50 Books from My Reading List

What I've been reading over the past year...

Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Recently I’ve seen a lot of people here on Substack sharing lists of the books they read, and I’ve really enjoyed those. Not only do I get to see what types of books are shaping their thinking, but I often find inspiration for my own reading. So I thought I would share some of my own reading list from the past year.

Another benefit of doing this at Stoicism for Humans is that I typically only write posts about the few books that I loved and would recommend, but there could also be value for you in seeing the books that didn’t make the cut. So on the list below, I’ve starred my very favorite books, so you know which ones I learned the most from. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the other books, just that they didn’t speak to me in quite the same way. But that might just be because of where I am in my life right now, or my own idiosyncratic tastes. It doesn’t mean other people won’t enjoy them. There might be something of interest for you.

I’m not providing details about each title, but if you’d like more information just ask in the comments!

My Reading List

A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life (Zena Hitz)

A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art (Michael B. Gill)

A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going (Michael Muthukrishna)

All About Love: New Visions (bell hooks)

American Philosophy: A Love Story (John Kaag)

*Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher (John Sellars)

Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth (Randy Woodley)

*Beyond the Individual: Stoic Philosophy on Community and Connection (Will Johncock)

Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred (Victoria Loorz)

Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us (Jon Alexander)

Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking (Cecilia Hayes)

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Kwame Anthony Appiah)

Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene (Andreas Weber)

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (Greg McKeown)

Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It (Janina Ramirez)

*Free Agents: How Evolution Gave us Free Will (Kevin J. Mitchell)

How to Love (Thich Nhat Hanh)

How to Think Like a Philosopher: Twelve Key Principles for More Humane, Balanced, and Rational Thinking (Julian Baggini)

Human Becomings: Theorizing Person for Confucian Role Ethics (Roger T. Ames)

I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World (James Geary)

In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (Carl Honore)

*Inwardness: An Outsider’s Guide (Jonardon Ganeri)

Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness (Helena Norberg-Hodge)

*Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology (Andreas Weber)

Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (Bill Plotkin)

*Nature, Our Medicine: How the Natural World Sustains Us (Dimity Williams)

Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being (Neil Theise)

On Beauty and Being Just (Elaine Scarry)

Once Upon a Time in the West: Essays on the Politics of Thought and Imagination (Jan Zwicky)

*Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does (Philip Ball)

Poems of Earth and Spirit: 70 Poems and 40 Practices to Deepen Your Connection with Nature (Kai Siedenburg)

*Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish (Francesca Peacock)

Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit (Lyanda Lynn Haupt)

Steps to Spiritual Perfection: Studies on Spiritual Progress in Evagrius Ponticus (Jeremy Driscoll)

*The Art of Loving (Erich Fromm)

The Enchanted Life: Reclaiming the Magic and Wisdom of the Natural World (Sharon Blackie)

The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction (Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye)

*The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans (Michael Tomasello)

*The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (Ivan Granger)

*The Lost Spells (Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris)

*The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Violet Moller)

The Overstory (Richard Powers)

The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction (Pink Dandelion)

The Reasons of Love (Harry G. Frankfurt)

The Role Ethics of Epictetus: Stoicism in Everyday Life (Brian E. Johnson)

The Stoic Idea of the City (Malcolm Schofield)

*The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi)

*The Voice of Virtue: Moral Song and the Practice of French Stoicism, 1574-1652 (Melinda Latour)

*The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (Jamie Kreiner)

*Wise Trees (Diane Cook and Len Jenshel)