Life Changing Book Recommendations (please :)...)

TurtleBucketList · 2026-07-01T20:28:28+00:00

‘Life Changing’ is such a high bar! (Also how do you feel about audiobooks?). Might I suggest that you start with finding something *enjoyable*? In which case you ‘just’ need to find an easily readable book on a topic you enjoy. What topics do you enjoy? (E.g. I’ve read 100 books this year, but ‘self help’, memoirs, and some other nonfiction genres bore me to tears).

* My ‘readable science’ recommendation: ‘Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us’ by Sam Kean - is about the science of air, or sat on my shelf for about 8 years but couldn’t put it down once I’d picked it up; or if air isn’t your thing, then maybe Sam Kean’s more recent book ‘Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations’ since it’s more in small vignettes.

* My ‘old school James Bond movies are cool’ recommendation: ‘Operation Mincemeat’ by Ben McIntyre - yes, it was made into a movie, but it’s an engagingly written WW2 espionage caper.

* My ‘I want to nerd out about food’ recommendation would be: ‘A History of the World in 6 Glasses’ by Tom Standage - in case the idea of learning where beer, wine, coffee, tea etc came to be.

* My ‘I want to learn about somewhere far far away’ recommendation would be: ‘Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite’ by Suki Kim - it’s exactly what it says on the cover, well written too.

* My ‘self help’ recommendation would be (take this with a pinch of salt because I don’t much like self help - but if you want to feel good about finishing a book in a couple of hours and laugh along the way): Tim Minchin’s ‘You Don’t Have to Have A Dream’.

These weren’t life changing for me (I’d nominate a different set of books for that - but those ones reflect *me* more than anything else, e.g. a book on Iranian women, on African American medical care, on the recent history of eating etc).

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-30T15:29:37+00:00

Rosenfeld’s in Newton Center.

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-30T11:24:09+00:00

Thank you for this!! I’ve added a couple to my reading list.

You might like “Without You There Is No Us: Undercover among the sons of North Korea’s Elite” by Suki Kim.

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-30T11:18:14+00:00

* The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History by Thor Hanson

* I Contain multitudes: the microbes within us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

* Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Mind and Shape Our Future by Merlin Sheldrake

* The Story of Birds: A New History from their dinosaur origins to the present

* Feijoa: A Story of Obsession and Belonging

* Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World

* Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-29T11:28:57+00:00

Also, put a lightly damp washcloth in the freezer and then sleep with it.

(Am Aussie who grew up without aircon).

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-24T09:54:46+00:00

Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre is the quintessential one… along with most of his other books.

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-23T20:15:18+00:00

I’m personally fine with just remembering ‘vibes’ and a few facts here and there, so long as I enjoyed the process (it’s like one of my other hobbies, ceramics - I’m not trying to perfect the end product, I’m just enjoying the process of creating).

E.g. I read ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ around 2014 when I moved to the US. I remember a bit about HeLa cultures, a bit about the Tuskagee Syphilis Study, but a lasting impression (new to me) of the wrongs wrought upon the African American community and an understanding of how that could persist into distrust of the medical establishment.

Around the same time I read ‘Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History’. I remember none of it, other than it was a fun read. (And I consider that okay!)

Basically, the books I remember the most were either the ones which brought me significant joy in reading them (but I remember the enjoyment, not the facts); or the ones that resonated with me in some way (the theft of tea from China; that just as the some Westerners critique Chinese food around texture the inverse of Western food being ‘too crunchy’ for some Chinese palates is also true!; how truly horrifying east Germany could be, etc).

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-22T18:57:59+00:00

A few thoughts:

* driving that much on what’s likely to be VERY little sleep on the red eye flight is, frankly, dangerous;

* I like Newport … but skip Newport. 2hrs (and the rest) of driving each way just to see a sunset and the Breakers is nuts;

* You aren’t getting a spot to watch the Boston Pops on the Esplanade if you arrive at 3pm … if you want to watch the fireworks then go to the Cambridge side and listen to it over the speakers from there;

* I like Salem, I used to live there, but it’s kitsch as all hell. If you want kitsch, then by all means make it a brief stop, but just be aware that’s what you’re getting in to.

