Here are 100 books that Time Lived, Without Its Flow fans have personally recommended if you like
Time Lived, Without Its Flow.
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Like many people, I have experienced my share of suffering. I have also spent a lifetime exploring the suffering of others through great works of literature and art. My attraction to Japanese literature–imbued with a Buddhist sensitivity to loss–reflects my taste for the melancholy beauty of works of art that transmute suffering into aesthetic form. The qualities I find in Japanese literature are in wonderfully long supply in writings from around the world. My list of favorite books is a small testament to that aesthetic work which has the potential to heal us.
Who among us has never felt shame? Who has never felt one’s spirit crushed? I myself have returned for relief from that periodic loss of inner spirit to this brave, unsentimental memoir of the ravages on Lucy Grealy’s face of a disease that condemned her to a punishing self-loathing.
Reading this boldly unabashed memoir of conquering shame, of finding an “inner eye” (and inner life) that could come to see as beautiful what the seeing eyes of the world saw only as ugly, I have felt buoyed by the possibility of reclaiming your own true self against the ravages of a hostile world.
"Grealy has turned her misfortune into a book that is engaging and engrossing, a story of grace as well as cruelty, and a demonstration of her own wit and style and class."—Washington Post Book World
“It is impossible to read Autobiography of a Face without having your consciousness raised forever.” – Mirabella
In this celebrated memoir and exploration of identity, cancer transforms the author’s face, childhood, and the rest of her life.
At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her…
Like many people, I have experienced my share of suffering. I have also spent a lifetime exploring the suffering of others through great works of literature and art. My attraction to Japanese literature–imbued with a Buddhist sensitivity to loss–reflects my taste for the melancholy beauty of works of art that transmute suffering into aesthetic form. The qualities I find in Japanese literature are in wonderfully long supply in writings from around the world. My list of favorite books is a small testament to that aesthetic work which has the potential to heal us.
Though I am not religious, I have been aesthetically moved and spiritually stirred by these deeply personal, profoundly philosophical, and poetically enigmatic essays, which I find myself returning to when faced with the most fundamental questions about our spiritual lives.
Written by a French Jewish convert to Christianity whose own suffering is exquisitely attuned to the suffering of others, these essays have continued to inspire readers from across a broad spectrum of religious and philosophical orientations—including the most secular among us.
Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the farmer to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals. On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition - by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1952 - this Routledge Classics edition offers English readers the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever, by incorporating a specially commissioned translation of…
Like many people, I have experienced my share of suffering. I have also spent a lifetime exploring the suffering of others through great works of literature and art. My attraction to Japanese literature–imbued with a Buddhist sensitivity to loss–reflects my taste for the melancholy beauty of works of art that transmute suffering into aesthetic form. The qualities I find in Japanese literature are in wonderfully long supply in writings from around the world. My list of favorite books is a small testament to that aesthetic work which has the potential to heal us.
I have never read a more profoundly sad but philosophically wise novel about the complex bonds of friendship and how the betrayal of those bonds and of one’s own authentic feelings leads to loneliness and even anguish.
I first read this great Japanese masterwork, written by Japan's greatest writer of fiction, over forty years ago, and I revisit it every year, both for the life lessons it continues to teach and for its literary beauty—which only deepens with time.
"The novel sustains throughout its length something approaching poetry, and it is rich in understanding and insight. The translation, by Edwin McClellan, is extremely good." —Anthony West, The New Yorker
Kokoro, which means "the heart of things," explores emotions familiar to everyone—love and hate, hope and despair, companionship and loneliness.
Sensei, a man seen against the rich background of old Japan entering the modern era, is outwardly successful. He has position, wealth, a charming wife. But deep in the heart of things, he is harried with a profound sense of isolation whose cure lies only in "faith, madness, or death."…
Like many people, I have experienced my share of suffering. I have also spent a lifetime exploring the suffering of others through great works of literature and art. My attraction to Japanese literature–imbued with a Buddhist sensitivity to loss–reflects my taste for the melancholy beauty of works of art that transmute suffering into aesthetic form. The qualities I find in Japanese literature are in wonderfully long supply in writings from around the world. My list of favorite books is a small testament to that aesthetic work which has the potential to heal us.
