New Year's Resolution Reading List: 9 Essential Books on Reading and Writing by Maria Popova Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolism has to do with the osmosis of trash and treasure. Hardly anything does one’s mental, spiritual, and creative health more good than resolving to read more and write better. Today’s reading list addresses these parallel aspirations. And since the number of books written about reading and writing likely far exceeds the reading capacity of a single human lifetime, this omnibus couldn’t be — shouldn’t be — an exhaustive list. If anyone can make grammar fun, it’s Maira Kalman — The Elements of Style Illustrated marries Kalman’s signature whimsy with Strunk and White’s indispensable style guide to create an instant classic. The original Elements of Style was published in 1919 in-house at Cornell University for teaching use and reprinted in 1959 to become cultural canon, and Kalman’s inimitable version is one of our 10 favorite masterpieces of graphic nonfiction. On the itch of writing, Lamott banters: On why we read and write:
Free Audio Books Online Introduction This is a listing of 224 sites that legally offer free audio books, either for online listening or for download. A comprehensive alphabetical listing of free books for reading or listening can be found on these pages: This listing does not include the free online courses, audio and video, that are now listed in the Free Courses Online (Audio & Video) page here at Gizmo's Freeware. Also, any of those course on the genre pages are not listed here. Also, the video listings under Free Cooking, Food & Wine Audiobooks and Free Health, Fitness & Medicine Audiobooks are not included here. The Old Time Radio shows listed in some of the genres are also not listed here and the Free Motion Comics Online are not listed here either. All of the listings here are, to the best of my knowledge, offering legal content. If you know of any other sites offering free and legal audio books, then please post them in the comments below. Alphabetical Listing AmblingBooks offers over 1500 free audio books.
7 Essential Books on Music, Emotion, and the Brain by Maria Popova What Freud has to do with auditory cheesecake, European opera and world peace. Last year, Horizon’s fascinating documentary on how music works was one of our most-liked pickings of 2010. But perhaps even more fascinating than the subject of how music works is the question of why it makes us feel the way it does. Today, we try to answer it with seven essential books that bridge music, emotion and cognition, peeling away at that tender intersection of where your brain ends and your soul begins. We love the work of neuroscientist and prolific author Oliver Sacks, whose latest book, The Mind’s Eye, was one of our favorite brain books last year. Why music makes us feel the way it does is on par with questions about the nature of divinity or the origin of love. Patel also offers this beautiful definition of what music is: Sound organized in time, intended for, or perceived as, aesthetic experience. Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr
8 Cute DIY Bookmark Ideas | Good Life Eats - StumbleUpon bookmarks | 26 comments I don’t really use real bookmarks. I’m not sure why. (For those curious, I finished A Million Suns a couple days later and really enjoyed it! I’ve been eye-ing lots of super cute DIY bookmarks for the last few months that I’ve seen pop up around the web. The problem is, often my bookmarks fall out and I lose my page. I’m definitely going to keep these in mind for future gift giving opportunities after I’ve made a couple for our use at home. 8 Cute DIY Bookmark Ideas Bow Tie Paper Clips Using Fabric Scraps from How About Orange. No-Slip Bookmark Tutorial from Mary Janes and Galoshes. Fabric Button Paper Clip Bookmarks from Quiverfull of Blessings. Remember when I mentioned all those cute ways to use or make fabric rosettes recently? Page Corner Monster Bookmark Template from I Could Make That. Ribbon Bookmark or Journal Wrap Tutorial from Craft Snob. Jumbo Clip and Ribbon Bookmark from Midnite Scrapper. Heart Shaped Corner Bookmarks from Craft and Creativity.
Why We Love: 5 Must-Read Books on the Psychology of Love It’s often said that every song, every poem, every novel, every painting ever created is in some way “about” love. What this really means is that love is a central theme, an underlying preoccupation, in humanity’s greatest works. But what exactly is love? How does its mechanism spur such poeticism, and how does it lodge itself in our minds, hearts and souls so completely, so stubbornly, as to permeate every aspect of the human imagination? No superlative is an exaggeration of Alain de Botton‘s humble brilliance spanning everything from philosophy to architecture. Every fall into love involves [to adapt Oscar Wilde] the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. You might recall biological anthropologist Helen Fisher‘s work from this fascinating discussion of how antidepressants impact the experience of romantic love. Sample her work with this fantastic TED talk on the brain in love: For many people, love is the most important thing in their lives. Is love really blind?
