the shelf · 68 books
every book i recommend, sorted by what’s wrong
Most reading lists are sorted by subject, which is useless, because nobody wakes up wanting a book about attachment theory. They wake up unable to stop checking whether one specific person has posted.
So this is sorted by the thing that sent you looking. Find the sentence that describes your week and start there. Everything on this page is a book I have actually read and would hand to a person in front of me, and under each one is the reason it’s here rather than a blurb.
these are amazon affiliate links, so if you buy through one i earn a small commission and it costs you nothing extra. as an amazon associate i earn from qualifying purchases. nobody paid to be on this page and nobody can.
if you can’t stop thinking about someone
the obsession shelf. these are for the feeling that has taken over more of your head than you agreed to.
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Love and Limerence
Dorothy Tennov
the 1979 book that named the thing. intrusive thinking, the need for them to reciprocate, the fear of rejection, and a burn that runs eighteen months to three years. if you read one book off this page, read this one.
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Attached
Amir Levine & Rachel Heller
why anxious attachment is limerence-prone. the obsessive machinery was already running before you met them, it just found a target.
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How to Break Your Addiction to a Person
Howard Halpern
a whole book on attachment hunger. needing a person like a fix, and how intensity gets mistaken for depth.
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On Love
Stendhal
where crystallisation comes from. a novelist mapped projection in love in 1822, two centuries before the researchers got to it, and nobody has described it better since.
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Women Who Love Too Much
Robin Norwood
dated in places and still the most direct book about mistaking the work of loving someone difficult for love itself.
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Getting Past Your Breakup
Susan J. Elliott
the practical case for no contact, from someone who ran breakup support groups for years. useful in the week where nothing else is.
if you’re trying to tell love from something else
comfort, habit, relief, need. the books that hand you a way to tell them apart.
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The Art of Loving
Erich Fromm
love as something you do, not something that happens to you. his phrase is standing in love, not falling for. written in 1956 and it still ends the argument.
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Hold Me Tight
Sue Johnson
adult love as an attachment bond, a safe haven and a base you leave from. the science of why calm is the signal and not the absence of one.
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The Course of Love
Alain de Botton
a novel about what happens after the crystals fall off. loving the ordinary disappointing actual person instead of the one your head built.
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Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay
Mira Kirshenbaum
thirty six diagnostic questions for the stay-or-go fork. it is a whole book about telling inertia from love, which is the question i get asked most.
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Mating in Captivity
Esther Perel
the collision in asking one person to be both your safe home and the source of your desire. those two demands do not want the same conditions.
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The Relationship Cure
John M. Gottman
where the bids for connection come from, and the 86% vs 33% finding. the whole book is an argument that love is built out of moments too small to notice.
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The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
John M. Gottman
the one built on watching thousands of couples in a room rather than asking them how it is going. the friendship underneath is the part that predicts whether it lasts.
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Mindset
Carol S. Dweck
fixed vs growth, written about ability. read it thinking about love instead and the soulmate belief stops looking romantic and starts looking like a fixed mindset.
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Symposium
Plato
the dinner party where the soulmate myth was born, as a joke, told by the comedian at the table. worth reading to see how little of it plato actually endorsed.
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The All-or-Nothing Marriage
Eli Finkel
the case that we set the bar at one person being everything, and what it costs. either meet it or lower it on purpose, but stop doing it by accident.
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Coercive Control
Evan Stark
the book that argued domestic abuse is neither primarily domestic nor necessarily violent, and that what is being taken is your liberty rather than your safety. it is academic and it is heavy going, and it changed the law in several countries.
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Why Does He Do That?
Lundy Bancroft
fifteen years of running groups for abusive men, written up for the people they were abusive to. the one that explains that the charm at the start and the coldness later are not two phases, they are one strategy.
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The Gift of Fear
Gavin de Becker
on charm as something a person does to you rather than something they are, and on the read your body files before you can explain it. the chapter on unsolicited help is worth the whole book.
