Experts > Lydia Ruffles

Lydia Ruffles's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Lydia Ruffles recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Lydia Ruffles's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
From poet and classicist Anne Carson comes this translation of the work of Sappho, together with the original Greek. Carson presents all the extant fragments of Sappho's verse, employing brackets and white space to denote missing text - allowing the reader to imagine the poems as they were written. less
Recommended by Lydia Ruffles, Bettany Hughes, and 2 others.

Bettany HughesThis is a collection of fragments of Sappho’s poems. They are so beautiful, I would recommend them to anyone. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

2
2014 Reprint of 1947 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. An updated version of the Sadleir translation, with considerable re-translation by Francis Golffing, Michael Harrison and Ferdinand Ostertag. Published in 1912, Kandinsky's book defines three types of painting; impressions, improvisations and compositions. While impressions are based on an external reality that serves as a starting point, improvisations and compositions depict images emergent from the unconscious, though composition is developed from a more formal point of... more
Recommended by Lydia Ruffles, and 1 others.

See more recommendations for this book...

3

The Book Thief

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.
more
Recommended by Lydia Ruffles, and 1 others.

See more recommendations for this book...

4

The Mirror

Erik Satie - composer, dandy, eccentric - is dead. Told to select one memory to take with him into the afterlife, he finds himself in limbo with a community of the deceased, looking back at his fifty-nine years for its most precious moments. Evenings of absinthe at the Chat Noir? Friendships with Debussy, Duchamp and Man Ray? What of his great musical triumphs and disasters? How will he choose his own legacy before silent whiteness descends?

Venice, 1511. In the convent of Sant' Alvise, Oliva is about to take the veil and become a bride of Christ. When her world is shaken -...
more
Recommended by Lydia Ruffles, and 1 others.

Lydia RufflesThis is a really well executed portrayal of a specific kind of synesthesia. It is also interesting within the context of the story of Eric Satie and 20th Century Paris. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

5

Wednesday Is Indigo Blue

Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia

A person with synesthesia might feel the flavor of food on her fingertips, sense the letter "J" as shimmering magenta or the number "5" as emerald green, hear and taste her husband's voice as buttery golden brown. Synesthetes rarely talk about their peculiar sensory gift—believing either that everyone else senses the world exactly as they do, or that no one else does.

Yet synesthesia occurs in one in twenty people, and is even more common among artists. One famous synesthete was novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who insisted as a toddler that the colors on his wooden alphabet blocks were...

more
Recommended by Lydia Ruffles, and 1 others.

Lydia RufflesIt’s a comprehensive survey of different kinds of synesthesia alongside research that’s been done into it so far. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Don't have time to read Lydia Ruffles's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.