Trevor Owens

It was a pretty good reading year for me. I met the target of 50 books that I set for my Goodreads reading challenge. As part of gearing up for this new year, I went back and pulled the five books that I am sure I’m going to keep thinking about. In no particular order, below are my top five reads of 2023.

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life – by Dacher Keltner.

Keltner provides a powerful tour of contemporary social psychological research on the importance and need for us all to experience awe and wonder. The book does a great job of laying out how valuable awe experiences are and the ways that the natural world and cultural institutions enable awe.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut.

Labatut’s work of historical fiction explores a number of issues around the philosophical implications of break throughs in physics and mathematics in the early 20th century.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being – by Rick Rubin.

Rick Rubin set out to write a book about his approach to producing creative works, but ended up offering a broader meditation on how to live and interact with the world. Many of his ideas/practices for producing works of art map over into useful ways into any number of other kinds of work.

Vera Rubin: A Life – By Jacqueline Mitton & Simon Mitton

Jacqueline Mitton & Simon Mitton provide a great tour of Vera Rubin’s life and work. Following along in Rubin’s life and career is fascinating and inspirational, both as another way to get a perspective on life and science in the 20th century, and as a powerful exploration of how our understanding of the universe outside our galaxy changed in that period.

Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, by Valerie Trouet

Trouet presents this engaging tour of both how dendrochronology (the science of dating trees by their rings) works, and it’s history. Both of which turn out to be fascinating. It has a bit of a travelogue and memoir aspect to it, too, as she takes you along on research trips to visit trees around the world.