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The Verbally Abusive Relationship
Patricia Evans
the one that names the thing that leaves no mark and no evidence, which is most of why it goes on so long.
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Psychopath Free
Jackson MacKenzie
written for the person afterwards, working out what happened. the idealise, devalue, discard shape, described plainly.
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The State of Affairs
Esther Perel
infidelity taken seriously as a thing that happens in good relationships too, rather than as proof somebody is a monster.
if you’re working out whether you’re asexual
the four i give people who message me at 2am asking whether there is a word for it. there is.
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Ace
Angela Chen
what the ace spectrum shows everyone about desire, not just ace people. the clearest writing anywhere on compulsory sexuality. the vantage point most of my videos are written from.
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The Invisible Orientation
Julie Sondra Decker
the introduction. the whole spectrum of words in one place, demisexual and gray-a included, written for someone who has just found the term.
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Come as You Are
Emily Nagoski
the 300 page version of responsive versus spontaneous desire. it is how you tell "my desire needs a running start" apart from "my attraction needs a whole relationship first".
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Loveless
Alice Oseman
a novel from inside the spectrum, about a girl finding out she is asexual and aromantic and that a friendship can be the great love of her life. the one i wish i had at nineteen.
if you’re lonely, or the friendships aren’t enough
on loneliness as a signal rather than a verdict, and on building a life around friendship.
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Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
John Cacioppo & William Patrick
loneliness is an alarm, the social version of hunger. it is asking for connection in general, not for one specific person. reading this is what stopped me misfiling it as love.
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Together
Vivek H. Murthy
the former surgeon general on loneliness as a health problem and connection as the treatment. connection broadly, which is exactly what the alarm was asking for.
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Platonic
Marisa G. Franco
how adults actually make friends, from attachment research. the part about initiative being the whole game is the part that changed what i do.
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Big Friendship
Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
two friends going to therapy together, which nobody does, and writing down what it took to keep the friendship. proof that a friendship can be worked on like a marriage.
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The Other Significant Others
Rhaina Cohen
people who built their whole lives around a friendship instead of a marriage. the closest thing there is to a book length case for the queerplatonic life.
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Families We Choose
Kath Weston
the 1991 anthropology of chosen family. real kinship built from the people you pick instead of the ones you were assigned.
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Bowling Alone
Robert D. Putnam
the book on what happened to the places people used to see each other in. your loneliness has a structural half, and this is it.
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The Loneliness Cure
Kory Floyd
the researcher on affection deprivation. skin hunger, and how to actually meet the need for touch that adulthood starves without telling you.
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Touch
Tiffany Field
the whole science of touch from the person who built the field. skin is the first sense to develop and the last one anyone takes seriously.
if you want to know why you like who you like
attraction, beauty, choice, and the culture doing more of the deciding than you think.
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Survival of the Prettiest
Nancy Etcoff
what beauty is, why brains react to it in milliseconds, and why that reaction is not the same thing as wanting someone. by one of the authors of the 2001 faces study.
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The Evolution of Desire
David M. Buss
the trade book behind the 37 cultures study. the full evolutionary case for why a good mind ranks so high in what humans say they want.
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The Paradox of Choice
Barry Schwartz
why more options produce more regret, and the difference between maximisers and the people who just pick someone and stay happy.
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Modern Romance
Aziz Ansari & Eric Klinenberg
a sociologist and a comedian on how endless options rebuilt dating, and what it costs. funnier than the research it is carrying.
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How to Not Die Alone
Logan Ury
behavioural science pointed at dating. the three dating tendencies framework is the most useful thing in it, and it is in the first fifty pages.
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Singled Out
Bella DePaulo
the research case that single people are as happy and as connected as married ones. staying single is an answer, not a waiting room.
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Minimizing Marriage
Elizabeth Brake
where amatonormativity was coined in 2012. the assumption that everyone should want one central exclusive romantic relationship, named and taken apart. it is academic philosophy, so it reads like it.