36 Writing Essays by Chuck Palahniuk 1: Establishing Your Authority Chuck teaches two principal methods for building a narrative voice your readers will believe in. Discover the Heart Method and the Head Method and how to employ each to greatest effect. 2: Developing a Theme At the core of Minimalism is focusing any piece of writing to support one or two major themes. 3: Using “On-The-Body” Physical Sensation Great writing must reach both the mind and the heart of your reader, but to effectively suspend reality in favor of the fictional world, you must communicate on a physical level, as well. 4: Submerging the “I” First-person narration, for all its immediacy and power, becomes a liability if your reader can't identify with your narrator. 5: Nuts and Bolts: Hiding a Gun Sometimes called "plants and payoffs" in the language of screenwriters, Hiding a Gun is an essential skill to the writer's arsenal that university writing courses almost never touch upon. 6: Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs 8: Nuts and Bolts: Using Choruses
Creative Cartography: 7 Must-Read Books about Maps by Maria Popova From tattoos to Thomas More’s Utopia, or what Moby Dick has to do with the nature of time. We’re obsessed with maps — a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for the world, arguably the earliest form of standardized information design, and a relentless source of visual creativity. Today, we turn to seven fantastic books that explore the art and science of cartography from seven fascinating angles. Map As Art, The: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography is the definitive overview of today’s bravest, boldest creative cartography, featuring 360 colorful creations by well-known artists and emerging visual experimenteurs alike, including Brain Pickings favorites Maira Kalman, Paula Scher and Olaful Eliasson. Insightful essays by Gayle Clemans complement the maps and overlay a richer sheath of insight onto the work and creative process of these cartographic artists. Matthew Cusick, 'Fiona’s Wave,' 2005 Qin Ga, 'Site 22: Mao Zedong Temple,' 2005 We reviewed it in full here.
DarkCopy - Simple, full screen text editing 7 Essential Books on Optimism by Maria Popova What the love of honey has to do with ancient wisdom, our capacity for hope, and the future of technology. Every once in a while, we all get burned out. Sometimes, charred. And while a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism may help us get by, it’s in those times that we need nothing more than to embrace life’s promise of positivity with open arms. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, one of our must-read children’s books with philosophy for grown-ups, is among the most poetic and hopeful reflections on human existence ever penned. Here is my secret. Published in 1943, translated into 180 languages since and adapted to just about every medium, Exupéry’s famous novella is one of the best-selling books of all time. As you read this book, you will see that there is an epidemic of depression among young adults and among children in the United States today. Reviewed in full, with more images, here. Full review here. 'Live Humbly' by Mikey Burton Craving more?
The New Motivational Poster: Illustrated Advice From Designers - Atlantic Mobile Unpacking the secrets of happiness and creativity, one poster at a time. What better way to kick off the new year than with words of wisdom from those who have threaded before us? That's precisely the premise of Advice to Sink in Slowly, a wonderful project enlisting design graduates in passing on advice and inspiration to first-year students through an ongoing series of posters—part Live Now, part Everything Is Going To Be OK, part Wisdom, part something completely refreshing, based on the idea that we all have subjective wisdom we wish we'd known earlier, but often don't get a chance to pass it on to those who can benefit from it in a way that makes them pay heed. "Advice is subjective. But, by passing on advice in a creative way, it is possible to create something that lasts, that people will want to live with and which can let the advice sink in slowly and help out later on." "to create ideas is a gift, but to choose wisely is a skill" by Ryan Morgan "Do what you love" by Andy J.
7 Must-Read Books on the Art & Science of Happiness by Maria Popova From Plato to Buddha, or what imperfection has to do with the neuroscience of the good life. If you, like me, are fascinated by the human quest to understand the underpinnings of happiness but break out in hives at the mere mention of self-help books, you’re in luck: I’ve sifted through my personal library, a decade’s worth of obsessive reading, to surface seven essential books on the art and science of happiness, rooted in solid science, contemporary philosophy and cross-disciplinary insight. The question of what makes us happy is likely as old as human cognition itself and has occupied the minds of philosophers, prophets and scientists for millennia. Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. Haidt takes this ambitious analysis of philosophical thought over the centuries and examines it through the prism of modern psychology research to extract a remarkably compelling blueprint for optimizing the human condition for happiness. Donating = Loving
Seven great writing quotes from seven great American writers Ernest Hemingway once said “All American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” As much as we love our Ernest, we beg to differ. It’s not just the amazing books Americans have written, which cause us to contradict Papa’s viewpoint. John Steinbeck Ernest Hemingway Elmore Leonard Toni Morrison Stephen King Henry Miller F. designed by the awesomely talented Chris Ritter (Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books by Maria Popova What the limits of the universe have to do with the history of jazz and the secret of happiness. Last week, I was reorganizing my library and realized that some of my favorite books are ones that introduced me to subjects I either admired but knew little about or was unaware of altogether. The kinds of reads that profoundly enrich one’s lens on the world. Long before there was The Visual Miscellaneum or Data Flow, there was Graphis diagrams: The graphic visualization of abstract data — a seminal vision for the convergence of aesthetics and information value, originally published in 1974, which codified the conventions of contemporary data visualization and information design. Images courtesy of insect54 The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society. Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending: