100 books like The Joy Experiments

I loved this book. It is the biography of one of my favorite cities, tracing its trajectory from the 17th century to becoming the world’s first modern city. Jean Dejean points out the critical moves, the urban innovations, that were game changers, from the broad boulevards and the social life they supported to bridges over the Seine to the introduction of streetlights, making the city safer at night.

I was particularly taken by how, through these innovations, the city came to foster a vibrant social and civic life in a newly conceived public sphere, making Paris a model for how, through design, my profession, urban beauty, functionality, and culture could fuse to create one of the world’s great cities.  

This eye-opening book was a revelation to me as a young student of architecture. It provided the keys to how cities really work. Its observations are as relevant and fresh today as they were when it was published in 1961. For me and many in my generation, it helped us to see and appreciate the organic, human-centered dynamics of neighborhoods, introducing the powerful concept of “organized complexity,” which made sense of things we saw but failed to understand.

I met Jane in Toronto in 1968 where she became a lifelong friend and mentor until her death in 2006. It remains a foundational text for me in understanding urban life and my life’s work. 

One of the greatest challenges of urban design in my career has been overcoming the overreliance on the car and the damaging collateral damage that has caused. I have admired the work of my fellow practitioner, Jane Sadik-Khan, who has tackled this head-on from her time as New York City’s Transportation Commissioner under Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

In this book, I like the emphasis on practical and bold ways to reclaim urban spaces to create safer, more vibrant, and people-friendly environments. She has pioneered tactical urbanism—using pilot projects, public plazas, bike lanes, and traffic-calming measures—to dramatically reshape a city's streetscape. The success of these efforts has inspired cities worldwide to prioritize pedestrians, cyclists, and community life over car-dominated infrastructure.

When I started my career in urban design, I was finding great success in bringing diverse groups around the table to develop ideas and find breakthrough solutions. James Surowieki’s book helped me to understand why this worked, offering compelling examples. And why, under the right circumstances, diverse groups—across different backgrounds, skills, and experiences—can often make better decisions than individual experts.

His insights had huge implications for me in dealing with cities, where the collective input of stakeholders can shape better urban outcomes. It reinforced my confidence in inclusive urban planning, participatory governance, and bottom-up approaches as a way to achieve nuanced solutions to complex urban challenges, making cities more resilient, innovative, and responsive to peoples' needs.

Sometimes, I’m drawn to a book for its title, and this title sold me immediately. I was intrigued by the idea that local institutions and people could come together despite, or in spite of, waning faith in East German communism and the flagging legitimacy of the centralized regime. 

I loved the idea that Leipzig’s population and local officials worked to save and renew their city during the last days of the communist regime by building a bowling alley, nearly synonymous with the American working class in the late twentieth century, as a shared public space.

This book completely shifted my perspective on rest and its importance in my life. I am a recovering hustle-and-grind girl. I learned that great ideas and true creativity flourish when we are well-rested and when we give ourselves the space to make new connections.

Hersey’s book showed me that rest is not just about sleep—it’s a form of resistance against capitalism and white supremacy. I loved how she emphasized rest as a foundation for healing and justice, reminding us that we are enough just as we are. This book made me rethink my relationship with productivity and why it’s essential to reclaim rest as a human right. I now see rest as a radical act of self-care and community care.

A lot of people are consigned to the belief that nuclear weapons are here to stay and that nuclear disarmament is a naïve pipe dream. Ray Acheson’s book is the perfect remedy to this pessimistic malady, as it lays out the case for nuclear disarmament in an accessible way.

I love how Acheson grounds the book in academic research and gives a fascinating insider's account of how activists and diplomats worked together to make the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons a reality. Acheson also demonstrates how the existence of nuclear weapons is reliant on the injustices of capitalism, sexism, colonialism, and racism.

I read this book and felt optimistic that ordinary people like you and me can challenge these injustices and achieve seemingly impossible things if we work together.

This is a fascinating book that deals with one of the central dilemmas in American history—that a nation committed to high ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a republic made up of people from several lands could also be a nation committed to racial oppression and the denial of fundamental rights. It considers citizenship not as noun but as verb—a dynamic process, not just a legal affiliation. Spires gets at the complexity of American life, explaining approaches to citizenship that required savvy improvisation, community formation, and determined commitment to ideals that were violated by the dominant culture at every turn. Spires explores the tensions, the disagreements over directions and methods, that were part of this collective effort, and the concepts of citizenship that emerged from those productive debates. Among a great many other things, readers will learn a lot about African American intellectual life, writing, and… show more.

adrienne maree brown taught me a lot about the lineage of sex-positive writing from the 1970s to today.

The book offered me a useful corrective to views of sexual politics which so often ignore and silence liberatory writing by Black women. This book reminded me that you cannot tell the story of sex-positive feminism without Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, or Fran White. But brown isn’t here to scold you – this book is a joyful read.

Showing the wonders of our world, One Earth is a counting book told in lyrical, rhyming verse that counts up to 10 and back down again.

This book is geared toward the youngest reader with little text and gorgeous illustrations by Rogerio Coelho. Two children walk through field and forest, mountains and shorelines to show the wonders of nature as she counts up to ten.

Counting down from 10 to one, the text features conservation, repurposing, repairing, and recycling, emphasizing we have one, just one, Earth. The message is, take care of it