Books
I sorted the books onto shelves, because someone looking for one kind of book usually does not look for the other. Under each book I wrote why I recommend it.
- LongRussell A. Barkley
12 Principles for Raising a Child with ADHD
Barkley's thick guide in distilled form, and kinder than I expected. Half of the twelve principles try to change the parent, not the child.
9 min - LongThomas E. Brown
A New Understanding of ADHD in Children and Adults
A defense of a paradigm squeezed into two hundred pages. Not a pleasure to read, yet its first chapter should be within reach of anyone who talks about ADHD.
9 min - LongSari Solden & Michelle Frank
Kadınlarda DEHB İçin Radikal Bir Rehber
If you want a book that teaches system-building, wrong shelf. If you want to see where shame knots itself to you, it is one of the most useful I have read.
9 min - LongJudith Kolberg & Kathleen Nadeau
ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life
Most organizing books tell me what kind of person I should be. This one first asks what kind of person I am, and builds the system around that.
9 min - LongEdward M. Hallowell & John J. Ratey
ADHD 2.0
Maybe the easiest ADHD book on the shelf to read, so one to read with care. I put my pen down at the balance board chapter.
9 min - LongRussell A. Barkley
ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control
This book stands behind most of the executive function writing I read today. A four-hundred-page theory text, and not at all easy to read for someone with ADHD.
10 min - LongRichard Saul
ADHD Does Not Exist
The title is wrong, but part of its question is right. Hard to finish a book that denies the definition, yet its differential diagnosis warning deserves a hearing.
9 min - LongTracy Otsuka
Akıllı Kadınlar İçin DEHB (ADHD for Smart Ass Women)
It flows like a podcast episode and some pages truly do you good. I read it pen in hand because of the superpower tone and figures whose sources I could not find.
9 min - LongAlan Schwarz
ADHD Nation
Well researched, but its anger sometimes turns into unfairness. Even where I objected most, it raised new questions that should be put to a doctor.
9 min - LongEdward M. Hallowell & John J. Ratey
Delivered from Distraction
A thick answer to the "so what do I do now" the first book left behind. The optimism about brain scans in the diagnosis chapter is what has aged most.
9 min - LongJoel T. Nigg
Getting Ahead of ADHD
Written for parents, and I am not a child. Still, it was the coolest-headed guide I have read in the debates over nutrition, sleep and screens.
9 min - LongDaniel G. Amen
Healing ADD
The book on this list I object to most. It is right that ADHD does not look the same in everyone, but tying that to brain scans is a claim the field rejects.
9 min - LongJessica McCabe
DEHB İle Yaşamak (How to ADHD)
One of the best-written how-to books on the shelf, though not free of the shelf's molds. Do not empty the toolbox all at once; pick two tools and try them.
9 min - LongTimothy Denevi
Hyper
A memoir that weaves his own childhood into the history of ADHD. What I like most is that he draws neither a method nor a stance on medication from his story.
9 min - LongMatthew Smith
Hyperactive
ADHD through a historian's eyes. Very good for understanding where the idea of the 'hyperactive child' came from; its share for biology looks narrow from today.
9 min - LongGina Pera
Sen mi, Ben mi, Erişkin DEHB mi? (Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.?)
One of the few books that takes the anger of the partner without ADHD seriously. It was not easy to read as someone with ADHD, and in many places I cannot say it is wrong.
9 min - LongAri Tuckman
More Attention, Less Deficit
An ADHD book designed to be read by skipping around, and it really keeps that promise. As long as you read it keeping in mind that it was written in 2009.
9 min - LongSusan C. Pinsky
Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD
An organizing book that says efficiency over beauty and takes the idea all the way. Some principles work at once; some assume everyone has a detached house.
9 min - LongJ. Russell Ramsay
Rethinking Adult ADHD
Written for therapists, but its sentences about the inside of my own head left the deepest mark. I first saw here that an optimistic thought can be a trap.
10 min - LongGabor Maté
Dağınık Zihinler (Scattered Minds)
It caught me with its compassion and lost me when it pushed heredity aside. It gives a lot to the reader who can hold both at once, and can harm the one who cannot.
