What books make you feel better about the past, present, and future?
November 16, 2022 6:18 AM   Subscribe

Can you please recommend any books that make you feel better about living life as an individual inside a chaotic world? The political catastrophisation of every issue has left my friends group feeling inadequate to face the challenges of modern life. And yet, life goes on, we keep aging, and, despite near-daily predictions, the sky has not yet fallen. What do you find hopeful, helpful, or healthy to read?

I would be grateful for recommendations about any book that has helped you find peace in your daily life.

I would prefer to avoid any books that talk about solutions for modern problems - like Bill Gates' book about how he thinks we can address climate change. We want to relax away from consuming lists of things we should be listening to, doing, focusing on, addressing.

Instead, I am hoping to find books that make us feel more comfortable just existing as humans, aging, seeing the world change in good and bad ways, being grateful for every day, and taking care of ourselves. These may be memoirs, books about science, histories, stories, fiction, nonfiction, illustrated guides to bugs and bees... Anything that helps us balance against the perspective of "The world is falling apart and you must save it."

A note about MeFiGiftGuide2022: These next two weeks, we are collecting questions on ask.metafilter.com that help people find fantastic holiday gifts that show love for friend, family, nature, and our global community. These questions, tagged with #MeFiGiftGuide2022, will be collected into an FPP on Nov 24, the night before Black Friday, to spread our community’s love and wisdom across the universe (or at least to the hearts of our future MeFi members).

If you’re new to MetaFilter, why don’t you join? It’s $5 for a lifetime membership, and that $5 is mostly to keep the spammers out. If you end up buying something based on what you read, why not donate to MetaFilter as part of our November Fundraiser Drive.
posted by rebent to Shopping (30 answers total) 82 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love this question, and luckily I have a couple of suggestions.

I just started listening to The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, based on a recommendation in this other AskMe. So far it has done a great job of providing a timeless somehow comforting perspective on life and the universe. It's also available in print.

I also recently listened to and enjoyed Piranesi, for similar reasons. I found it provided a lovely respite from our day to day world. (Note: I recommend going into Piranesi knowing as little about it as possible. Avoid any plot summaries. That is part of the fun.)
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:42 AM on November 16, 2022 [3 favorites]


I have been rereading Four Thousand Weeks every couple of months since it came out. It's billed as a time management book, but only in the broadest sense. If you live to be 80ish, you'll have about 4000 weeks. How do you want to spend yours? It is a deeply comforting read for me.
posted by Barnifer at 6:50 AM on November 16, 2022 [5 favorites]


Middlemarch!
posted by yarrow at 6:56 AM on November 16, 2022 [7 favorites]


It's not an easy ride - it's not supposed to be - but Max Gladstone's Last Exit is exactly and specifically exploring the idea that "The world is falling apart and you must save it." I found, by the end, that it was an immensely hopeful and comforting book.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:01 AM on November 16, 2022


Ed Yong's An Immense World is really helping me with this at the moment.
posted by minsies at 7:01 AM on November 16, 2022 [2 favorites]




Probably *not* at all what you have in mind, but I found Elizabeth Gilbert's The Sixth Extinction weirdly comforting- somehow reading about previous mass extinctions made this one more bearable.
posted by pinochiette at 7:17 AM on November 16, 2022


Hah, stuck record... exactly the same pair of books by John Higgs that I recommended in another AskMe less than 24 hours ago:

Stranger Than We Can Imagine - Making Sense of the 20th Century

The Future Starts Here - An Optimistic Guide to What Comes Next

The audiobook versions read by the author are exceptionally good performances.
posted by protorp at 7:20 AM on November 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


Any Becky Chambers books, but especially the Monk & Robot series - there are only two so far, and the first is A Psalm for the Wild Built. Cozy, utopian science fiction.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. How to opt out of the tumult you reference.
posted by Isingthebodyelectric at 7:30 AM on November 16, 2022 [6 favorites]


Definitely the first thing that comes to mind for me is Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I've sort of made an unintentional tradition of rereading at the start of the year for the last couple of years precisely because I find it recentering and helpful.