Reading these messages in a bottle discovered buried under a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, I am staggered and amazed at the indomitable human capacity for resilience and creativity.
I read these harrowing literary masterworks, which report on the most hellish degradations, and I am stunned that Zalmen Gradowski, from deep within his suffering, could wrest from the horrors before him and from his own despair, a literary art that is beautiful and solacing. I am reminded of the human capacity, which we all must certainly share, to snatch shreds of beauty from the darkest of circumstances and of the human hope that somewhere beyond one’s own hell lives a sympathetic ear.
A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz.
On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner's powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III.
I started my career teaching high school. I attended amazing professional development institutes, where scholars showed me how the stories I’d learned and then taught to my own students were so oversimplified that they had become factually incorrect. I was hooked. I kept wondering what else I’d gotten wrong. I earned a Ph.D. in modern US History with specialties in women’s and gender history and war and society, and now I’m an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of ISU’s Social Studies Education Program. I focus on historical complexity and human motivations because they are the key to understanding change.
Generally speaking, I hate anything that hints at theory. But this slim volume, which investigates the relationship between states of war and how we understand time, is grounded solidly in reality and does not require mental gymnastics to understand.
Using the examples of World War II, the Cold War, and the Global War on Terror, Dudziak made me rethink how we define when it’s “wartime” vs. when it’s “peacetime” and why that matters. Her argument is about how war has not been a time out of time or aberration, so treating war as a period when different rules apply has real consequences.
The book pushed me to rethink how and when I silo ideas, time, and events and how dangerous silo’ing can be.
When is wartime? On the surface, it is a period of time in which a society is at war. But we now live in what President Obama has called "an age without surrender ceremonies," when it is no longer easy to distinguish between wartime and peacetime. In this inventive meditation on war, time, and the law, Mary Dudziak argues that wartime is not as discrete a time period as we like to think. Instead, America has been engaged in some form of ongoing overseas armed conflict for over a century. Meanwhile policy makers and the American public continue to view…
I was 14 years old when my dad was imprisoned by the communist police of ex-Yugoslavia. My dad spent his childhood working as a shepherd in a small Macedonian village with 11 inhabitants. Later, he became a poet, and he belonged to the last group of political prisoners in the former Yugoslavia. When my dad was sent to prison, my family and I dealt with great trauma.
How do we master trauma? Some books say that I should repeat what I already did, and other books say that I should choose something new. But this small book explains that both decisions are bad.
This book has taught me that neither repetition nor choosing the new heals. I should choose the recollection over the repetition. I already have all the knowledge I need to overcome it, which is already within me.
'The love of repetition is in truth the only happy love'
So says Constantine Constantius on the first page of Kierkegaard's Repetition. Life itself, according to Kierkegaard's pseudonymous narrator, is a repetition, and in the course of this witty, playful work Constantius explores the nature of love and happiness, the passing of time and the importance of moving forward (and backward). The ironically entitled Philosophical Crumbs pursues the investigation of faith and love and their tense relationship with reason.
Written only a year apart, these two works complement each other and give the reader a unique insight into the breadth…
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by humanity’s place within deeper time. As a boy, I collected rocks and fossils, and at university studied geology. The long term has also been a theme running throughout my journalism career at New Scientist and the BBC, and it inspired my research during a recent fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. I believe we need to embrace a deeper view of time if we are to navigate through this century’s grand challenges – and if we can, there’s hope, agency, and possibility to be discovered along the way.
Vincent is a social anthropologist who spent a number of years in Finland completing a truly fascinating piece of fieldwork: he studied the people involved in planning the spent nuclear waste depository at Onkala.
This is a huge undertaking and responsibility, requiring its architects to project their minds tens of thousands of years into the future. Through his fieldwork, Vincent drew out various broader lessons for how to think longer-term.
What’s striking about Onkala is that the people involved in the planning are simply normal Finnish people tasked with an extraordinary job. To me that shows that deep time can be accessible to everyone, and indeed this is a theme that Vincent explores himself: seeking out long-term time in everyday experience can be cathartic, he argues.
A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth.
