What to Read If You Want a New Hobby

The Atlantic

01-08-2025

Every evening around 10 p.m., I settle onto the couch, open up the New York Times crossword app on my phone, and complete the day's puzzle. One moment I'm stumped; the next I'm struck by an epiphany. Once the grid is filled with interlocking words, I get no tangible reward for my efforts. All I have is a gold star on a screen—and the kind of fulfillment that comes only from doing something for the love of it.
Crosswording, like many other hobbies, is not productive—but it's not vapid consumption, either. Crocheting a scarf, doing ollies at the skate park, adorning one's nails with intricate designs: These are hardly the most utilitarian ways to spend an afternoon. The decision to pursue an activity simply for one's own enjoyment, though, is deeply human—especially at a moment when our time and attention are treated as commodities. Trying a new hobby gives us the opportunity to learn and grow: a situation that can be rare in adulthood.
In the eight books below, casual pursuits such as knitting, gardening, and drawing, undertaken with varying levels of skill and success, become life-affirming practices. Each reminds us of the possibilities that lie in our hobbies—even the ones we might be bad at.
Unraveling, by Peggy Orenstein
During the pandemic, many people revisited old hobbies or took up viral recipes. (Who could forget the great sourdough mania of 2020?) Orenstein doubled down on her lifetime love of knitting. She sought what she calls 'the primal joy of transforming raw material into something useful and, hopefully, beautiful,' and challenged herself to create a sweater entirely from scratch. In Unraveling, she recounts her year-long quest to meet this goal: She shears a sheep, spins its wool fibers into yarn, dyes that yarn, designs a sweater, and finally knits the thing together. Orenstein's book highlights how much of the charm of craft is found not only—or even mostly—in the objects it yields, but also in the private moments and time-consuming processes behind the final results. Unraveling is an ode to the herculean efforts we make for ourselves, for no reason other than to know that we can.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles, by Amy Tan
Tan coped with the political tumult of 2016 by returning to two of her childhood refuges: nature and art. Drawing was an early hobby of hers, but she'd felt discouraged from taking it seriously. At 65, she took 'nature journaling' lessons to learn how to depict and interpret the world around her—most notably the inter-avian dramas of the birds behind her Bay Area home. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a disarming account of one year of Tan's domestic bird-watching, a book 'filled with sketches and handwritten notes of naive observations,' she writes. That naivete is endearing: The accomplished novelist becomes a novice, trying to improve through eager dedication. Over the course of this engaging book, her illustrations grow more sophisticated, more assured—leaving readers with a portrait of the hobbyist as an emerging artist.
Slow Tech, by Peter Ginn
My friends and I are obsessed with the BBC's 'historical farm' series, in which historians and archeologists explore and reenact agrarian life across different eras, spanning the Tudor period to World War II. The shows make clear not only how laborious everyday existence once was, but also how much skill and ingenuity were required just to address our basic needs. In Slow Tech, Ginn, one of the co-hosts, walks readers through dozens of projects featured on the shows, and a good many new ones: weaving baskets, making candles, roasting meat, extracting salt from seawater. The book is a manual for learning skills that, in today's world, are largely outsourced to technology or industry; it also emphasizes the point that doing these tasks by hand connects us with a long human lineage. Extracting plant dyes, whittling a spoon, making felt—these projects are inefficient and, Ginn argues, extremely satisfying.
Soil, by Camille T. Dungy
Soil follows Dungy's years-long efforts to remake her 'water-hogging' lawn into a pollinator-friendly garden by diversifying the plant species there, while considering what it meant to do so as a mother and a Black woman living in a mostly white Colorado town. Her garden becomes a site of hands-on learning, teaching her daily how to be patient, embrace change, and be a steward for the land she lives on. Importantly, gardening is far from a solitary hobby for Dungy: It can't be separated from the world at large. On her hands and knees planting tulips, she thinks about laboring to give birth to her daughter; watching goldfinches perched on her budding sunflowers, she is reminded of the Indigenous people who have cultivated these plants in the American West for 4,000 years. 'Whether a pot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person'—by which Dungy means anyone who cares about the future of human relationships—'should have a garden,' she writes. 'We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn't easy."
The Boatbuilder, by Daniel Gumbiner
Gumbiner's debut novel introduces readers to Berg, a Silicon Valley defector with an opioid addiction who has left his tech-startup gig to apprentice with Alejandro, an eccentric boatbuilder. Alejandro—a chronic hobbyist who also carves Elizabethan lutes and builds portable pasteurizers in a rural Northern California town—teaches Berg the minutiae of boatbuilding, such as how to gauge the moisture content of a piece of wood and how to ready a vessel for its maiden voyage. The work is painstaking, but Berg's measurable progress lends direction and meaning to his otherwise unsettled existence. Perhaps most importantly, he forges a profound bond with another human being, something missing from his former life. 'When was the last time you got lost in a thing?' Alejandro asks Berg at one point. Berg can't summon an answer. What he seeks, Gumbiner writes, is to learn 'how to do things properly,' and as his skill grows, he only becomes 'more confident, more connected to the world.'
The Puzzler, by A. J. Jacobs
Consistent hobbies become rituals that can give our lives shape and meaning. (This has certainly been the case for me; my New York Times crossword streak now exceeds 1,500 days.) In this thorough and spirited survey, Jacobs celebrates how puzzles of all kinds—jigsaws, sudoku, Rubik's Cubes—give us not only fun and purpose but also a secret set of superpowers. Puzzle lovers, he writes, have heightened capacities for critical thinking and problem-solving, which can come in handy in daily life. 'Don't freak out, seek out,' my dad used to say to me whenever I would misplace an object; similarly, puzzling instructs us to keep cool and find solutions. But self-improvement need not be the goal of puzzling, or of any hobby, for that matter. Offering a succinct quote from Maki Kaji, the 'godfather of sudoku,' Jacobs writes that puzzles exist to propel us from '? → !'—that is, from a state of confusion and frustration to surprise and delight.
Picture This, by Lynda Barry
Part how-to guide, part graphic memoir, part manifesto about creativity, Picture This celebrates drawing as a means of spontaneous expression. The cartoonist Barry puts aside any pretense toward quality: Even simple doodling can be a salve, she writes, and therefore a worthy endeavor. Through her beguiling multimedia collages, which incorporate hand-drawn illustrations and typewritten notes along with phone-book pages and cotton balls, Barry makes the case that sketching offers us a way to forge a more curious, childlike relationship with our surroundings—an ethos that could apply to just about any artistic act. She tells her readers that they have to 'be willing to spend time making things for no reason' and be okay with setting aside self-doubt and its accomplice, perfectionism—the surest enemies of discovery.
In Defense of Dabbling, by Karen Walrond
Unlike some of the other authors on this list, Walrond is not an expert at anything—she says so on the very first page of this ode to what she calls 'intentional amateurism.' The word amateur, though mostly used to disparage, is derived from the Latin 'to love,' and Walrond builds an argument for indulging our interests free of expectation or commitment. Dalliances demand neither talent nor discipline, she argues—we need only enjoy what we're doing. The book is a ringing endorsement for being just okay at stuff. Instead of trying to gain mastery at any one thing, Walrond tries to gather as many experiences as she can, letting pleasure lead the way. She attempts surfing, pottery, and astrophotography, with mixed results but sustained amusement. 'The joy I've had in almost everything I've ever done,' she writes, 'has arisen mostly in the attempt.' Walrond concludes the book with a compendium of more than 200 amateur pursuits, some of which she's tried and some she hasn't (yet)—a great place for the beginning hobbyist to start their journey.