Field guides are probably my favorite genre of all-time. I read them like novels, cover to cover, entranced by both the natural world and the organizational systems we’ve applied to our understandings of it. Add in my weaknesses (in no particular order) for hand-painted illustrations, offset printing, the perfectly circular o’s featured in the Futura typeface, thumbnail-sized maps, old paperbacks that can fit in my back pocket, and 1970s color palettes—and it’s no wonder that these quaint little retro Golden Guides topped my Christmas list last year. Have no fear, though: while I relish their charm, I do acknowledge that my copies are a few decades out of date, and I will be conducting my zoological and botanical fact checking elsewhere.

These majestically crafted documentaries, nearly all narrated by David Attenborough, brought me wonder and newfound knowledge about everything from killer whale feeding frenzies to hummingbirds that duel with their beaks. They’ve played a crucial role in my determination to bring a better understanding of nature and biology to those outside the field.

You know you’ve discovered the world’s best ever comic strip artist when you set out to read their life’s work, planning to put a flag on every page that makes you literally laugh out loud, and you end up with every single page flagged. (Very dangerous if you do this while recovering from a tonsillectomy … consider yourself warned. Also be sure to stock up on sticky notes ahead of time.) Bill Watterson rolls wit, humor, and worldly perspective into one, through incredibly inventive illustrations and idiosyncratic character creation. I feel more than comfortable calling him a genius at what he does, and consider myself lucky to be living at a point and place in history that has allowed me to benefit from his brilliance (even if it set back my post-op healing time a bit).

Trader Joe’s sends out little newspaper-like missives every once in a while, cheekily and cheerfully touting the virtues of their newly stocked or seasonal items. I love reading them. I have a stack at least three inches high that I’ve been saving for years: they’ve survived every move and every massive apartment-wide purge I’ve ever undertaken in an attempt at minimalism. These grocery-centric newsletters are just so joyous, silly, and self-aware; I dig into my stack whenever I need inspiration for finding my own writer’s voice.

Stephen Dubner, the host of this podcast and co-author of a book or two of the same name, is my favorite interviewer on the air. He is unbiased but exceedingly personable in his interrogations after the truth, siding with nothing short of critical thought. He manages to measure the seemingly unmeasurable—squishy social science things like the concept of creativity, for example—revealing every detail of his protocol along the way, and sussing out and scrutinizing those of others he talks to. I listen to the show as much for its intriguing content as for Dubner’s journalistic methods.

Processing is, in the words of the foundation behind it, “a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts”. When I learned it as fledgling designer, I knew I’d caught the coding bug. p5.js is even better, because it’s an adaptation of Processing that can be built into websites so that its outputs can be shared across the web! Keep an eye out for the p5-dependent interactive modules—or sketches as they’re called in Processing-speak—across my Curiosity-Colored Glasses posts!

Charley Harper’s prolific compendium of paintings, posters, murals, and more combine my love of the natural world with my fondness for modern geometric lines and grid systems. This digest serves as a visual stroll through Harper’s career as an artist, biology book illustrator, and conservationist. I pull it off the shelf any time I need to simplify a visual concept or illustration.

This overwhelming collection—in both quality and quantity—of short animated videos are intended to enhance teachers’ curriculums, but have also transformed my rainy day elliptical machine workouts from sweaty and boring (a.k.a. non-existent usually) to educational and awe-inspiring. They even have tutorials about the animation used to create some of the videos.

The original, almost hour-long episodes out of Radiolab are some of my very favorite science journalism. Flu-afflicted, I listened to the Mimiviruses episode during an otherwise insufferable traffic jam in Tel Aviv and it made me nervous that the cars would start moving again before I could finish it. My other two favorites are about chance and color.

If you happened to have set a new year’s resolution along the lines of “come to truly understand the implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity, to a point where I believe it in my bones, not just my brain” and are wondering how you’ll ever accomplish it, fear not, I’ve been through that whole rigamarole myself. I’d recommend starting your journey to enlightenment with a copy of Flatland, and one with an introduction by Rosemary Jann. She sets Abbott’s story up in the context of the time it was written—just a decade or so prior to Einstein’s relativity work, when the notion of extra-dimensional thinking was just starting to be explored. Flatland drops its readers into a 2-D world with a square playing protagonist. I’ll let you read the riveting, geometry-heavy plot yourself, but I will say that if you adore walking, talking, inanimate objects a fraction as much as I do, you’ll be delighted to have A. Square as your guide to acquiring a higher understanding of the physical world.

I am one of the (hypothesized) many adults who consider themselves both proud and avid fanatics of this exuberant podcast (which possibly considers itself aimed at children). Hosted by the hilariously paired and hyperbolic Mindy Thomas and Guy Raz, I am unceasingly in awe of their ability to pull me into their wondrously imagined world, as much as I am of the pertinent scientific topics they examine. This podcast is a must-listen; I can’t even choose a favorite episode.

