20151209 - reading list

Your holiday reading list: 

58 books recommended by TED speakers

From tech to self-help via poetry, fiction and graphic novels, here are the books you need to read.

What’s the one book you’re always thrilled to discover that someone else has read? We posed that question to TED speakers — and, well, they geeked out, offering us a list of hidden gems that wouldn’t typically crop up on a holiday shopping list. Read on …

Literature

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
“This is a wonderfully written novel about empathy, nature, mortality, zen and quantum mechanics. A good reminder of how we are all connected and all trying to find our place ‘for the time being.’”
— Recommended by Benedetta Berti
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
“Asimov was a masterful fringe thinker, and this first book in the Foundation series shows just how attuned he was to possible and plausible future scenarios. Although it’s 50 years old, Foundation is especially provocative reading given our current state of world affairs — in order to save humankind and the vast knowledge we have accumulated, the main character gathers the smartest thinkers and forms a secret society. But that doesn’t go exactly as planned, either.”
— Recommended by Amy Webb
Fugitive Pieces: A Novel by Anne Michaels
“Anne Michaels’s poetic collage about love and loss and escaping the wounds of Europe to construct a fresh future in the New World remains one of the novels I’m always thrilled to recommend to friends — in part because I’m fairly sure they’re about to recommend it to me. It’s moving and beautiful and ageless, and nothing quite like it has ever been written.”
— Recommended by Pico Iyer
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
“This is cheating, because it’s a series of novels! Like so many great novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, very little actually happens, but the characters and their world are painted so well, and so truthfully, that every page becomes a thing of almost unbearable beauty.”
— Recommended by Simon Anholt
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
“This is one of those books where you feel like you have fallen deeply into someone else’s dream. It’s an epic World War II story, but it’s the tenderness on every page that is haunting.”
— Recommended by Rachel Botsman
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
“I read this when I was eight. And I’ve read it a few times since, and watched it onscreen too. Nothing dulls it or stops me loving small, plain Jane, a Yorkshire lass like me, who had more spirit and fire in her 150 years ago than I probably do today, with all my modern freedoms and privilege. I love the story because it is a tale of a woman becoming free, while still being a classic love story. I mean, there’s even a madwoman in the attic. But I love Jane because I love Charlotte too: a woman who triumphed in a deeply patriarchal world, getting published and getting famous, while living in a cold, glum vicarage on the edge of the moors. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is seen as a trickier, better book by many, because they are fooled by the romance of Jane Eyre. Look behind that, and you find a character as complex and wonderful as any Cathy or Heathcliff, in little, plain Jane, who would always ‘rather be happy than dignified.’”
— Recommended by Rose George


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 http://ideas.ted.com/your-holiday-reading-list-58-books-recommended-by-ted-speakers/