100 books like She Made a Monster

The Secret World of Walter Anderson is one of my favorite picture book biographies. From the first lyrical lines, Bass draws the reader into another time and place where a solitary Mississippi artist climbs into his leaky skiff and sails off to an uninhabited island to paint the world around him. The watercolor illustrations are so wonderful, the reader will hear the crash of the waves, feel the warm sun on their shoulders, and breathe in the salty air right along with the illusive artist. It’s a brilliant story about a man who “may be the most famous American artist you’ve never heard of.”

I love this picture book biography about composer Erik Satie. It has all the ingredients I love—lyrical language, fascinating details, and most of all a compelling story, in this case, about a man as odd and enchanting as his music that sounded happy and sad, like “kick line songs and ancient chants, but mixed together.” His most famous musical composition is Gymnopédie. Although Satie was a musical misfit and struggled throughout his life, in the end, he succeeded, leaving the world with a legacy of unforgettable music.

This book is about Jane Goodall, famous chimp researcher and United Nations Messenger of Peace. As a child, she shared her backyard “magical world of nature” with her stuffed chimp named Jubilee. The book Tarzan of the Apes expanded her passion into dreams of going to Africa to study animals. “Wow!” She did it, and her stick-to-it observations led to the discovery that chimpanzees make and use tools. As she protects wildlife she also helps people in wild places to get better food, water, and education. Her concerns for all creatures have inspired children around the world to take some action toward a better planet.  

I’m a big fan of Don Brown and this is one of my favorites. In this biography, we follow the adventure of Alice Ramsey who was the first woman to drive across the United States. It was 1909, so no easy task since there weren’t any interstates, road maps, or gas stations. Yet, Alice, along with her companions, set off. Magically, Brown lets us go along with them as they ramble past farms and fields, muster their way down roads clogged with pigs, dig themselves out of muddy holes, and urge the car across vast moonlit deserts, and over the grueling Sierra Nevada mountains. Alice’s grand adventure not only celebrates a woman’s first, but takes us along for the long, extraordinary, bumpy ride. Bravo Alice! Bravo Don Brown!

A perfectly formed, intimate epiphany of a book about birdwatching, by a non-birdwatcher. Unmoored by her father’s illness, Maclear tries to find a way of making life make sense. She experiments with calligraphy; she wrestles with writer’s block. One day she meets a birdwatching musician, who explains how the activity helps dissipate his worries and daily pressures. Intrigued, she asks if she can tag along. Reluctant at first, and almost despite herself, the author begins to find peace and unexpected beauty in the urban landscape. She discovers that simply being still triggers introspection. This is also a book about the tension between freedom and confinement – something that resonates particularly for me, as a writer with children.

There are lots of how-to-write books with a chapter or two on motivation, inspiration, perspiration, and how to get over writer’s block. But The Artist’s Way is all about what’s happening when the creative part of your life gets stuck, or never started in the first place. It goes to the sources of your human creative energy, and helps you to understand how to find them and feed them, and then how to unblock the channels which prevent that energy from actually flowing into your art, writing, or anything else. You can work your way through the book to establish a creative practice or, like me, return to it at different times, cherry-picking her ideas and processes to suit different kinds of stuckness. 

Rick Ruben is a genius at his work, but this book speaks to the genius in all of us.

We are all artists, and we are all creating our lives. He reminds us every day to embrace what we already have by not wanting more. The pages flew out at me as I had to earmark most of them. His poetic words inspired me to live my life more authentically and with greater pleasure to spread the word to all.

Just this quote alone: “Art is choosing to do something skillfully, caring about the details, bringing all of yourself to make the finest work you can. It is beyond ego, vanity, self-glorification, and need for approval.”

This is the message for all mindfulness practices, and it totally resonates with me. Rick certainly treks life with grace as I explore in my book. 

This edited volume, by academics Irene Gammel and Jason Wang from Ryerson University, Canada, includes contributions from authors living across the world. The chapters focus on how the arts and culture can both express and document people’s thoughts, practices, and feelings about living through the COVID pandemic. There are discussions on the role of drawing, graphic fiction, cinema, diary writing, urban space, music, streaming services, film, and video conferencing platforms in helping people cope with COVID life. Reading the book provides insights into the different social, cultural, and geographical contexts in which the pandemic has been experienced and how people adjusted to the often very stressful conditions of lockdown, restrictions on movements, fear about their health and grief.

This book is a compilation of chapters written by (mostly) psychology professors who have dealt with creativity extensively throughout their careers, and I highly recommend it. The topics cover psychometric approaches to creativity, experimental studies in creativity, the history of creativity, biological bases of creativity, the development of creativity, relationships between creativity and intelligence, the types of motivation necessary to produce creative outputs, cultural aspects of creativity, computer modeling in creativity, the development of prodigies, and significant research into creative processes. I gained valuable insights into domains and areas that I never would have considered otherwise.

This book contains 17 chapters written by educational psychologists who have worked with creativity.  These chapters range from establishing the best conditions in organizations for creativity to occur, how to test for creativity, problem-solving and creativity, freedom, and constraint in creativity, time’s impact on creativity, how dreams and other insights influence creativity, how society influences creativity, the relevance of talent in creativity, to leadership involving creativity. The spectrum of perspectives is broad indeed and I have personally gleaned much about all the relevant domains relating to creativity from reading this book.