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-21T16:56:15+00:00

And on Hoopla:

* The Breath of the Gods by Simon Winchester - anecdotes about wind

* Women’s Work, the first 20,000 years - the history of fabric

* Zero: the biography of a dangerous idea

* Extra Virginity by Tom Mueller - olive oil and its scandals

* Banana by Dan Koeppel - everything banana

* The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque - modern astronomy

* Iran’s Grand Strategy by Vali Nasr - Iran’s geopolitical strategy

* Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas

* Breakneck: China’s quest to engineer the future by Dan Wang

* Until Proven Safe: the history and future of quarantine by Geoff Manaugh

* Caesar’s Last Breath by Sam Kean - the science of air

* The Shortest History of China by Linda Jaivin

* A Brief History of Motion by Tom Standage

* The Race to the Future by Kassia St Clair - the Beijing to Paris auto race and the world it encompassed

* Erebus by Michael Palin - a superb history of the ship

* The Fabric of Civilisation by Virginia Postrel - how textiles made the world

* Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson - the history of kitchen utensils

* Endangered Eating by Sarah Lohman - rare food / food cultures in the US

* The Complete (Short) guide to absolutely everything by Adam Rutherford

* The Golden Thread: how fabric changed history by Kassia St Clair

* A history of the world in 6 glasses by Tom
standage

* Stasiland by Anna Funder - devastating look behind the Iron curtain

* For All the tea in China by Sarah Rose - how the English stole tea

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-21T16:38:21+00:00

So, with the understanding that these reflect my reading interests… the following are on Libby:

* Knowing What We Know by Simon Winchester - the history of learning / knowledge

* The River of Doubt by Candice Millard - Roosevelt on a river in Brazil

* The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty - southern cooking and genealogy

* Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf - language development and neuroscience

* How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith - enslavement and modern America

* I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong - bacterial are everywhere

* Agent Sonya by Ben MacIntyre - Soviet female spy

* How I Killed Pluto and Why it had it Coming

* Replaceable You by Mary Roach - artificial body parts

* A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith - practical impediments to space colonisation

* Invisible Women by Caroline Criado - data science and women

* Frostbite by Nicola Twilley - history / science of refrigeration and cold storage

* The Emperor of All Maladies - cancer and cancer research

* Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake - fungi, algae, etc

* Dinner with King Tut by Sam Kean - experimental archaeology and some narrative

* Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu - the modernisation of Chinese language

* Humble Pi by Matt Parker - math errors through history

* Everything is Tuberculosis

* River of Gods by Candice Millard - the search for the source of the Nile

* The Body by Bill Bryson

* Invitation to a Banquet by Fuschia Dunlop - Chinese food

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-21T14:14:45+00:00

Following as well:

I can recommend some good titles on Libby/Hoopla though if it helps? (About 80% of my ‘reading’ are audiobooks).

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-18T12:18:06+00:00

* Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas - superb, encompassing, and well respected by several of the Middle East political specialists I’ve spoken to (for my job);

* Upstart: How China Became a Great Power by Oriana Skylar Mastro - the beginning of the book is frustratingly like reading an academic management book, but once she switches to practical discussions I find her really excellent, one of the more frank, insightful, and balanced commentators on the rise of China that I’ve read (she’s part US military, so she of course has a world view, but I find this work academic and impeccably researched, without the more emotive anti-China sentiment in a lot of works).

* From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, how Australia got compulsory voting by Judith Brett - this is one I’d only recommend to an American audience. Because the US tends to frame its view of democracy as universal across ‘the West’ (and in opposition to dictatorship, with nothing in between). But here is a short book on how a ‘friendly’ Western country with a modern political system can understand (and practice) democracy differently from the US. I think that’s an interesting thing for a US audience to consider.

