Elise Fissmer 6/19/22 Elise Fissmer 6/19/22

The Best Books About Business, Leadership, and Time Management

Leadership styles are varied. When I led a team, I always prioritized autonomy, since I personally don’t like being managed. I figured my best recourse was to ensure people were supported and had what they needed, had clear deliverables and expectations, and freedom to determine how and when they wanted to do their work. (Within some limits.) I primarily lead creatives, and you can’t turn on creativity like a spigot. I’ve had the privilege of knowing and working with Brené Brown, which makes Dare to Lead an easy favorite. I loved Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, and Sydney Finklestein’s Superbosses, in particular.

Please, as always, drop recommendations in the comments, I am always all ears for more books to read. The link below will take you to a shelf I curated on Bookshop with my picks—I earn an affiliate commission there, but it is ALWAYS MY PREFERENCE that you shop at and support your local bookseller, so no pressure to buy via Bookshop. This is the easiest way for me to organize and keep picks updated. Happy reading!

Elise Fissmer 6/19/22 Elise Fissmer 6/19/22

The Best Books About Creativity & Writing

Whether you’re trying to get your creativity flowing in general (The Artist’s Way), are contemplating writing a book (The Art of Memoir, Bird by Bird), or are contending with writer’s block and resistance (Do the Work), some antidotes await.

Elise Fissmer 6/18/22 Elise Fissmer 6/18/22

Some of My Favorite Memoirs

Hopefully there’s something for everyone in this mix—Mary Karr, Anne Lamott, Nora McInerny, Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay. Memoir is one of my favorite categories, so very excited to hear what you love.

Please, as always, drop recommendations in the comments, I am always all ears for recommendations. The link below will take you to a shelf I curated on Bookshop with my picks—I earn an affiliate commission there, but it is ALWAYS MY PREFERENCE that you shop at and support your local bookseller, so no pressure to buy via Bookshop. This is the easiest way for me to organize and keep picks updated. Happy reading!

Elise Fissmer 6/18/22 Elise Fissmer 6/18/22

The Best Books About Civics & Social Justice

This is a wide and complex issue, and I will frankly never be done reading into how civilizations evolve (and equity fails). I also have shelves devoted to feminism & patriarchy, as well as trauma.

Elise Fissmer 6/18/22 Elise Fissmer 6/18/22

The Best Books About Feminism & Patriarchy

These are vast topic spaces, with myriad voices—many voices that have been culturally oppressed for millennia (i.e. women). I’ve tried to reflect a good range, though am always trying to read as widely as possible as feminism, in particular, was co-opted by white women.

Elise Fissmer 6/14/22 Elise Fissmer 6/14/22

The Best Books About Physical Health & Diet

This is a wide topic—for issues like addiction, trauma, etc., which all effect the body, please see those devoted shelves. My hands-down favorite book ever about healing is Cured, by Jeffrey Rediger. A must read. I’ve curated a wider selection across specific diet plans, to books about our collective body dysmorphia, to books about back pain and the connection to the mind.

Elise Fissmer 6/14/22 Elise Fissmer 6/14/22

The Best Books About Mental and Emotional Health

This is obviously an incredibly wide and nebulous category (I also have shelves devoted to addiction, trauma, relationships, death and dying, spirituality, etc. and tried not to do too much duplication here). Which means this is a bit of a mish-mash. There’s Ellen Vora’s book, The Anatomy of Anxiety, Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon, and a few books about our favorite diagnosis to give each other: Narcissism. I love Craig Malkin’s take on it, and the idea of healthy narcissism (which is theoretically where we should all be on the spectrum). I also included a bunch of books about emotions: There’s Susan David’s Emotional Agility, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, and more. Tell me what I’m missing!

