The Ultimate Book List 2023.
The books we re-read are few. And the books we gift are even fewer. Therefore, a list of gifted books is the purest signal of something remarkable.
So, with that said, we asked our community a simple question: ‘Which book have you given as a gift in 2023?’ This list was built from all of their replies.
We hope this proves useful.
WELL-BEING.
Pebbles of Perception
By Laurence Endersen
An exploration of life’s fundamental truths and the importance of long-term thinking, encouraging readers to cultivate wisdom through reflection and curiosity.
Being Mortal
By Atul Gawande
The modern experience of mortality — what it’s like to get old and die, how medicine has changed this and how it hasn’t, where our ideas about death have gone wrong.
The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
By Boyd Varty
Navigate life’s journey with the ancient wisdom of the African wilderness, emphasising awareness, intuition, and connection to the environment and oneself.
Solve for Happy
By Mo Gawdat
Using his engineering background, Gawdat argues that happiness results from understanding and addressing the discrepancies between our perceptions and reality.
Breath
By James Nestor
Drawing on thousands of years of wisdom and cutting-edge studies, Breath is full of revelations, flipping the perception about our most basic biological function on its head.
Why We Sleep
By Matthew Walker
Walker illuminates the role of sleep in human health and well-being, detailing its impact on memory, emotional regulation, lifespan, and disease prevention.
Full of Shit
By Ellen Rozman
Vauhini Vara’s lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel begins in India in the 1950s, following a young man born into a Dalit family of coconut farmers in a remote village in Andhra Pradesh.
Connect
By David Bradford
Learn how to foster deeper, more meaningful relationships in both personal and professional spheres through understanding, empathy, and effective communication.
I May Be Wrong
By Björn Natthiko Lindeblad
We think we can determine the path our life takes, but events rarely unfold the way we plan for or expect. A humbling journey towards navigating uncertainty.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
By Jon Kabat-Zinn
Kabat-Zinn shows how mindfulness meditation as a practice can bring peace and presence into everyday life, regardless of one’s surroundings or circumstances.
The Untethered Soul
By Michael Singer
How the development of consciousness can enable us all to dwell in the present moment and let go of painful thoughts that keep us from achieving happiness.
The Power of Now
By Eckhart Tolle
Find spiritual enlightenment and mental freedom by living fully in the present moment, transcending ego-driven thought patterns.
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
By Philippa Perry
Build stronger parent-child relationships through understanding, empathy, and effective communication.
My Voice Will Go with You
By Sidney Rosen
A collection of therapeutic narratives and anecdotes that illustrate the pioneering hypnotherapist’s techniques and their transformative power in therapy.
Animals of the Four Windows
By Eligio Stephen Gallegos
Delving into the diverse modes of human perception and cognition, offering insights into harmonising these aspects for enhanced personal understanding and growth.
Man’s Search for Meaning
By Viktor E Frankl
Frankl’s story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz. Today, this tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
The Four Agreements
By Don Miguel Ruiz Jr
How to create love and happiness, personal freedom and a fulfilling life by adhering to these transformative agreements with oneself.
brother. do. you. love. me.
By Manni Coe
A response to a desperate text from his brother Reuben, a man with Down’s syndrome and a gift for art and poetry, leading them on a transformative journey of healing and rediscovery.
Sad Book
By Michael Rosen
An exploration of grief, following the loss of his son, illustrated with evocative images that convey the depth of sorrow and human emotions.
The Parents Tao Te Ching
By William Martin
Martin adapts Taoist wisdom for modern parenting, promoting mindfulness and harmony in raising children.
Siddhartha
By Hermann Hesse
A chronicle of the spiritual journey of a man named Siddhartha as he searches for enlightenment in ancient India.
Isaac And The Egg
By Bobby Palmer
Heartbreaking and heart-stealing, this modern-day fable is a novel about sorrow, joy, friendship and love. As is the title, it all starts when Isaac meets the egg.
Blue Mind
By Wallace J Nichols
Nichols reveals the remarkable truth about the benefits of being in, on, under, or simply near water.
CREATIVITY.
A Technique for Producing Ideas
By James Young
A step-by-step technique for sparking breakthrough creativity in advertising — or any field. Generate exciting ideas on demand, at any time.
Big Magic
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic challenges us to embrace our curiosity, tackle what we most love and face down what we most fear.
Smoke Hole
By Martin Shaw
Smoke Hole is a passionate call to arms and an invitation to use stories to face the complexities of contemporary life.
Feck Perfuction
By James Victore
James will guide you through all the twists, trials, and triumphs of starting your creative career and give you a kick in the pants.
The Meaning in the Making
By Sean Tucker
Find your voice, discover your message, maintain inspiration, and stay mentally healthy and motivated creators as we strive to find “the meaning in the making.”
