We are asked occasionally what we read. Here is an honest answer — twelve books that have been on our shelf, our bedside table, or our mind this season. Some are about making things. Some are about moving through the world. Some are about the quieter work of becoming who you are. All of them feel like they belong in the same company.
Non-Fiction — The World as It Actually Is
1. The Comfort of Things — Daniel Miller An anthropologist spends a year visiting thirty homes on a single street in London, asking what the objects people surround themselves with say about who they are. Not about materialism — about meaning. About why we keep what we keep and what it tells us about the lives we are building. For anyone who has ever wondered why a particular bag or a particular chair matters more than it should.
2. Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino Technically fiction, but reads as non-fiction philosophy. Marco Polo describes cities to Kublai Khan — each one an idea, a feeling, a way of being in a place rather than a description of one. Relevant to anyone who travels not to collect stamps but to understand something. Short chapters. Reads like poetry. Worth returning to every few years.
[Note: this one crosses the fiction line — see note at the end on why it earns its place here]
Personal Growth — The Work of Becoming
3. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne — Sarah Bakewell Montaigne invented the personal essay in sixteenth-century France and spent his life asking one question: how should a person live? Bakewell answers twenty versions of that question using Montaigne’s life and writing. Warm, funny, genuinely useful. For the woman who thinks carefully about how she moves through the world and likes company in that thinking.
4. The Artist’s Way — Julia Cameron A twelve-week programme for recovering creative confidence — originally written for artists but relevant to anyone who feels they have lost contact with the most alive version of themselves. The morning pages practice alone is worth the book. Not self-help in the generic sense — something more honest and more demanding than that. Read it slowly.
5. Lean In — Sheryl Sandberg A landmark bestseller combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research — Sandberg examines how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers and offers practical advice on negotiation, mentorship, and building a satisfying career. The book that started a global conversation about women and work that has not finished yet. Some of its arguments have been debated, refined, and challenged in the years since publication — which is itself a sign that it said something true enough to be worth arguing with. Read it not as a prescription but as a starting point for thinking about what you want and whether you are asking for it clearly enough. For the woman at the beginning of her career who has not yet learned that the people who get what they want are usually the ones who asked for it.
6. Designing Your Life — Bill Burnett and Dave Evans Two Stanford professors apply design thinking — the methodology used to build products and systems — to the problem of building a life and a career. The central idea is that a life is not discovered, it is designed: through prototyping, iteration, and honest assessment of what is actually working rather than what you imagined would work. Practical without being prescriptive. Particularly useful for the early twenties moment when the question is not how to advance in a career but which career to be in at all. The exercises in the book are genuinely useful rather than decorative — this is one of the rare self-help adjacent books where doing the work it asks of you produces a real result.
Lifestyle — Art, Travel, Making
7. A Pattern Language — Christopher Alexander A book about architecture and the design of spaces — but really about why some places feel right and others do not. Alexander identifies 253 patterns that make human environments feel alive, from the scale of cities down to the placement of a window seat. Extremely specific and somehow universal. For anyone who cares about why well-made objects and well-designed spaces matter.
8. A Year in Provence — Peter Mayle An English couple leave their life behind and move into a farmhouse in the Lubéron. What follows is a year of impossible weather, unhurried lunches, unreliable builders, and the gradual realisation that a life governed by seasons rather than schedules is the only one worth having. Warm, funny, and genuinely transporting — the book that made an entire generation want to move to southern France, and still earns that response thirty years later. For the woman who understands that how and where you live is as important as what you do.
9. Knitting in the Nordic Tradition — Vibeke Lind A richly illustrated guide to Scandinavian knitting featuring over 100 graphed patterns in the authentic Nordic tradition — sweaters, jackets, caps, mittens, stockings, and shawls. Simple in cut and striking in decoration, the patterns are based on practical and aesthetic values. This is knitting as it has always been done in the north — wool chosen carefully, patterns that have earned their place over generations, garments designed to last rather than to follow a season. For the woman who wants to spend the coming winter making something real with her hands. A good starting point and a lasting reference.
10. The Nordic Baking Book — Magnus Nilsson Not a cookbook you cook from every week — a book you read. Nilsson documents over 450 recipes from across the Nordic countries, each one placed in its cultural and seasonal context. The recipes are real and the writing around them is better. For the woman who understands that how we eat and what we make with our hands is part of how we live, not separate from it.
Fiction — Two
11. Normal People — Sally Rooney The story of Connell and Marianne — two young people in Ireland who meet in school and spend years circling each other, coming together and falling apart, never quite able to say what they mean to each other. Rooney brings psychological precision and spare, almost dialogue-only prose to a story about class, self-worth, and the way the people we love most are often the ones we communicate with least. The book that a generation read and felt that someone had finally described exactly what it was like to be young and not yet formed and already in love with someone who could not say it back. Winner of the Costa Book Award and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. For the woman in her twenties — or anyone who remembers what it felt like to be there.
12. Convenience Store Woman — Sayaka Murata A Japanese novel about a woman who has worked in the same convenience store for eighteen years and finds it the only place where she feels entirely herself. Funny, strange, and quietly devastating in what it says about the pressure to live a conventional life and the courage it takes to refuse. Short — reads in an afternoon. Stays for weeks.
