Awe

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder

Dacher Keltner · 2023

Keltner has spent decades studying awe in a laboratory, and this is the book where he lays out what he’s found: that awe is good for us in measurable ways, that it quiets the self-obsessed part of the mind, and that it’s far more available in ordinary life than we think. He calls the everyday sources the eight wonders of life, from music to moral beauty to the birth of a child. It’s warm, rigorous and quietly moving, and it will send you looking for wonder in places you’d stopped noticing it.

How to Change Your Mind

Michael Pollan · 2018

Pollan set out to write a level-headed account of the science of psychedelics and ended up writing one of the great modern books about awe itself: what it means to have the walls of the ordinary self dissolve, and to feel connected to something enormous. You don’t have to have any interest in the drugs to be gripped by it. It’s really about the mystical experience, why human beings keep seeking it, and what it might be for. Curious, careful and full of wonder.

Cosmos

Carl Sagan · 1980

Nobody has ever made the sheer scale of the universe feel as thrilling, or as humbling, as Sagan does here. He writes about the age of the stars and the strangeness of matter with the plain wonder of someone who never got over how astonishing it all is. Reading it is the fastest way I know to feel pleasantly small. If awe for you means the vastness of time and space and the miracle that we’re here to notice any of it, start with this.

The Sparrow

Mary Doria Russell · 1996

A crew, including a Jesuit priest, travels to make first contact with life on another world, and the novel becomes a profound meditation on awe and faith and what happens when wonder and catastrophe arrive together. It’s a first-contact story on the surface and a deep, unsettling book about God and meaning underneath. Few novels sit so honestly with the terror that lives right next to awe. Beautiful, and not easily forgotten.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell · 2004

Six stories nested inside each other across centuries, from the nineteenth-century Pacific to a far-future ruin, each echoing the others in ways you only feel as the whole thing clicks together. The awe here is at the scale of it, the sense of lives connected across enormous distances of time, small acts rippling forward in ways nobody could have seen. Ambitious and dazzling, and it leaves you with the strange, expansive feeling that everything is joined up.

The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern · 2011

A circus that appears without warning and is open only from dusk till dawn, full of tents that hold impossible things. Morgenstern is really writing about enchantment, the childlike wonder of a made thing so beautiful you can’t quite believe it exists. When you want awe of the simplest, most delighted kind, the kind that widens your eyes rather than humbles you, this is the one. Pure, immersive, gorgeously imagined escapism.