You know those pens that make your handwriting look stunning, and bring out the best in all your doodled curlicues? If you don’t, you really should get around to inventorying the world’s expansive supply of mark-making tools, and I’d urge you to start with the very affordable Pentel Rolling Writer. I admire Pentel’s retro designs across much of their writing utensil portfolio, and the Rolling Writers are no exception. But what I truly adore about these pens are their ability to produce lines of variable widths, which is a rarity in the roller ball arena. I should say that this very trait I’m touting is what many loathe in a pen, so it’s not for everyone—particularly if you tend to hold your pens at an angle approaching perpendicular to your writing surface, which will result in a very thin, scratchy stroke. But for those with very angled grips, the ink flows freely. I keep a Rolling Writer on-hand in every purse, backpack, glove compartment, and desk drawer I own.

As a 6th grader, this birthday present (yes, I requested it) saw me through several drafts of an entire spy novella and a few chapters of a potential sequel. I can confidently say that my middle school vocabulary tutor is just as reliable now as it was then.

When I first saw this book for sale in a coffee shop I instantly felt less alone in the world, simply based on the fact that there was a market serving the intersection of doodlers and lovers of tiny objects. I crack this book open whenever I feel like drawing but can’t come up with a prompt of my own, or am feeling too perfectionist-y to draw loosely and need to warm up.

Coursera is an online class offerer, featuring instructors from many well-renowned universities. I audited all the Information Visualization courses—led by NYU professor and researcher Enrico Bertini—for free, and it was more than worth every penny. The lessons covered practical considerations for designing data visualizations, and distilled a plethora of research around human visual perception into consumable nuggets. I filled a medium-sized Rollbahn notebook cover to cover with notes, and am still poring over what I learned to figure out how I can best apply it to my work.

Danny Gregory and Koosje Koene co-founded this purveyor of online courses around art, drawing, making, and general creativity. You can tell that they and the artists and illustrators they invite to teach all love what they do. I follow along on their free YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes interviews and tips, and am unceasingly inspired by the varying approaches and styles they showcase.

This is more than just an artistic coffee table book; it bears an honest and enlightening account of the struggles involved in making one’s living as a creative. I love Niemann’s illustrations as much for their cleverness as for their simplicity and craftsmanship: every line and ink wash is perfectly placed, in a way that comes off as effortless.

Color-coding is an imperative part of my process when it comes to planning scripts and other complex code, so the more hues, the merrier. But that’s not the only criteria that these mini highlighters deliver on: each is only about the size of a blanket-less pig-in-a-blanket, but that’s exactly what attracted me to them in the Target school supply aisle in the first place. Not only are tiny things great for their cuteness value, they’re also convenient: I’ve toted all ten of these colorful li’l fluorescence-dispensing piggies to many a coffee shop in one of my favorite (also tiny) zippered pencil pouches for a working session.

This book will make you want to go explore North America on foot with nothing but a cute little mini traveling watercolor kit, or at least eat breakfast outside while sketching a squirrel. The pages are filled with snippets from the author-artist’s own sketchpads, nestled in amongst 37 step-by-step painting tutorials. I take it down whenever I want some inspiration in the way of hand-rendered explanatory drawings.

Nick Higgins’ colorfully textured mixed media illustrations are delightful, and make me extra-grateful that I have accidentally amassed a huge shelf full of art supplies over the years. The style of the imagery in this book makes me want to use them all, and unsparingly, in my own illustrations for Curiosity-Colored Glasses posts.

Kirby is the infrastructure behind the content management system (CMS) I built into this very website. It’s extremely flexible and well documented, which is why I chose it: I couldn’t find any other CMS that would let me design and build-in all the little content-filled details I had in mind, while providing web performance equivalent to a static site. However, it was not an easy task at all; Kirby uses PHP, so I had to learn that coding language from scratch, the syntax of which leaves much to be desired. Kirby has a fantastically responsive forum though, and they helped me with nearly every challenge I encountered and could not solve through my own sheer will and external research.

These are great books for any beginners looking to become semi-competent in browser-based code. However, be warned that they are a bit out of date: the

Once you’ve mastered the basics of browser-based coding, you’ll need to learn all about designing and executing sites that respond properly to all screen sizes. This book, published by O’Reilly, does the job. My copy is riddled with flags and margin notes.

First, a few caveats: these are heady; take the time to fully fathom the text and examine the imagery (alternatively, have a look at my in-progress “Cliffs notes”). Take the words in these books with several salt grains and be selective about the truths you take away; designing for data and information is not black and white and there will always be best-practice tradeoffs. I found The Quantitative Display of Visual Information and Envisioning Information to be the best investment of my time, the other two largely re-hashed the same concepts and examples, providing diminishing returns. That being said, there are some very useful ideas and ideals analyzed at length in these books, and anyone serious about data and information visualization would be wise to dig into them deeply.