Ursula K LeGuin has written about various 'utopias' and societies - I think her book Always Coming Home fits within your parameters for me. It's about the world after our way of civilisation has been and gone but it is very much not a standard scifi approach to that.

She also wrote a non-fiction essay about Utopia and colonialism which might be of interest (A Non-Euclidean View of
California as a Cold Place to Be).

Tangentially that got me thinking about David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything - if you'd find reading about alternate ways societies may have structured themselves in pre-history (which was pretty eye-opening for me to the multitude of possible structures that can exist) helpful for facing our current structure.

(I would also recommend Piranesi as an excellent novel.)
posted by colourlesssleep at 7:37 AM on November 16, 2022 [7 favorites]


Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark
In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.
posted by away for regrooving at 7:40 AM on November 16, 2022 [3 favorites]


The Dawn of Everthing, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I found it very uplifting and hopeful.
posted by 15L06 at 7:56 AM on November 16, 2022


I was stepping in to specifically recommend Four Thousand Weeks and anything by Becky Chambers (especially the Monk and Robot series), but I see Barnifer and Ising beat me to it. Consider this another very enthusiastic recommendation. Those books feel life-giving to me in the best sorts of ways.
posted by hessie at 8:05 AM on November 16, 2022


Thích Nhất Hạnh's "how to" books:

How to Eat, Parallax Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1937006723
How to Fight, Parallax Press, 2017, ISBN 978-1941529867
How to Love, Parallax Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1937006884
How to Relax, Parallax Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1941529089
How to Sit, Parallax Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1937006587
posted by aniola at 8:07 AM on November 16, 2022 [4 favorites]


Also here to recommend Ursula Le Guin who wrote so beautifully about people living in times of widespread social upheaval. Always Coming Home is a good choice, but try the Earthsea books too, and maybe The Telling.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:07 AM on November 16, 2022 [3 favorites]


Stranger Than We Can Imagine - Making Sense of the 20th Century

came her to recommend this, which I'm currently halfway through. It's odd that I wasn't really thinking of it as hopeful or whatever until I saw this question. Because it's not as if it avoids the hard stuff. Chapter names include WAR, UNCERTAINTY, NIHILISM, CHAOS yet the tone is consistently curious and spry (as opposed to despairing or even that cautionary), and of course, we did get through 20th Century, which had to feel like an impossibility at times for many.
posted by philip-random at 8:09 AM on November 16, 2022


Children’s books! They can be Art with a capital A, and they tackle the hard work of helping small people grow to be good humans. They aren’t projects: if you start, you will finish, and they aren’t likely to feel like work. The children’s section of a local bookstore is a great place to spend money, librarians will help you find the most amazing books for reading to yourself and the young people in your life… and the whole exercise is a profound reminder that the world is so, so much bigger than I can imagine.

Several people above have recommended Buddhist authors that I also love - Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh - and the concept of Beginner’s Mind has been very powerful fin my life. The joy and curiosity and emotional immediacy of childhood are often what I try to channel when I want to gentle my adult ego.

One of my favorites from the recent past is Julián is a Mermaid, by Jessica Love.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:03 AM on November 16, 2022




+1 Million to Ursula Le Guin (any)
posted by Isingthebodyelectric at 12:37 PM on November 16, 2022


This might sound weird, but I found The World Without Us very comforting. Just the idea that even in the worst-case scenario for us as a species, the planet would probably still, eventually, recover from our presence and flourish anew, if likely in quite different ways than it does now.
posted by praemunire at 1:37 PM on November 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


Yes, I found The World Without Us comforting in just the same way. Another book I remember being unexpectedly reassuring was John Hersey's Hiroshima. Of course the events and experiences described are horrible, but the people hit by those events just kept on doing what people do - trying to survive, to help each other, to fix things and keep on living. It was a disaster, but it wasn't the end of everything. The six people whose stories are told did survive, Hiroshima survived, and life went on.
posted by Redstart at 2:28 PM on November 16, 2022