10 min - LongPeg Dawson & Richard Guare
Akıllı Ama Zorlanıyor (Smart but Scattered)
Not quite an ADHD book, yet maybe the most useful one in a home with a child with ADHD. And the "smart but" in its title is what I heard most as a child.
10 min - LongThomas E. Brown
Zeki ama Saplantılı (Smart but Stuck)
The book on this list where I found myself most. Its Turkish title pulls its real concern to the wrong place: the people it describes are not obsessive, they are stuck.
9 min - LongRussell A. Barkley
Dikkat Eksikliği ve Hiperaktivite Bozukluğu ile Baş Edebilme
The soundest ADHD book a parent can hold: its knowledge flawless, its tone as warm as a spreadsheet. The two need to be looked at separately.
9 min - LongMelissa Orlov
The ADHD Effect on Marriage
The book a partner with ADHD will most want to flee while reading, and should flee least. I have not seen the load on both sides laid out this clearly anywhere else.
10 min - LongStephen P. Hinshaw & Richard M. Scheffler
The ADHD Explosion
One of the rare books that has the overdiagnosis debate without shouting. After reading the North Carolina and California gap, I could no longer ask whether ADHD has risen the old way.
10 min - LongJ. Russell Ramsay & Anthony L. Rostain
The Adult ADHD Tool Kit
I opened it expecting one more list book. It stayed in my hands because it cares less about the list than about what I tell myself to avoid looking at the list.
9 min - LongLidia Zylowska
The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD
I opened it thinking meditation was not for ADHD, and the book had taken that objection seriously before me. Its research side must be read cautiously, starting with the title.
9 min - LongTerry Matlen
Kadınlarda Dikkat Dağınıklığı (The Queen of Distraction)
No grand theory; short chapters and advice from right in the middle of everyday life. One of the rare ADHD books I did not feel obliged to read from start to finish.
9 min - LongKathleen G. Nadeau, Ellen B. Littman & Patricia O. Quinn
Understanding Girls with ADHD
As a woman diagnosed late, one of the hardest books to read: every chapter describes a girl growing up unseen. Far ahead of the year it was written.
9 min - LongSari Solden
Women with Attention Deficit Disorder
Written thirty years ago and some of its pages have aged. The chapters on shame read as if written yesterday; you have to read the two apart.
10 min - MediumGeorge Orwell
1984
Everyone talks about surveillance; what stayed with me was the language. With no word for a concept it cannot be thought, and I lived that mechanism in reverse.
4 min - ShortStanisław Lem
Solaris
The ocean does not communicate, and does not try to. The book's question: can you tolerate the existence of something you do not understand?
3 min - ShortMarcel Proust
Swann'ların Tarafı (Swann's Way)
I could not finish it, I started three times, and I am still writing about it. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory landed so clearly I did not need to finish.
3 min - MediumHaruki Murakami
İmkansızın Şarkısı (Norwegian Wood)
Murakami does not narrate grief in stages. People heal unevenly, some never heal, and the book does not explain it.
4 min - MediumHan Kang
Vejetaryen (The Vegetarian)
A woman stops eating meat and never speaks in her own voice again. Three parts, three narrators, none of them her: the subject is everyone thinking on her behalf.
4 min - ShortOlga Tokarczuk
Sür Pulluğunu Ölülerin Kemikleri Üzerinde (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
I loved the narrator without taking her seriously, and the book catches exactly that: how the sentences of someone nobody listens to are left hanging in the air.
3 min - MediumFriedrich Nietzsche
Böyle Buyurdu Zerdüşt (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
I did not understand it, yet the camel-lion-child chapter has stayed with me for years. Refusing is a stage, not the last: the lion tears down but builds nothing.
4 min - MediumVirginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway
Woolf's sentences leap, and I struggled in the first pages. Then I realized the inside of my head already works like this, and Woolf wrote it as richness.
4 min - ShortCal Newport
Derin Çalışma (Deep Work)
I read the first half underlining, the second half irritated. Take the diagnosis and shrink the prescription: four-hour blocks were written for another life.
3 min - MediumDaniel Kahneman
Hızlı ve Yavaş Düşünme (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
The book caught me out again and again. What matters is the confession at the end: knowing does not prevent the error; the fix is a structure that skips thinking.
