Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
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Real-Life Reads: Books on Mental Wellness, Creativity & Meaningful Living
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items A curated list of life-changing books on self-discovery, creativity, emotional wellness, and personal growth—designed to help you reset and reconnect.
These pages feel like a backstage pass to life's hardest encore. They take you through Greta Morgan’s journey—from singing with Vampire Weekend to losing her voice after COVID, and then finding it again in a totally unexpected way. Poetic, real, and ...
The Lost Voice: A Memoir
Fame, family drama, mental health swings, and new motherhood—all packed into one chaotic, art-punk year. Follow Kristin Hersh as she tours with her band, navigates a bipolar diagnosis, and writes songs she couldn’t outrun. Raw, funny, and deeply huma...
Rat Girl: A Memoir
Born into privilege and creative chaos in a West Village brownstone—rock-star dad, fashion-designer mom, houseguests like Courtney Love—Lola Kirke weaves wild, hilarious stories of identity, family dysfunction, and longing for normalcy. Think acting ...
Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1)
These are essays that use goofball adventures—taxidermied raccoons, zombie drills, koala hugs—to fight back against depression. It’s hilarious, chaotic, and utterly real. Jenny Lawson openly unpacks her anxiety and mental health while refusing to let...
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
These feel like wandering dream‑diaries instead of a memoir—a year of grief, politics, coffee, motel signs, and late-night hitchhikes. Patti Smith drifts through 2016 with her camera and her curiosity, visiting dying friends, arguing with a talking m...
Year of the Monkey
This is grief lived from the inside out—from diagnosis to the long, raw aftermath of losing her mother. Meghan O’Rourke writes about sorrow with vivid honesty, anger, confusion, and fierce love. Lynn anchors of memory, reading old letters, diving int...
The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
A brilliant neurosurgeon’s career—and entire life—is cut short by terminal lung cancer. But instead of a medical manual, this becomes a lyrical reflection on mortality, purpose, and legacy. Paul writes from both sides of the scalpel—doctor and patien...
When Breath Becomes Air
These are gentle jolts back into presence. Rob Walker serves 131 bite-size, playful prompts to rediscover the world you’re walking through—counting trash cans, framing the view like a child, hunting for hidden signs. It’s light, surprising, and a lit...
The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday
Showing up starts at home—with yourself—before you can really show up for others. Rachel breaks it into two parts: how to build self-care routines that stick, and how to navigate adult friendships with honesty, boundaries, and real emotional presence...
The Art of Showing Up: How to Be There for Yourself and Your People
These pages show how making or experiencing art isn’t just fun—it actually rewires your brain, calms stress, and sparks creativity. With stories from people using painting, dancing, writing, museum visits, and even architecture as medicine, this book...
Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
These are quiet, handwritten letters with doodles, for the burned-out, anxious, and endlessly over-productive. Jonny Sun documents small moments—scrambling eggs so hard they become emotional, propagating houseplants, overthinking “rest,” missing home...
Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations
This isn’t a self-help book—it’s a steady anchor in the wild territory of uncertainty. Bowler offers clear-eyed commentary on hustle culture, perfectionism, and the pressure to fix everything, all while living with stage IV cancer. It’s wry, honest, ...
No Cure for Being Human: (And Other Truths I Need to Hear)
More than a memoir, this is a love letter to friendship as adult work and deep reward. Sow and Friedman share the raw, hilarious truths beneath their decade-long bond—spa trips that failed, fight avoidance that fractured, and the therapy that helped ...
Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close
These pages feel like permission to pause in the middle of chaos. Katherine May embraces what she calls a “wintering”—a fallow period of retreat built not out of burnout, but intention. Inspired by hibernating dormice, Baltic winters, C.S. Lewis, and...
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
These pages make the case for stillness as resistance. Instead of endless scrolling, Jenny Odell invites you to notice—birds outside your window, the sway of a branch, street signs peeling in the sun—and reclaim your attention from screens and algori...
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Feeling overwhelmed? These printable activities are like a gentle nudge from a friend—meaningful prompts to help you pause, feel seen, and reset from within.
Resilience Activities: Meaningful Resilience
The Running Dream introduces us to Jessica Carlisle, a high school track star whose life literally comes off the rails when a tragic accident results in the loss of her leg. Running wasn't just her passion—it was how she defined herself. Suddenly eve...
The Running Dream