Here are some of my favourite and most useful books on the bookshelf in my office. And of course, a link to my own book Be Creative – Now! which covers all of the topics on NewThinking.Tools in one handy place.

Storytelling and communication

• Bobette Buster: Do/Story. Heartfelt advice from a great script-writer.
• Blake Snyder: Save the Cat. Funny and direct guide to getting the beats of your story straight.
• George Lois: Damn Good Advice (for people with talent). Unstoppable energy from one of the original Mad Men.
• Dominic Gettins: How to Write Great Copy. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
• George Orwell: Politics and the English Language. Don’t be put off by the title, this essay is about writing from the heart and killing off jargon, cliche and bullshit.
• Lisa Cron: Wired for Story. Why our brains are so receptive to information contained in the form of a story.
• David Edgar, How Plays Work. Wish I’d read this one ten years ago.
• Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: the Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense. Insights from the irrational world of advertising, told by a pro.
• Randy Olson, Don’t Be Such a Scientist. Great starting point for academics who want to reach a wider audience.
• Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks. How great writers use stories to create emotional states in us, the reader. And why we love it when they do.
• Carmine Gallo: Talk Like TED. Great advice from a man who has studied thousands of TED talks to discover their secrets.
• Jonah Berger: Contagious. What makes stories spread online.
• Jonah Sachs: Winning the Story Wars. Why big corporations are employing storytellers.
• Shawn Callahan, Putting Stories to Work. Advice on how stories can win over colleagues and customers. And of course, it’s full of great stories.
• John Yorke, Into the Woods. An experienced writer’s take on the theories about why stories work.
• Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling. How “character” works in the stories we love.
• Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way. Part spiritual, part practical guide for anyone who wants to write or create.
• Sally Holloway, The Serious Guide to Joke Writing. Funny doesn’t just happen, you have to work at it. Funny ha ha or funny peculiar – either way, new ideas happen.
• John Weich, Storytelling on Steroids. Pumped up tales from the world of advertising and pop culture.
• Roger Horberry & Gyles Lingwood, Read Me: 10 Lessons for Writing Great Copy. The secrets of people who write stuff for a living.
• Clare Lynch, Good Copy, Bad Copy. Fantastic blog from an experienced copywriter.
• Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories. Astonishing book, treats storytelling like any other evolved human trait.
• Walter Fisher: Human Communication as Narration. Why we see the world in terms of stories, not facts.
• George Marshall. Don’t Even Think About It. How the narratives of climate change discourage people from acting.
• Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots. From Homer’s Illiad to Homer Simpson, why we keep telling stories about heroes.
• Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning. How our beliefs are structured around a world divided into chaos and order.
• Steven Pinker, A Sense of Style. Why a good sentence works the way it does. Grammar for non-pedants.
• George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It. Why climate scientists fail to convince the sceptics and what this tells us about the stories we do – or don’t – trust.
• Donald Miller, Building a Storybrand. A step by step guide to building your own simple hero’s journey narrative that customers will connect with.
• Joseph Carroll et al, Graphing Jane Austen. Brilliant piece of data analysis to create a Darwinian analysis of great Victorian novels, heroes and heroines.
• Stephen King, On Writing. This guy has sold millions of books. He knows what he’s doing.
• Dwight Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer. A brilliant set on insights into what makes commercial fiction tick.
• Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment. Why kids love fairy tales, and what that tells us about the relationship between stories and our psychological development.
• Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By. A collection of essays on life, death and religion.
• Brene Brown, Atlas of the Heart. An attempt to map the emotions that hold sway over us. Wonderfully heartfelt book.
• Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. Hard to imagine a culture without writing, but that’s most of human history. Text is just different. Writing alters our consciousness.
• G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy. A study of the basic truths inside some of our oldest stories.

Case studies

• Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace: Creativity Inc. Brilliant lessons from the founder of Pixar.
• Hans Rosling, Factfulness. A masterclass in telling stories with data.
• David Robertson: Brick by Brick. How innovation almost broke LEGO, and how innovation saved the company too.
• Margaret Heffernan: Beyond Measure. Examples from all over the world of companies thriving with a “just culture”.
• David Halpern: Inside the Nudge Unit. The story of the Downing Street team using behavioural economics to save the UK government millions of pounds and make its citizens happier.
• Laszlo Bock: Work Rules. Insider tips on innovation from Google’s head of HR.
• Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion. Tips from the master salesman.
• Gary Klein, The Power of Intuition; Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don’t. That’s three books, all brilliant, about how we make expert decisions. Written by the godfather of observational psychology, and richly storied.
• Darren McGarvey, Poverty Safari. Part hilarious memoir, part rant about people from working class backgrounds refusing to play the ‘victim’ role assigned to them by their betters.
• Julian Orr, Talking About Machines. An ethnographic study of photocopier repair engineers, and how the “war stories” they tell about stupid bloody machines and stupid bloody people help them become experts. Surprisingly insightful.

Philosophy, history and science

• Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow. Decades of research on cognitive biases and why smart people make stupid mistakes.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Black Swan. A philosopher/financier’s view of uncertainty, learned on the trading floors of Wall Street and applied to life. See also Antifragile and Fooled by Randomness from the same author.
• Gray, Brown & Macanufo: Gamestorming. Dozens and dozens of creative techniques, ice-breakers, visualisation tools and more.
• Roger Firestien: Leading on the Creative Edge. A thorough guide to the creative process.
• Alex Osborn: Your Creative Power. Brainstorming tips from the father of brainstorming, written back in the 1940s.
• David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old. Good antidote to neophilia, our obsession with new things. Here’s why we should pay attention to boring old things.
• Steven D’Souza: Not Knowing. Why good ideas sometimes lurk in the dark of what we don’t understand.
• Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong. Such a good book on the complex business of making mistakes.
• Claire Bridges, In Your Creative Element. An overview of scientific studies of creative thinking.
• Benjamin Bergen, Louder than Words. We process information by creating an embodied simulation using our visual, aural and motor centres of the brain.
• Paul Lawrence & Nitin Nohria, Driven. How four basic drives motivate human behaviour: to acquire, defend, bond and learn.
• The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist. Detailed account of how the left-right split of our brains shapes our perceptions, actions and culture.
• Dr Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things (Vol 1 and 2). More on the left/right split and how it shapes the world.
• Robert Sapolsky, Behave. How our brain combines split second decision-making with ancient instincts.
• Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neurobiology. How mammal brains like ours are wired to experience and be guided by emotions.
• Andy Clarke, The Experience Machine. Introduced me to the Default Network of our brains that basically sees the world as one never-ending story.
• Susan Cain, Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that won’t stop talking. Wonderful book. Made me realise I’m a functional extrovert who loves a bit of quiet time too.
• Donald Brown, Human Universals. A wide-ranging study of trends – and rows – in anthropology, as we figure out what we have in common with the rest of humanity.
• Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. Even in the bleakest, darkest moments imaginable, we still have free will. Auschwitz survivor who went on to found a school of psychology.
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago. A literary investigation into the worst crimes of the Soviet Union, and how some people could survive so much cruelty and dishonesty with their spirit intact.

And as someone who will never love a glass screen as much as I love actual books, here is one virtual library I would recommend: The Marginalian – a lovingly curated source of information and reviews about all aspects of creativity.