New Beginnings

Beginners

Tom Vanderbilt · 2021

Vanderbilt spent a year learning things as an adult beginner — surfing, chess, singing, drawing — and wrote a book about what beginning actually feels like when you are no longer young, and what it teaches you. For anyone whose new beginning requires learning something unfamiliar, Vanderbilt’s account of the discomfort and joy of genuine beginner’s mind is both funny and fortifying.

The Artist’s Way

Julia Cameron · 1992

Cameron’s twelve-week course in creative recovery is one of the most reliable maps available for beginning again after a long period of not-beginning — whether the creative block is literal or metaphorical. Her morning pages practice and artist’s dates have helped millions of people restart what had gone quiet, and the book remains as useful now as when it was first published.

Big Magic

Elizabeth Gilbert · 2015

Gilbert’s book on creative living treats the fear that accompanies any new beginning as an expected travelling companion rather than a stop sign, something to be invited along for the ride rather than waited out. It is an unusually permission-giving book for anyone hesitating at the start of something.

The Power of Habit

Charles Duhigg · 2012

Duhigg breaks down exactly how habits form and, more usefully, how they can be deliberately rebuilt, which makes this a practical companion for anyone trying to make a new beginning actually stick rather than fizzle out by February. It treats willpower as far less important than most self-help books suggest.

Evvie Drake Starts Over

Linda Holmes · 2019

Recently widowed and quietly relieved about it in a way she can’t admit to anyone, Evvie starts over in the unglamorous, halting way most people actually do — one small decision at a time, with no dramatic music swelling underneath. It is warm and funny and refreshingly honest about how unclean a fresh start usually feels from the inside.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce · 2012

Harold sets out to post a letter and simply keeps walking, six hundred miles, in his ordinary shoes, toward an unplanned new beginning he could never have talked himself into on purpose. Joyce’s novel is gentle proof that a new beginning doesn’t need a plan to be real — sometimes it just needs one foot in front of the other.

Quote Therapy

Georgia Clare

The book behind Book Quote Therapy. Georgia Clare gathers the quotations she loves most and tells the human stories behind acting on them, making a gentle, persuasive case that a single sentence can be a turning point. A comforting companion to keep close.