Elise Fissmer 6/10/22 Elise Fissmer 6/10/22

The Best Books About Environmental Health

We recognize we must do something about climate change and the warming planet, and yet it’s a paralyzing—far too big for any one of us, as much as corporations would shift responsibility onto our shoulders. (Recycle!) Ultimately, we must take collective action and find powerful technological solutions to sequester carbon and stop burning fossil fuels, all while recognizing that we will continue to experience a lot more climate disruption. On this shelf, you’ll find pessimistic takes (The Uninhabitable Earth) and optimistic turns (Saving Us), as well as stories from some of our most heroic scientists, like Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

Elise Fissmer 6/8/22 Elise Fissmer 6/8/22

The Best Books About Parenting

I tried to satisfy a lot of different instincts on this shelf as there is simply no single way to parent—and anyone who parents siblings knows, no two kids are alike and they all need radically different things. If there is one manual that I would prescribe to all parents it’s probably Gabor Maté and Gordon Neufeld’s Hold On To Your Kids—it’s about how in our age of disconnection, children become peer-attached rather than adult-attached (you can really only have one True North). It’s not that kids today are crueler, it’s simply that no child can function as a reliable True North for anyone else, much less another child.) There is a lot in here on attachment theory, childhood development, as well as more specialized focuses like diet.

Elise Fissmer 6/8/22 Elise Fissmer 6/8/22

The Best Books About Psychedelics & Consciousness

While Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind is arguably the most famous book about psychedelics in recent years, there are many others, including Acid Trip, which is a biography of one of my personal heroes, Rick Doblin. (Rick is the head of MAPS, responsible for the decades long push to legalize and reschedule many psychedelics for therapeutic purposes.) When it comes to consciousness, every time I try to scratch that itch, I’m reminded that I know…nothing. And that we collectively know very little. But it is still one of my favorite areas of study.

Elise Fissmer 5/19/22 Elise Fissmer 5/19/22

The Best Books About Religion

I almost didn’t make this shelf because it needs a lot of help—I’ve been digging into the history of Early Christianity for the sake of the book I’m writing, but have been negligent in other areas and feel quite ignorant! This shelf will grow, hopefully with input from you.

Elise Fissmer 5/19/22 Elise Fissmer 5/19/22

The Best Books About Early Christianity

I’m fascinated by this era of history, particularly the story and role of Mary Magdalene and her moral exclusion from Christianity. There are many incredible books about her Gnostic gospel, along with the quasi-memoir Mary Magdalene Revealed by Megan Watterson (a dear friend). Elaine Pagels offers an incredible overview in The Gnostic Gospels. Meanwhile, if you want insight into how the gospels spread—via scribes and translators—then I encourage you to read Bart Ehrman, as he provides some clues as to how the church adopted their anti-Semitic and misogynistic views.

Elise Fissmer 5/19/22 Elise Fissmer 5/19/22

The Best Books About Spirituality & Mysticism

This is probably my favorite category of book, and I’m inclined to read in every direction. If you’re a listener to my podcast, Pulling the Thread, you’ll recognize Carissa Schumacher’s book (with Yeshua), The Freedom Transmissions—you can listen to our first conversation here, and our second conversation here. I also love Gurdjieff and the wisdom traditions and have found Cynthia Bourgeault to be my favorite guide in that space. (I love Eye of the Heart in particular.) And then of course there are people like Thomas Merton, a complete delight.

Elise Fissmer 5/19/22 Elise Fissmer 5/19/22

The Best Books About Mythology & Archetypes

This is a catch-all category, but includes some of my favorite books about these over-arching stories and systems that try to unify the human experience. If you don’t know your Enneagram type, I highly recommend digging into that system (I like the RHETI test, it’s $12, and Riso and Hudson have written many of the primary textbooks about the Enneagram). And then of course there’s Joseph Campbell, and his highly readable overview of mythology (The Power of Myth is a great start, and I adored Goddesses). Maria Tatar is a formidable expert/professor in fairytales, and then there’s some primers in Carl Jung and his archetypes (though I’m always trying to learn more).

Elise Fissmer 5/18/22 Elise Fissmer 5/18/22

The Best Books About Intuition & Mediumship

When my brother-in-law died, I dove deeply into this world—while it didn’t allow me to obviate or even side-step my grief, I did find comfort in the pages of Laura Lynne Jackson’s The Light Between Us (and later, Signs)—and over the years, I’ve learned a lot from Laura Day, another incredible psychic/medium who is also very practical. She gave me the fantastic advice to put Peter to work on the other side, and to ask him for help in exactly the same areas and ways that I asked him when he was alive. It’s very much allowed me to keep my connection to Peter alive.