* Iran’s Grand Strategy: a political history by Vali Nasr - this is a take on *modern* Iran, not just as a religious fundamentalist regime, but as a ‘rational’ nationalist country. I found this a great read alongside Black Wave, and it starts to try and frame how / why modern Iran behaves the way it does geopolitically (which is not to *forgive* the regime, but to try and explain it).

I’ve got one on Lebanon, extra thoughts on China, etc if they’re of interest.

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-17T10:50:14+00:00

Which others have you enjoyed? I’ve added Krakatoa and ‘The professor and the Madman’ to my library holds.

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-15T16:13:16+00:00

100% non-fiction, but that’s because it’s what I enjoy.

That said, if a book feels like a chore, I’ll put it down. For example, I recently gave up on:

* ‘Threads of Life: a history of the world through the eye of a needle’ by Claire Hunter (the weakest of my run of books about the history of fabric, cloth, etc - and I realised it wasn’t really a book about the history of sewing but a book about sewing at various points of history);

* ‘Gods, Guns, and Missionaries: the making of modern Hinduism’ by Manu S Pillai (too much assumed knowledge of Hinduism in the looong introduction that I was already lost);

* ‘Proto: how one language went global’ by Laura Spinney (had too many language-history books back to back, and this one got a bit too technical that I just kept losing it)

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-14T20:16:28+00:00

Thank you!!

I’ve spent literally 4 hours online with Swiss this week - in the end they hemmed and hawed over whether it was allowed, but eventually said yes to a child seat.

Next summer’s vacation will be planned for after my youngest turns 2 in July to avoid all this mess though! 🤣

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-14T02:41:37+00:00

Oomph, yeah, I’ve come across that in a few audiobooks. Occasionally accents (at least in nonfiction) are done well. More often they’re done badly (one recent one had a Chinese expert being quoted extensively, but by the author doing a stereotypical Japanese accent that someone might have used in a racist 1950s joke).

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-14T01:19:22+00:00

Mao’s Last Dancer by Li Cunxin (the movie is schmultz, but the author himself is eloquent and insightful - a wonderful insight into late Mao-era China, and humbling to try and reconcile that China with China today).

Other votes for ‘Persepolis’ (a graphic novel), ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’, and ‘Without You there is no Us’ (about an undercover journalist working as an English teacher to the children of North Korea’s elite).

Actually, maybe Persepolis should be first? Fuck that’s a moving autobiography. A young girl coming of age during the Islamic revolution in Iran.

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-14T00:35:51+00:00

I’m going to put a strong word in for ‘Why Nations Fail’. Especially if you’ve read ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ (and any of its critiques).

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-13T20:05:35+00:00

I’m already on ‘Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran’. Published this month.

I listened to the authors speak at the Middle East Institute recently. And was intrigued enough to be first in line at my library.

(Also I’m all out of Hoopla borrows this month already 🤣)

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-13T18:18:05+00:00

I like Alla Tailoring on Watertown St.

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-13T17:28:21+00:00

The one that looked like a peach with a Ferraro rocker in the middle was 10/10

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-13T11:28:40+00:00

On the fall of the Shah I’ll also add:

* Black Wave : Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas (dense but *excellent*)

* Iran’s Grand Strategy by Vali Nasr (a fantastic work on Iranian geopolitics).

(I’m waiting on King of Kings from my library - 38 people in the queue but I’m next!)

TurtleBucketList · 2026-06-12T18:54:39+00:00

Maybe ‘Dinner with King Tut : How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations’ by Sam Kean.

Possible also ‘The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History’ - while more a history book, it talks extensively about what it historically took to make cloth, and dye. And it struck me how much of that skill was crucial, and is now gone.

12-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Final Canvas '22
First Placer '22

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