We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn…
I love books. All kinds of books. Growing up, I didn’t have many friends outside of books. It’s no wonder that as an adult reader/writer/editor/book coach, I still read widely and voraciously. I believe all stories are magical, but I’m especially drawn to books that contain emotionally engaging characters and fun magical elements. I’m also a huge fan of good KidLit and getting a chance to see and explore other cultures and worlds, both real and imagined. (I even co-host a podcast: Coaching KidLit.) So, I read a ton of magical stories and a lot of KidLit. That’s how I discovered the books on this recommended reading list.
This is such a fun book, filled with fascinating characters, unusual creatures, and a camera that can freeze time. I loved hanging out with the main characters, Otto and Sheed. They are smart, fun, and relatable. Their adventure is both exciting and humorous, and their relationship is realistic and heartwarming. I love a good adventure, especially one where the characters are forced to set aside their differences to work together toward a single goal.
The Hardy Boys meets The Phantom Tollbooth, in the new century! When two adventurous cousins accidentally extend the last day of summer by freezing time, they find the secrets hidden between the unmoving seconds, minutes, and hours are not the endless fun they expected. Otto and Sheed are the local sleuths in their zany Virginia town, masters of unravelling mischief using their unmatched powers of deduction. And as the summer winds down and the first day of school looms, the boys are craving just a little bit more time for fun, even as they bicker over what kind of fun…
For many years, I’ve been creating visual nonfiction books for adults. These books are about climate change, indigenous sovereignty, and nuclear physics—not typical kids’ book fare. But because my books include artwork, everyone always asked me when I would write and illustrate a book for children. Once I had my own children, I was suddenly full of ideas. Children’s books are often underestimated. The best books of the genre are accessible enough to interest a young person, sophisticated enough to engage the adults reading them aloud, and multidimensional enough to reward countless re-readings. I believe books that meet this standard fit alongside civilization’s great works of literature.
I never tire of reading this brilliant book to my son. His imagination (and mine) goes to new places with each rereading. Each spread relocates the reader to another corner of the world, where we glimpse a snapshot of action: someone honks their car horn in a traffic jam in Mexico City, a volcano erupts in Papua-New Guinea, a woman drops a mysterious envelope on the sidewalk in Budapest.
For my son and I, the book has been as interactive as any game, offering endless possibilities for discussion and debate. Because each spread is a single moment, we can dream up our own interpretation of what might have led to this scene and what will unfold afterward. It’s wonderful to see wildly varied landscapes as we travel the planet.
Inspired by the question, "What are they doing right at this moment on the other side of the world?" this book focuses on natural and human events happening all over the world in the same second. Talking about the world and how it's so different in places but also so similar and shared, so incredible and surprising, the books takes us to New York, Chicago, Mexico, Portugal, Angola, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Hungry, Brazil, and South Africa, among others.
So, while you sit turning the pages of this book, things are happening everywhere. Somewhere, a wave is reaching the shore. Elsewhere,…
I am a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, with a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I teach courses in the philosophy of space and time, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of science. In addition to several authored and edited books on the philosophy of time, I have published many scholarly articles on time, perception, knowledge, and the history of the philosophy of time. I have always been attracted to the philosophy of time because time is quite simply at the root of everything: through the study of time we confront and illuminate the deepest possible questions both as to the nature of the physical world and as to the nature of human existence.
What is our ‘sense of time’, and why does it vary so much depending on circumstances and our state of mind? Cognitive psychologist Marc Wittmann explores the relationship between consciousness and the sense of being an embodied agent persisting through time. Drawing on cognitive science and neuroscience, he investigates the many factors that affect our experience of time, such as occupation, impulsivity, and mindfulness.
An expert explores the riddle of subjective time, from why time speeds up as we grow older to the connection between time and consciousness.
We have widely varying perceptions of time. Children have trouble waiting for anything. (“Are we there yet?”) Boredom is often connected to our sense of time passing (or not passing). As people grow older, time seems to speed up, the years flitting by without a pause. How does our sense of time come about? In Felt Time, Marc Wittmann explores the riddle of subjective time, explaining our perception of time—whether moment by moment, or in terms…
