Since childhood, fiction provided me a place to let my imagination soar and my moodiness root. Whether I was identifying with Colin’s hypochondria while reading The Secret Garden, worrying about the end of the world in The Neverending Story, or preparing myself for lifelong yearning as I read The Color Purple, I’ve always enjoyed a quiet nook with a book.

As an outlet for both my curiosity and my introversion, I’ve considered books my favorite form of wealth. Lately, my appreciation for biographies and other profiles of artists and entrepreneurs has begun to grow. Middle age will do that to you; makes you want to parse through reflections of the learned as validation that you’re doing life right. It can have the feel of scouring a roadmap: destination, wisdom.

This month has afforded me hours of extra reading time thanks to the longer days and boost in energy from the sun. I’m halfway through The Work of Art by Adam Moss. I love the way Adam gets artists to talk about their process and express the mental calibrations necessary to complete a great work of art, separate and apart from the inspiration that ignites the process.

The book both inspires and answers questions about how (and why) artists do what they do. Moss critiques the process–or rather, the artists’ interpretation of their process–but allows them to speak in their own words about their experience. In the final section of Moss’ book, Suzan-Lori Parks discusses not just her process but the forces that keep pushing her deeper into her creative waters by saying:

If the creative act builds a bit of wood in the ocean one can hold on to, then the inability to do that creative act just feels like drowning. I feel despair when I can’t see to bring it forth. I feel the constricting of the throat. It’s just the physical pain that I experiences when I have difficulty writing, like someone’s strangling me. I can’t breathe. I can’t speak. (p. 396-397)

Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying shifted a persistent melancholy that danced around me for the last few years as I grieved a deep loss. By detailing his near-death experience and his father’s history, he shines a light on a fair amount of loss and grieving of his own and, by doing so, bridges the gap between quantum physics (theoretical singularity) and rationalistic humanism:

When you drill down into it–which you must–we are really talking about an appreciation of death rather than life. Eventually you will be all alone with doctors shrugging because they’ve run out of things to do, and the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest: the successes and catastrophes and affairs and flashes of courage and the river of fear running beneath it all, and of course the vast stretches of wasted time that are part of even the most amazing life. (p. 128-129)

I could detail a number of other books that have touched me over the last year but, in the interest of brevity, here’s a list of some favorites:

In the Black. T. Dallas Smith

Walk Through Fire. Sheila Johnson

Fi. Alexandra Fuller

The Wim Hof Method. Wim Hof

Be Water, My Friend. Shannon Lee

Lost & Found. Kathryn Schulz

And for those who want to listen while commuting, check out David Senra’s Founders podcast.