81 books like What I Thought I Knew

Engaging with this book, I recognized how fear of imperfection often held me back, not just in my art but in various aspects of life. I feel like the importance of showing up and being seen, even when there are no guarantees, is a reminder that I can continue to revisit time and time again.

This book has empowered me to approach my art practice with a heart open to risks and imperfections, which transforms not just the art I produce, but also how I lead, love, and connect with the world around me.

The first book I ever read by Sharon Salzberg was her memoir, Faith. And then, I had the opportunity to study with her at Tibet House in New York City for several years. One of the things that I love so much about Sharon as a teacher is how simple, practical, and approachable she makes meditation. There’s nothing complicated or intimidating in her instruction—whether you’re a beginner or an advanced practitioner, you always feel like you’re practicing with a good friend who is super smart, exceptionally generous, and consistently humble. All of those qualities are immediately accessible and apparent in her book Real Happiness.

She has created a 28-day program that demystifies meditation so you can easily integrate it into your daily activities. And the book also includes guided meditations led by Sharon herself to eliminate any possible resistance to sitting still and breathing. You literally just have… show more.

By my nature, I really enjoy polemical writings and controversial thinkers who challenge the status quo. Rightly or wrongly, I wouldn’t typically associate such works with the Buddhist tradition. While it does contain its heretics and firebrands, it is also naturally a tradition that encourages respect for the transmission of teachings from generation to generation.

Batchelor is a Buddhist polemicist and a highly controversial one, at that. In this book, I loved how he really took on many aspects of Buddhism that could be seen as ‘unnecessary ossified relics’ and attempted to present the essential aspects of Buddhism, stripped of any ancient metaphysical worldview.

In my opinion, Buddhism can benefit from more rigorous debate and criticism of itself, and, for me, Batchelor does precisely that. This book is highly thought-provoking stuff.

DeMello was a Jesuit priest and a psychologist.

His workshops were legendary and had a deep impact on thousands. His books have touched millions. He was eclectic and open-minded and readily acknowledged the power of spiritual practices from traditions outside the Church.

For this, his books were removed from Catholic bookstores and a warning issued that his writings could mislead young minds. He was passionate about truth and cavalier about dogma.

What I adore about this book—which Carol Shields wrote a few years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries—is how it mingles the quotidian and the fanciful and the fantastic.

The quotidian takes the form of the very ordinary details in the life of the titular protagonist’s middle-aged life: The small things that Larry frets about, his ordinary conversations in Winnipeg coffee shops, his very relatable miscommunications, and even his fairly typical penis (there’s an entire chapter called “Larry’s Penis”).

Then there are the fanciful touches—for example, Larry makes garden labyrinths for a living (not a run-of-the-mill profession), and streets that don’t intersect in the real Winnipeg do intersect in the novel.

As for the fantastic, the novel ends with Larry having a vision of how his life might have gone in a happier alternative reality. 

Eliot Goldfinger’s book is very precise, reliable, and not too lengthy. Its systematic approach reminds me of a medical anatomy book, but it has been adapted for artists. The book is consistent in its depictions of human anatomy, and you will find each anatomical structure depicted from set angles: front, side, top, etc. It’s not always easy to find reliable human anatomy references, but this is one of them.

The discovery of insulin in early 1922 was a medical milestone that has since saved countless lives–my own included. Until this moment, a diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes was a certain death sentence. But as diabetes clinician and historian of medicine, Chris Feudtner points out, the success of insulin has distorted historical accounts of diabetes by marginalising the experience of the patient in favour of narratives that focus on the development of medical technology to treat them. And Feudtner’s diagnosis is confined not just to diabetes but to the history of medicine in general. Following a personal epiphany that patients have an existence beyond X-rays and blood tests, Feudtner set out to address this problem by writing a history of diabetes as told from the perspective of patients. He does so magnificently and offers important insights about our relationship with technology that extend well beyond the treatment of diabetes.

The word “abortionist” usually conjures up images of dangerous back alleys where untrained men take advantage of women.

In the case of Rickie Solinger’s book, instead, we meet Ruth Barnett, who performed approximately 40,000 abortions in the mid-twentieth century (1918-1968) in Portland, Oregon, without losing a single patient.

What I loved about this book is how Solinger takes us behind the scenes of a thoroughly illegal abortion clinic that still managed to provide expert care to all its patients, even as it sought to evade the law and its enforcers at every turn. 

Something Blue has some of the best possible ingredients for a great women’s fiction novel—forgiveness, personal transformation, friendship that blossoms into more, and the icing on the cake is that it’s set in London! The book focuses primarily on Darcy, who finds herself alone and friendless for the first time in her life. She’s not particularly likable at the beginning of the novel. Still, Giffin does an excellent job of making the reader connect with Darcy, invest in her transformation, and root for a happy ending. Although I don’t have much in common with Darcy, her experiences with pregnancy and childbirth in London caused me to reminisce about my own time living in London and the birth of my first child there. Due to the beautiful descriptions of the setting and the subject matter, it was like a walk down memory lane when I read Something Blue. 

Las Penas, New Mexico, is the setting for this moving novel that follows a year in the lives of the Padilla family. Valdez Quade creates characters with dazzling depth, and you’ll root for the Padillas as they stumble through twelve months, where everything they know is upended and destabilized.

The way this book portrays community reminds me of a favorite Sally Rooney quote from Normal People: “No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.”