The Creative Act
By Rick Rubin
The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow.
The Book of DO
By Miranda West
Featuring wisdom and advice from leading experts on how to live a more creative and sustainable life, work smarter, or even change direction.
Alchemy
By Rory Sutherland
Discover the alchemy behind original thinking and why abandoning logic and casting aside rationality is the best way to solve any problem.
Letters to a Young Poet
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke explores the necessity of solitude, the relationships between creativity, nature and sexuality, and the importance of living a full life.
Steal like an artist
By Austin Kleon
This beautifully illustrated book teaches readers how to use their surroundings and their own creativity to discover their own artistic paths.
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse
By Charlie Mackesy
Enter the world of Charlie’s four unlikely friends, discover their story and their most important life lessons.
The Treehouse Book
By Peter and Judy Nelson
Master treehouse builders embark on a treehouse-discovery expedition across America, adding the investigation of backyard playhouses to their agenda.
ENVIRONMENT + SUSTAINABILITY.
The Lost Rainforests of Britain
By Guy Shrubsole
Guy Shrubsole travels through Britain to map these spectacular lost worlds for the first time.
The Man who planted trees
By Jean Giono
Year after year the narrator returns to see a miracle being created: a verdant, green landscape that is testament to one man’s creative instinct.
The Climate Book
By Greta Thunberg
Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster.
DO Earth
By Tamsin Omond
How to heal our relationships with nature, each other and ourselves; and feel inspired about what the next phase of human evolution might be.
Silent Spring
By Rachel Carson
Silent Spring alerted people to the environmental and human dangers of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water.
Braiding Sweetgrass
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.
Factfulness
By Hans Rosling
Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world, and make you realise things are better than you thought.
Ultra-Processed People
By Chris van Tulleken
This is a book about our rights. The right to know what we eat and what it does to our bodies and the right to good, affordable food.
To Dye For
By Alden Wicker
To Dye For uncovers the harmful environmental and health impacts of the fashion industry, advocating for more sustainable and less toxic production practices.
PRODUCTIVITY.
The Promises of Giants
By John Amaechi
The product of a lifetime spent observing effective leadership. This book is a challenge to anyone who aspires to make a difference in their environment.
The Tao of Leadership
By John Heider
An invaluable tool for anyone in a position of leadership. It provides the clearest advice on how to trust the process, pay attention, and inspire others.
Multipliers
By Liz Wiseman
Liz explores why some leaders drain capability and intelligence from their teams while others amplify it to produce better results.
The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
By Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, Kaley Klemp
This book contains a comprehensive road map to guide you to shift from fear-based to trust-based leadership.
Dare to Lead
By Brené Brown
Daring leadership in a culture that’s defined by scarcity, fear and uncertainty requires building courage skills, which are uniquely human.
Liminal Thinking
By Dave Gray
Liminal thinking is the art of creating change by understanding, shaping and reframing beliefs.
Say Yes
By Scott Erickson
Our darkest moments are sometimes doorways to a more joy-filled journey of recovering who we are, why we’re here, and why the future bursts with possibilities.
The Earned Life
By Marshall Goldsmith
Goldsmith reveals that the key to living the earned life requires connecting the habit of earning rewards to something greater than our personal successes.
Atomic Habits
By James Clear
A foray into the power of small, consistent behaviour changes to achieve remarkable results, highlighting the compound growth effect of habits over time.
The Serendipity Mindset
By Dr Christian Busch
Exploring the art of cultivating good luck in life and work. Serendipity can be nurtured by recognising and acting on unexpected opportunities.
Give and Take
By Adam Grant
Everybody knows that hard work, luck and talent each play a role in our working lives. There is another way to get to the top.
Decoding Greatness
By Ron Friedman
Friedman reveals how top performers achieve success by studying and reverse-engineering others’ work.
Be a Better Boss
By Henry Engelhardt
This book will help any manager in any organisation think creatively, make smarter decisions, and manage people better.
Who Moved My Cheese?
By Dr Spencer Johnson
Johnson uses the allegory of mice and cheese in a maze to highlight the importance of adaptability, proactivity, and a positive mindset.
Peaks and Valleys
By Spencer Johnson
A parable about navigating life’s ups and downs, stressing that both periods are essential for personal growth.
The Back of the Napkin
By Roam Dan
Any problem can be made clearer with a picture, and any picture can be made using the same simple set of tools and rules.
Find Your Own Path
By Fiona Buckland
You are not in the waiting room of life. You sense you have more potential but the way forward isn’t clear. This is a practical guide to fulfilling your potential.
The Big Leap
By Gay Hendricks PhD
A step-by-step program for identifying and breaking through our personal upper limits to achieve ultimate success.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
By Eric Jorgenson
Getting rich is not just about luck; happiness is not just a trait we are born with. These may seem out of reach, but being happy is a skill we can learn.
