A Human Flow reading list — Smart Tips
Three books — Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist Journal, Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, and Bruno Munari’s Design as Art — offer three different lessons in slowing down and noticing more during the small in-between moments of an ordinary day: waiting rooms, train rides, the gap before a meeting starts.
Most days are full of small waiting rooms. The five minutes before a meeting starts. The ride between two stops. The pause at the counter while the kettle boils. We tend to treat these moments as empty — something to get through before real life resumes.
We think about books a little differently. The right one, kept close, can turn a waiting room into a small classroom. Not because it teaches you a fact, but because it changes how closely you look at the next ten minutes. At SOTIYO, that’s close to what we mean by Human Flow: the idea that movement isn’t only the long trip, but the small transitions that fill an ordinary day.
So we went looking for three books built for that kind of attention — short stretches, not long reading sessions. Each one treats the in-between differently: one turns it into a creative habit, one turns it into wonder, and one turns it into a lesson in design. Together, they make a small, portable case for paying closer attention.
None of these books asks for hours. Each rewards five minutes, used well. Here’s what we took from them — and what they might offer the next time you find yourself stuck somewhere with a little time on your hands.
An Atlas of Places You Will Probably Never Go
Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands maps fifty islands scattered across the world’s oceans, each one drawn to the same scale, each one paired with a short, strange, true story.
Schalansky grew up in East Germany, where an atlas was, for a while, the only way to travel anywhere. That origin shows in the book. It treats geography as something closer to literature than to a guidebook — Tristan da Cunha, Clipperton Atoll, Christmas Island — each entry just long enough to fill a short wait. As she puts it early on: “Paradise is an island. So is hell.” Which island you land on depends entirely on the page.
It’s an unusual choice for an in-between read because it doesn’t try to be useful. There’s no plot, no argument to follow across pages. You can open it anywhere, read about one island, and close it again with something new in your head — a shape of reading that fits a commute or a coffee line better than almost any other book we know.
A Spoon, Reconsidered
Design as Art, by Bruno Munari, is a short collection of essays from 1966 that argues good design lives in the objects we barely notice — lamps, road signs, even a spoon.
Munari — once described by Picasso as “the new Leonardo” — spent his career insisting that design wasn’t a separate, precious discipline, but something that should disappear quietly into daily life. The book moves in short bursts: a few pages on typography, a few on chairs, a digression on how a pea is, in its own way, a perfectly designed object, packaged by nature down to the seed. None of it asks for sustained focus.
That structure makes it one of the better books to keep near a bag rather than a shelf. Read two pages while something boils. Read three more on a short flight. What stays with you isn’t a single argument but a habit — looking twice at ordinary objects, the way Munari did with everything from cars to children’s books.
We explored a version of that same idea in Objects That Move Us: Iconic Design for Travelers, and Munari’s instinct shows up almost word for word in our conversation with Daniel Basiletti, who spent two decades asking whether a chair, a stair, or a clock sits exactly where it should.
A Notebook for Stealing Better
The Steal Like an Artist Journal, by Austin Kleon, is a companion workbook to his bestselling trilogy on creativity — built less for reading than for filling in, one short prompt at a time.
It’s less a book than a set of small assignments: lists to complete, charts to fill, an elastic band for place-marking, and a pocket in the back for scraps and clippings — what Kleon calls a swipe file. His core idea, carried over from Steal Like an Artist, is that no creative work starts from nothing. It starts from what you’ve gathered, studied, and rearranged. That idea translates surprisingly well to in-between moments. You don’t need a studio to use this journal. You need a pen and four spare minutes.
We like it for the in-between because it turns waiting into noticing. A delayed train becomes an excuse to fill in “Ten Things I Want to Learn.” A slow afternoon becomes a chance to look back through the swipe-file pocket and see what you’ve been collecting lately. The journal asks almost nothing of you, which is exactly why it fits into the cracks of an ordinary day instead of waiting for a free weekend that rarely comes.
That pocket of scraps is its own small case study in why we love looking inside other people’s bags — Kleon just turns that curiosity inward, asking you to start curating one of your own.
For the Curious
What makes a book good for in-between moments?
Length and structure matter more than subject. The best in-between books are built in short, self-contained units — a page, an entry, a prompt — so you can start and stop without losing the thread. All three books here share that quality, which is part of why they work for waiting rooms, commutes, and short pauses between tasks.
Is the Steal Like an Artist Journal a sequel to Steal Like an Artist?
It’s a companion, not a sequel. Austin Kleon designed it as an interactive workbook that follows his bestselling trilogy on creativity — Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going — built for filling in rather than reading straight through.
Do you need to be a designer to enjoy Design as Art?
No. Bruno Munari wrote it for a general audience, using everyday objects — lamps, chairs, road signs — to make his ideas about design accessible. It reads more like a way of looking than a technical manual, which is part of why it still holds up outside design circles.
Has Judith Schalansky actually visited any of the islands in her atlas?
No — and that’s the point. The book’s original German title translates to “Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will.” It’s built entirely from research and imagination: an exercise in armchair travel rather than firsthand reporting.
None of these books will get you anywhere new. That’s not really their job. What they do is smaller, and we think more useful: they make the waiting count for something. A notebook that turns idle time into practice. An atlas that turns a coffee line into a trip you’ll never actually take. A design book that turns a boring spoon into a small lesson in attention.
At SOTIYO, that’s the kind of comfort we care about — not the absence of friction, but a way of moving through it with your attention still intact. Human Flow isn’t only about the trips we plan. It’s about what we do with the minutes in between them.
If this list found you in a waiting room of your own, you might also enjoy The Power of Less: Why Minimalism Still Wins in 2026 — another look at why less, chosen on purpose, tends to feel like more.
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