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Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Katherine Angel
short, and the best argument anywhere that consent is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. she goes after the demand that you know your own desire in advance and can state it on request.
if the feeling is bigger than the situation
where a feeling comes from, why your body gets a vote, and why other people’s moods land on you.
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
the peak-end rule lives in here. how you remember an evening is the best bit and the last bit, which means the ending is worth planning.
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How Emotions Are Made
Lisa Feldman Barrett
a feeling is constructed, not detected, and your body is half the raw material. this is where the body budget idea lives.
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Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
Lisa Feldman Barrett
shorter and cleaner than the big one. the body budgeting lesson is the best explanation of "sad for no reason" i have found anywhere.
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The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk
how the body stores what the mind will not show you. the research grounded neighbour to Pete Walker.
a heads up trauma, abuse
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Silencing the Self: Women and Depression
Dana Crowley Jack
the 1991 book behind the self-silencing research: putting your own needs last to keep a relationship calm, and agreeing outwardly while disagreeing inwardly. thirty years of measurement sit on top of it.
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Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving
Pete Walker
the emotional flashback. dropping into an old feeling with no image attached to explain it. a therapist’s framework rather than a lab finding, and it is about real early wounds, so hold it for the feelings that are too big for the moment.
a heads up childhood abuse and neglect
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Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
Robert Sapolsky
the backbone on stress physiology, including why the body crashes after the threat is over rather than during it.
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The Managed Heart
Arlie Hochschild
where emotional labour and surface acting come from. performing a feeling you do not have is the thing that drains you, not the feeling.
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Quiet
Susan Cain
introversion and overstimulation, without reducing either to "you hate people". good on why the drain after a party is real.
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Unmasking Autism
Devon Price
the fullest treatment of masking and what it costs, by a social psychologist. useful even if you are not autistic, and a lot of people find out here that they are.
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The Highly Sensitive Person
Elaine Aron
the trade book on a sensitive nervous system, for anyone who recognised themselves as the sponge in the room.
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Emotional Contagion
Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo & Richard Rapson
the full book behind the idea, and still the deepest source on how a feeling moves from one person to another without either of them noticing.
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The Myth of Mirror Neurons
Gregory Hickok
the sceptic. mirror neurons are real in monkeys, but the popular empathy-neurons story is oversold. read it so you do not overclaim, including at me.
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Chatter
Ethan Kross
the practical science of labelling and distancing. the tools for stepping back from a feeling before it takes the whole day.
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Daring Greatly
Brené Brown
the popular case for vulnerability as the thing courage is made of rather than the thing that gets you hurt. qualitative research, not experiments, and worth reading as such.
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How to Know a Person
David Brooks
the skill of making another person feel seen, treated as a skill that can be learned rather than a personality you either have or do not.
if you just want a love story
the novels. love written without sex doing the work, which is the only way i can read it.
i wrote about these seven at length, with the research behind each pick, on the reading list.
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Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
the love story where they barely touch, and it is the most charged thing i have read. two people who cannot stand to be near each other and cannot leave.
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
a love the author refuses to label for four hundred pages, on purpose. the whole book is an argument that the label was never the point.
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Words in Deep Blue
Cath Crowley
letters left inside secondhand library books. love as something written down and waited on rather than said.
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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid
seven marriages and one real love, and the book knows exactly which is which the whole time. performative love against the actual thing.
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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
V.E. Schwab
three hundred years of nobody being able to remember her. it is the best book about being unknown i have read, and being known is the whole thing i talk about.
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A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
love as staying, for decades, without being owed it. the friendship in this book is the largest love story i know.
a heads up self harm, child abuse, suicide. this one is genuinely heavy, please check before you start it.
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The Duke and I
Julia Quinn
bridgerton book one. the fake courtship that stops being fake, which is the trope done at its most competent.
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The Viscount Who Loved Me
Julia Quinn
bridgerton book two, and the better one. he is engaged to her sister for most of it.
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The Deal
Elle Kennedy
off-campus book one. the hockey romance where the friendship is genuinely built before anything else is.
