100 books like The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

In this book, I loved the way the author explains the creative process and what it takes to engage your muse and catch ideas. In a different way from The War Of Art, I learned what holds us back from expressing ourselves creatively and how we can overcome this fear of being seen.

Elizabeth Gilbert shares stories and philosophies about how to be more creative every day in a funny and optimistic way.

As I read this book, I felt like the author was looking into my soul. I loved the short, punchy observations and challenges to anyone seeking to share their creativity. The Resistance is a force universal to everyone who is trying to share a little piece of themselves, and I love the way that it is broken down in this book.

I realized that when I could see what was holding me back from expressing myself, I was able to find strategies to mitigate that fear. This book was instrumental in my ability to express myself as an author and speaker. 

While this book is not written for artists or even about art, I found it very helpful for me as a painter. To achieve the best for my paintings, I realize I need to trust my intuition over intellect. If I get too intellectual about any of my ideas for a painting, the end result is not as fulfilling if instead, I follow my intuition or inner voice. Braden goes into depth in this book about having two sources of intelligence – the brain and the heart. I like his take on this which can also be thought of as right and left brain or intellect vs intuition. By thinking about Braden's ideas on our powerful heart-brain connection, I am able to tap into deeper modalities on what it is that I am painting about. Very interesting read that sticks with you for a long time and easily becomes a… show more.

This book is an absolute must-read for all painters. Kandinsky is known as the father of modern art who brought abstract painting into the realms of art history. As an important aside, there is now controversy over his title, as new information has come up about a woman painter Hilma af Klint, that preceded Kandinsky for abstract painting ideas. Even so, Kandinsky was the first to write about spirituality and art for painters. His ideas still feel fresh on how color plays an integral role to express emotion in painting. He originally wrote this book in German, and so the translation to English along with his determination to express inner motivation for painters, makes this read a bit of a challenge. A worthy task guaranteed to surprise even the savviest painter, on how Kandinsky points out our inner thoughts as contemporary painters, but more than a century ago.

I’m picking this book because it’s actually useful for anyone in content, whether you’re a marketing strategist, UX writer, or content designer. It’s easy to read, and a lovely overview of creating more effective content – with guidance on how to adapt tone for different scenarios, and a brilliant exercise for proposition development. It was one of the first books I read about web content, and still one of the books I refer back to again and again.

Linear A, the script that preceded Linear B in Crete, has long attracted attempts at decipherment. Ester Salgarella, who is a colleague of mine at Cambridge, would not claim to have deciphered Linear A, but her work on the script and its relation to Linear B is brilliant at reframing the question about the relationship between the two. If you read this after Andrew Robinson’s account of Linear A (in his Lost Languages book mentioned above), you might be surprised by how much progress has been made.  

This book blew my mind when I first read it twenty years ago, and it still seems fresh when I revisit it now. 

Our common assumption about language is that it represents the world, plain and simple. However, Ong’s book colorfully captures how differently language was experienced in the oral world before the rise of literacy.

Hearers empathized with speakers and participated in the scenes their words evoked. There was an immersive and tangible sense of commonality that spread through the shared experience of sound, which comes from within one person’s body and enters another person’s body. Language knitted the culture together more than it indexed the world.

Ong’s book made it much harder for me to blithely assume that referentiality is a natural or inherent property of language. 

We live in a world of documents caught between new and old, between paper and bits–from library cards and movie tickets to PDFs–and media historian Lisa Gitelman explains why the “document” itself is so critical a category in modern society. Medical facilities, schools, governments, and prisons all require documentation, so this book is particularly useful in thinking about how societies organize around knowledge infrastructures and artifacts.

I marvel at how the book (and all of Gitelman’s work) is able to move so facilely between different historical moments and objects, weaving them together into a tapestry that is more than the sum of its parts. While we might think of “media” as radio, TV, newspapers, or the internet, Gitelman helped me understand that media is so much more.

This is one of those books that completely changes the way you understand a subject.

Clanchy looks at how the growth of bureaucracy in England fostered the growth of literacy and changed the world in the process. That’s an important subject in its own right, but I love this book for all of the little details it includes.

It’s full of information about how the definition of literacy has changed over time, how knights and kings were educated, how courts functioned, how oral testimony was heard, how records were kept, how books were produced, how much it cost to produce them, and how forgery developed.

This is very much an academic book, but it explores a whole range of practices and attitudes that have shaped the world we live in.

The title says it all. I choose Patai’s withering account of Orwell’s irredeemable misogyny not because I think she is right but because I think she onto something in him and in his life and times. After Koestler, another dark corner.