take you right into the heart of the kitchen in a rural Alabama home where he lived as a young boy with an elderly distant cousin in the late 1920s. Those few cherished years would influence his writing and life for as long as he lived.

Writing in concise, elegant language, Capote centers his brief memoir around one Thanksgiving and Christmas when he was seven and his beloved cousin, Miss Souk Faulk, was in her late sixties. Perhaps it is because I have hosted Thanksgiving for my family for years, that I so appreciate Capote’s ability to capture, with humor and poignancy, the power of traditions with those you love.

Life on the Mississippi is the autobiographical story of Mark Twain’s career as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River in the mid-1800s.

I first read this book when living in the French Quarter in the 1990s and could hear ship horns out on the river as I took in Twain’s fascinating, often silly and sarcastic narrative about his life and the river.

When describing New Orleans cemeteries, Twain writes, “Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it.”

Maggie Smith is a poet, and this book about the end of her marriage is exquisite.

I loved her careful prose, her honesty, and the book’s format (with its varying chapter lengths and her perfect word choice, it often reads like poetry). I love being married to my husband of 20+ years, but this book reminds me that, in the end, I belong to me. It’s healthy and necessary to search out my own joy.