4 min - MediumJosé Saramago
Körlük (Blindness)
The blindness is white. Not darkness but a milky brightness. So there is no darkness to hide in; everything happens in the light and nobody sees.
4 min - MediumFranz Kafka
Dönüşüm (The Metamorphosis)
Seventy pages, one sitting, a sentence that stayed for months. Gregor does not rage; he apologizes for being a burden, and I know that logic all too well.
4 min - ShortJames Clear
Atomik Alışkanlıklar (Atomic Habits)
Arranging the environment and reducing friction worked for me. The assumption that repetition automates everything, and identity-based change, did not hold at all.
3 min - MediumGabriel García Márquez
Yüzyıllık Yalnızlık (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
The names drove me mad. When I dropped the family tree and decided not to tell who was who, the book opened up, because the confusion is the subject itself.
4 min - MediumHannah Arendt
Eichmann Kudüs'te (Eichmann in Jerusalem)
Arendt expects to see a monster and finds an ordinary clerk. The concept is valuable, but the example it rests on is weak: the Argentina recordings show another man.
4 min - MediumOrhan Pamuk
Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence)
A man who says he loves her for eight years does not once wonder what the woman wants. Someone telling his own story can be the most unreliable source about himself.
4 min - ShortBessel van der Kolk
Beden Kayıt Tutar (The Body Keeps the Score)
Seeing symptoms as a response did me good; I stopped when it became the explanation for everything. Valuable as a book of perspective, not as a diagnostic book.
3 min - ShortSabahattin Ali
Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat)
A quiet clerk's notebook is opened and a whole life comes out. Along with the narrator, I too had to take back my own judgment.
3 min - ShortVirginia Woolf
Kendine Ait Bir Oda (A Room of One's Own)
Woolf answers the question 'why did women write so little' with a room and money, not talent. The way she shifts the question stayed with me.
3 min - MediumYusuf Atılgan
Aylak Adam
I never liked C., but I liked the book. Being unable to hold on to anything, applied to people, and a loneliness told by walking through the crowd.
4 min - MediumAldous Huxley
Cesur Yeni Dünya (Brave New World)
I read it after 1984 and it frightened me more. In Orwell order is built with fear, in Huxley with pleasure: no one is forced because no one wants anything else.
4 min - ShortSteven A. Safren ve ark.
Mastering Your Adult ADHD
I read it and nothing happened. Then I understood: this is not a reading book but a measured program run one module a week.
3 min - MediumAhmet Hamdi Tanpınar
Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute)
A useless institution grows because everyone believes it works. It made me think of the systems I built myself, and I did not like what I saw.
4 min - MediumViktor Frankl
İnsanın Anlam Arayışı (Man's Search for Meaning)
A book that was told to me wrongly for years. Frankl never says a strong enough reason lets you endure; not one sentence blames those who could not.
4 min - MediumOğuz Atay
Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected)
I quit twice, and when I stopped trying to understand it the third time, the book opened up. It is read to recognize, not to understand, and there is a lot you will recognize.
4 min - ShortRussell A. Barkley
Taking Charge of Adult ADHD
I did not like it, and it is the book on this list I trust most; the two do not contradict. It says where each claim comes from and says unknown when something is unknown.
3 min - MediumAlbert Camus
Sisifos Söyleni (The Myth of Sisyphus)
I opened it looking for comfort, did not find it, and I am glad I did not. Camus never says there is meaning; having to push the rock again does not make pushing meaningless.
4 min - MediumFyodor Dostoyevski
Suç ve Ceza (Crime and Punishment)
The murder is over by page fifty; the other seven hundred pages are about how hiding is heavier than what is hidden. It is also funnier than anyone says.
5 min - ShortStefan Zweig
Bir Kadının Yaşamından Yirmi Dört Saat
Zweig describes not the man's face but his hands; all the passion of gambling is in their movements. A forty-year life fits into the impulse of a single day.
3 min - MediumLev Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Everyone remembers Anna. What stayed with me was Levin mowing grass in the field, and I have a problem I cannot resolve with Tolstoy putting the two side by side.
6 min - ShortEdward Hallowell & John Ratey
Driven to Distraction
What I did most while reading was stop, because I was reading myself. Knowing yourself and knowing what to do are different things; this book gives you the first.
3 min