Stokecast listeners and guests alike are consistently sending over their book recommendations.
We know we have some avid readers and book devourers, if you will, in our community. So we decided to start publishing 10 recommendations per month to help keep your reading fire stoked, and more importantly, keep your nightstands stocked.
1. You Are A Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life by Jen Sincero
By the end of You Are a Badass, you’ll understand why you are how you are, how to love what you can’t change, how to change what you don’t love, and how to use The Force to kick some serious ass.
2. Dispossessing The Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks by Mark David Spence
By contrasting the native histories of these places with the links between Indian policy developments and preservationist efforts, this work examines the complex origins of the national parks and the troubling consequences of the American wilderness ideal. The first study to place national park history within the context of the early reservation era, it details the ways that national parks developed into one of the most important arenas of contention between native peoples and non-Indians in the twentieth century.
3. The Mindful Path To Self Compassion: Freeing Yourself From Destructive Thoughts and Emotions by Christopher Germer and Sharon Salzberg
Dr. Christopher Germer has learned a paradoxical lesson: We all want to avoid pain, but letting it in–and responding compassionately to our own imperfections, without judgment or self-blame–are essential steps on the path to healing. This wise and eloquent book illuminates the power of self-compassion and offers creative, scientifically grounded strategies for putting it into action.
4. Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson
Limits are an illusion: discover the revolutionary account of the science and psychology of endurance, revealing the secrets of reaching the hidden extra potential within us all. Alex Hutchinson reveals that a wave of paradigm-altering research over the past decade suggests the seemingly physical barriers you encounter as set as much by your brain as by your body. This means the mind is the new frontier of endurance—and that the horizons of performance are much more elastic than we once thought.
5. On The Nose: A Lifelong Obsession with Yosemite’s Most Iconic Climb by Hans Florine
In On the Nose, Florine describes the most dangerous, pivotal, and inspirational of those climbs, providing a rare look inside the adrenaline-charged world of competitive climbing in Yosemite Valley. He tells of his very first attempt on the Nose, which ended in failure after 14 hours, his friendships (and rivalries) with climbing’s most colorful personalities, and his battle with Dean Potter to secure the definitive speed record on the Nose – an endeavor that’s been called the wildest competition known to man.
6. The Laws Of Human Nature by Robert Greene
Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.
7. To The Bright Edge Of The World by Eowyn Ivey
In the winter of 1885, decorated war hero Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small band of men on an expedition that has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River and pierce the vast, untamed Alaska Territory. Leaving behind Sophie, his newly pregnant wife, Colonel Forrester records his extraordinary experiences in hopes that his journal will reach her if he doesn’t return–once he passes beyond the edge of the known world, there’s no telling what awaits him.
8. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed”, as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
9. Educated by Tara Westover
Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
10. Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.
We realize that not everyone can buy all their books from Amazon, at full price. There are a lot of alternatives where you can find cheaper, used books. Or if you’re into physical books, head over to your local library!
Pro tip: public libraries are the original, and still best, co-working space.