Lisa Well's Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World.
“[Believers] grapples with the question of how to go forward in the shadow of endings ― not only our own, but the endings of species and ecosystems, of cultures and of language . . . The question is not of what we face but how we can face it bravely and creatively — how we can curb the destructions we’ve wrought and how, as individuals and societies, we can struggle against their desolations and forestall their seeming inevitability.”
―Lydia Millet, Los Angeles Times

“Lisa Wells follows a cast of unruly and colorful characters who believe their work on the land and with one another is a healing force . . . She never loses sight of her inspired objective, to restore and revive what she refers to as 'the promised land’… The urgency to live sustainably stems from the cascading woes of collapsing ecosystems, and Wells implores her readers to start thinking creatively."
―Gretel Ehrlich, The New York Times Book Review
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:32 PM on November 16, 2022


Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble (I've quoted from this book here a few times, it's really been a lifechanger for me, but you do need to have a certain patience with academic prose).
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:32 PM on November 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


Thich Nhat Hahn's Being Peace (pdf). In a long and cynical life it is the only book that has ever given me a glimmer of hope that humanity can actually work it all out.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:59 PM on November 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


All About Love by bell hooks.

Also, seconding both Rebecca Solnit works - I haven't yet read them myself, but multiple people have recommended them for feeling more hopeful.
posted by kristi at 10:40 PM on November 16, 2022 [1 favorite]


Braiding Sweetgrass.
posted by Bottlecap at 11:18 PM on November 16, 2022


I tend to turn to nature writing, poetry, philosophy, and (certain kinds of) history books when I need to knock the frantic daily churn of bad news back into the appropriate scale amongst the larger perspective of the human lifetime and beyond. A few specific books that have worked for me:

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
The Peregrine by J.A. Baker
A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver (especially good if you're intimidated/ overwhelmed by where to start with poetry as an adult, as I sure was)
Working by Studs Terkel
A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

We are very far from unique in terms of living in terrifying times. Throughout history, people all over the world have had cause, and have found ways, to transcend despair. As a general rule, when I'm feeling overwhelmed by anxieties that are characteristic of my particular class, education level, cultural background, time and place, etc., I go out of my way to read things written by writers who exist outside that narrow stratum, and if those works don't magically turn me into an irrepressible optimist, they make me aware that the "the world is falling apart and you must save it" attitude you describe—which I definitely feel myself too a lot of the time—is a specific cultural construct that is not at all neutral or universal, and can actually be self-defeating in many contexts. There is so much life outside the echo chamber of despair.
posted by TayBridge at 2:18 AM on November 17, 2022 [3 favorites]


In the World Without Us vibe -- Lewis Thomas is another source for the idea that Life is incredibly larger than H. sap and the end of our particular species would be just another extinction for the list.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:55 PM on November 17, 2022 [1 favorite]


Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series.
I started listening to Pratchett’s books for the first time this year, and these were among my favourites. You ask for books that, “make us feel more comfortable just existing as humans, aging, seeing the world change in good and bad ways, being grateful for every day, and taking care of ourselves.” To my mind, these are exactly the themes of the Tiffany Aching books. Care and compassion are their core. Plus, they’re funny.

In order, they are The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight, and The Shepherd’s Crown. They take place in the “Discworld” universe, but no prior knowledge is required. They’re supposedly written for a younger audience but are perfect for readers of any age.

Bonus: they’ve recently released handsome-looking new hardcover editions.
Bonus-bonus: they’re a truly wonderful alternative to a certain other series about teen witches and wizards.
posted by TangoCharlie at 9:30 PM on November 21, 2022 [3 favorites]


Fantastic question! I've been a therapist since 2004- through the lockdown I met with many people who were struggling with the chaos the world was in, but also the 'big questions' in their lives. I began using a skill called 'Radical Acceptance' which allows one the freedom to not condone, but rather to let go of things that one can't control. Tara Brach is a thought leader in this field, and has a book aptly named 'Radical Acceptance'. She has many stories and examples ranging from the practical to the esoteric.

Again, I appreciate the question- there's a few books on here that I've added to my reading list as well!
posted by Karen Kerschmann at 11:34 AM on November 23, 2022


« Older Translation device options for real time   |   Tablescapes and Other Bougie Nonsense Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.


Tags

Share