By the Percept Team | December 2022
Perceptors tend to devour books. And podcasts. Often, they seek out books that can teach them things – how to live, how to learn, how to understand the past, how to prepare for the future, how to be a good person… But they also read (and listen) for fun, for relaxation, for escapism, for the thrill of a beautiful narrative…
So we did a whip around the team: What can you recommend for the holiday time off, and what’s on your ‘to-read/listen’ list when you turn on your Out of Office message and switch off Slack notifications?
We suggest you pick one of them up, and let it lead you to another. And then when you come to a dead end, come back to the list.
SHIVANI RANCHOD’S PICKS
NON-FICTION
The Relatively Public Life of Jules Browde by Daniel Browde
This deeply personal biography of Dan Browde’s grandfather is a layered exploration of memory, perspective and family. It is also so evocative of place: Johannesburg is central to the book’s atmosphere. I loved this quote about heartfelt conversation: “The more he spoke, the closer his heart’s sound seemed to come to the gravelled surface of his voice.”
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
This perspective-shifting book is science writing of the most beautiful sort. It pulls together the emergent science of fungi, and at every turn is a reminder about how little we know about the world around us: “… it is tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers”. This book has influenced my thinking about organisational design, providing new language, new metaphors and new mental models for decentralised intelligence and decision-making, and for the building of partnerships. I was struck by the prevalence and power of collaboration: “The history of life turned out to be full of intimate collaborations.”
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
This book should come with a warning label for the ways in which it provokes change in your life. It is a profound critique of the deeply internalised notion that our worth as human beings is predicated on our productivity (thanks capitalism). Even when we rest and meditate, it is often in service of future productivity. Burkeman encourages a grappling with finitude: living with awareness of our mortality requires us to disabuse ourselves of the belief that we can do it all and instead to focus on the inevitable tough choices. The book is full of practical ways of shifting our relationship with time and work, and is an invitation to a more present, joyful and playful way of living.
POETRY
Earlier this year, I embarked on the Sealy Challenge, an invitation to read more poetry and to radically diversify the voices I’m exposed to. The experience of starting my day with reading poetry was luminous – it connected me to less linear ways of thinking and opened up my heart in unexpected ways. The five books of poetry that I loved the most are:
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo
Bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver
FICTION
Cloud Cuckoo Land
Fiction of the best sort, to be savoured at holiday pace. Characters who will remain with you, a shift in your sense of time (and hence what really matters), and a celebration of storytelling.
“If it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
A book that starts with the ending and yet still… Does the portrait reflect the truth of the subject? What makes us recognisable? Is the magic of a story lost if we know how it ends? A fable for every vivid woman who strains at the edges of what is allowable and acceptable.
Podcasts
On Being with Krista Tippett:
The recent Four Foundations episodes are bite-sized delicacies: thought-provoking and succinct.
Adrienne Maree Brown – “We are in a time of new suns”
“Everything is waiting for you” by David Whyte (him reading his poem)
The Ezra Klein Show
Ruth Ozeki’s enchanted relationship to minds and possessions
ANDREA HUGGETT
FICTION
Where the Crawdads Sing by Deli Owens
NON-FICTION
Permission to Feel by Prof Marc Brackett
PODCAST
The Happiness Lab – Prof Laurie Santos
POETRY
Consolations by David Whyte
SUHAVNA KHALAWAN
I have two books on my list right now: Wild by Jay Griffiths, and One: Simple One-Pan Wonders by Jamie Oliver (because holiday cooking has to be kept simple!).
DAVE STRUGNELL
These are my book recommendations:
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein
One of the most eye-opening accounts you can read of the sheer scale of the climate challenge we have to climb in the face of the bias towards climate destruction that we’ve woven into our socio-economic fabric in the last century, and particularly the last 30 years.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Thought-provoking speculative fictional account of the combination of personal, societal, political and technological will that we’ll need to bring to bear to have a liveable planet in fifty years’ time.
Heart, You Bully, You Punk by Leah Hager Cohen
Super-quirky navigation of the unruliness of the human heart through an unlikely trio of protagonists.
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
An exploration of grief and loss, and the challenges of adolescence, and the soul of books and other inanimate objects, and the fuzzy line between sanity and craziness, written with the deep insight, humour and appreciation of paradox of a life-loving Zen priest.
And this is my holiday reading list:
Bill Gates’ How to avoid a climate disaster
Mark Lynas’ Our final warning: six degrees of climate emergency
William MacAskill’s What we owe the future
Thomas Piketty’s A brief history of equality
… and the second half of David Whyte’s A heart aroused, as well as the last three-quarters of Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life
NICHOLAS SWARTS
NON-FICTION
The New Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan
Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson
FICTION
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles