Thank you for sharing your list. Very helpful.
Here is a little list of books commonly read that I feel have a great impact on the reader and the significance of which has been lost through time: (each followed by a quote from the book cause I don't have the expertise to write a summary of why i like the book for all books):
1.Blink (The Power of Thinking without Thinking) - Malcolm Gladwell
-“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.”
-“allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.”
-“Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.”
2.The Tao of Pooh and Te of Piglet - Benjamin Hoff
-“When we give up our images of self-importance and our ideas of what should be, we can help things become what they need to be.”
3.A Short History of Nearly Everything -Bill Bryson
-“Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.”
4."The Little Prince" -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
-“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
-“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
5.Who Moved My Cheese? -Spencer Johnson
-“What would you do if you weren't afraid?”
-“Smell the cheese often so you know when it is getting old.”
6.Notes To Myself -Hugh Prather
-“Today I don't want to live for, I want to live.”
7.The Power of Habit -Charles Duhigg
-The problem is that brain can’t tell the difference between good and bad habits
8.Tao Te Ching -Lao Tzu
-Adapt the nothing; because change is permanent
9.The Kite Runner -Khaled Hosseini
-“Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.”
10.Cosmos -Carl Sagan
-“we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers”
11.Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
-“...It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.”
12.Pride and Prejudice -Jane Austen
-“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”
13.The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us -Christopher Chabris
-“the confidence people express often reflects their personalities rather than their knowledge, memory, or abilities.”
14.Diary of Anne Frank
-"We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.”
15.Great Expectations -Charles Dickens
-“I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”
I'd like to add a little thought on what you said about spirituality and why you picked the books you did.
Books, I believe are one of the most powerful weapons created by man. They can on all levels of consciousness and orientation of the mind, body and soul, influence parts of people they may never even know existed.
What I'm saying is, reading with passion, being lost in each word and what it screams, be it anything, can be a spiritual experience.
And it is for most who love reading.
Even fairy tales and comics that don't use the words "Tao" or "How to be Happy" in their title directly have such an immense spiritual influence on those who read it with that much passion and intent and depth.
As G.K.Chesterton very wisely put:
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
|