Start with Why
By Simon Sinek
Those who have had the greatest influence in the world all think, act and communicate in the same way.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
By Stephen Covey
Covey promotes principle-centred habits for personal and interpersonal effectiveness, proactivity, understanding, synergy, and self-renewal.
Clarity
By Jamie Smart
Renowned speaker, writer, and coach Jamie Smart delivers a practical roadmap to turning that infinitely long to-do list into manageable and focused tasks.
Time to Think
By Nancy Kline
Effective listening is recognised as the foundation for more productive meetings, solving business problems and building stronger relationships.
SPORT + ADVENTURE.
Around the World in 80 minutes
By Robert Kitson
Observant, amusing and thought-provoking, the journey takes in some of the game’s more prominent names, to reflect on rugby’s intangible shared joy.
Flares Up
By Niamh McAnally
Flares Up is a true story of adventure, tenacity and the capacity of the human spirit to triumph over adversity.
Independent People
By Halldor Laxness
This is a magnificent portrait of the eerie Icelandic landscape and one man’s dogged struggle for independence.
Blood Knots
By Luke Jennings
Blood Knots is about angling, about great fish caught and lost, but it is also about friendship, honour and coming of age.
In Waves
By AJ Dungo
In this graphic novel, surfer and illustrator AJ Dungo remembers his late partner and the shared love of surfing that endured throughout their difficult times.
BUSINESS.
MEDDICC
By Andy Whyte
A framework for complex sales, focusing on metrics, decision criteria, and understanding the buyer’s needs.
It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be
By Paul Arden
This uplifting little book provides a unique insight into the world of advertising and is a quirky compilation of quotes, facts, pictures, wit and wisdom.
DO Open
By David Hieatt
Build community. Build your brand. Build long-term growth. Discover why the humble newsletter is pure and utter gold.
Zero to One
By Blake Masters and Peter Thiel
Masters and Thiel advocate that true innovation comes from creating something entirely new, rather than iterating on existing products.
Company Of One
By Paul Jarvis
A refreshing approach to entrepreneurship centred on staying small and avoiding growth — maximising happiness, sustainability and profitability.
The Intelligent Investor
By Benjamin Graham
Promotes the virtues of value investing and the significance of understanding a company’s intrinsic value over market trends.
Mastering Uncertainty
By Matt Watkinson
The unforeseen always occurs. Mastering Uncertainty shows you how to prepare for it and succeed in our ever-changing world.
The Craft of Research
By Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, et al.
The Craft of Research has helped generations of researchers at every level learn how to conduct effective and meaningful research.
Economics.
Citizens
By Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad
Citizens opens up a new way of understanding ourselves and shows us what we must do to survive and thrive as individuals, organisations, and nations.
Worldly Philosophers
By Robert L Heilbroner
Heilbroner links the world’s greatest economic thinkers and explores the philosophies that motivate them.
Economical Writing
By Deirdre McCloskey
Economical Writing is itself economical: a collection of thirty-five pithy rules for making your writing clear, concise, and effective.
Critical Mass
By Philip Ball
This investigation into human nature ranges from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, across economics, sociology and psychology.
The Club on the Edge of Town
By Alan Lane
A deeply moving memoir of how a group of artists fed their local community during the Covid pandemic.
CHANGE-MAKERS.
Thirst
By Scott Harrison
Thirst is a riveting account of how to build a better charity, a better business, a better life — and a gritty tale that proves it’s never too late to make a change.
The KLF
By John Higgs
Wildly unauthorised and unlike any other music biography, THE KLF is a trawl through chaos on the trail of a beautiful, accidental mythology.
Untamed
By Glennon Doyle
Untamed explores the joy we discover when we stop striving to meet the expectations of the world and dare to listen to and trust the voice deep inside us.
Atlas Of The Heart
By Brené Brown
Brené lays out an actionable framework for meaningful connection and gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances.
A Confederacy Of Dunces
By John Kennedy Toole
A pithy, laugh-out-loud story following John Kennedy Toole’s larger-than-life Ignatius J. Reilly, floundering his way through 1960s New Orleans.
Doctor Zhivago
By Boris Pasternak
Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and love of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
By Adam Grant
Adam Grant delves into how unconventional thinkers challenge the status quo and champion new ideas to drive innovation and change in society.
Be More Pirate
By Sam Conniff Allende
Challenge the status quo, adopt the rebellious spirit of pirates, and rewrite the rules for greater innovation and societal impact.
You Made It!
Thank you for making it all the way to the bottom of the list. It is a behemoth with lots of gold. Our aim is to share insightful and inspiring books that will help you on your journey to get you from where you are to from here, to where you want to be.
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